Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  I had been lucky. My father had died quickly, by comparison.

  “Give me the banjo,” Silas repeated.

  But life was life. And there it was, staring up at me from the depths of a hospital bed, as wispy and tenacious as greenery in the desert.

  Silas made these decisions every day. Every hour of every day. I could not.

  I extended one hand to him, letting the banjo pass in front of Mariah. This was their fight, not mine.

  Mariah lunged for it, but Silas was quicker. He snatched the banjo from me, hugging it like a long-lost friend. On the bed, the father made a strange keening sound—and I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or pain.

  The years shed off of Silas like fur off a cat. As he crossed the room, Mariah wrapped herself around him. The sounds of the hospital had faded into nothing.

  “Let him live,” she said.

  Silas, young, black-haired, slim, the beautiful man I had first seen, ran his hand along her face. He kissed her forehead and cupped her chin, as if he had never held anything so precious. “You should have asked that in the first place,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Her voice sounded desperate. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t.

  “I’m as familiar with hurt as I am with anything else,” he said. “The banjo takes the hurt away.”

  “But only for him.”

  “Yes,” Silas said. “Only for him.”

  He walked beside the bed, took the old man’s hand. The old man stared up at him, keening stopped. I could see fear in the old man’s rheumy eyes, but his gaze never wavered. “You can live like this for years,” Silas said, “or you can come with me.”

  Mariah was shaking. She hadn’t moved another step. All through this, she had thought of no one but herself.

  “I’m sorry,” the old man said to her.

  She nodded, unable to speak. A lump rose in my throat, too. I wanted out, but didn’t dare move. Silas let go of the old man’s hand, swung the banjo to the front of his chest, and played.

  I didn’t quite hear the music, although I felt it, rollicking through me. For a moment, the old man’s face lit up, and I saw him, strong and young, a baby girl on his shoulder, a beautiful woman beside him. Then the image faded, and with it, the sparkle in his eye. Silas finished playing, swung the banjo back into position, and reached for the old man’s face.

  Mariah pushed him aside, knelt beside her father. Silas stumbled backward, then stared at her for a moment, and I saw longing so intense that it burned me. What was it like to be outside time, human but not human, loving, but unlovable? I hoped I would never know.

  He saw me watching him. Color touched his cheeks. “Come on,” he said.

  We walked into the corridor. People flowed around us like water around a rock.

  “You lied to me, you know,” I said. “You were there when my father died.”

  He stopped near the elevator. “The first time you summoned me was in that convenience store.”

  “I was courting you.”

  He smiled a little, but the smile was sad. I liked his beauty. I liked his compassion. I liked him. “I’m not the kind of lover you want,” he said. “I’ll never leave you, but I’ll never make you happy.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. Then he leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “Silas,” I said—but he disappeared. One moment there, one moment gone. A man who was lonelier than I could ever be.

  I stood there for a while, then I remembered to pocket the envelope. When I got downstairs, I would donate the money to the hospice center. They had to have one, every hospital did, for cancer care for families and patients. Then I would go to the desert and stare at the greenery.

  The dream would never come again. Nor would he ever have to admonish me anymore.

  The courtship had ended. We were, and we would remain, just good friends.

  Felixity

  Tanith Lee

  The name sounds a little like “felicity,” or happiness, and a little like “felix,” or luck. Felixity, the quintessential poor little rich girl, seems to be neither happy nor lucky. In any fairy story, such a girl would have compensations of brain or talent and marry a handsome prince. Felixity can’t even do good watercolors. And when she chooses a husband—don’t even ask.

  Let Tanith Lee tell you in this ironic and elegantly decadent story. I could compare “Felixity” to the works of Oscar Wilde or Angela Carter—but I think I’ll say that this is Tanith Lee at the top of her form, and leave it at that.

  Felixity’s parents were so beautiful that everywhere they went they were attended by a low murmuring, like that of a beehive. Even when pregnant with her child, Felixity’s mother was lovely, an ormolu madonna. But when Felixity was born, her mother died.

  Among the riches of her father, then, in a succession of elaborate houses, surrounded by gardens which sometimes led to a cobalt sea, Felixity grew up, motherless. Her father watched her grow—he must have— although nannies tended her, servants waited on her, and tutors gave her lessons. Sometimes in the evening, when the heat of the day had settled and the stars had come out, Felixity’s father would interview his daughter on the lamplit terrace above the philodendrons.

  “Now tell me what you learned today.”

  But Felixity, confronted by her beautiful and elegant father burnished on the dark with pale electricity, was tongue-tied. She twisted her single plait around her finger and hunched her knees. She was an ugly child, ungraceful and gauche, with muddy skin and thin unshining hair. She had no energy, and even when put out to play, wandered slowly about the garden walks, or tried tiredly to skip, giving up after five or six heavy jumps. She was slow at her studies, worried over them, and suffered headaches. She was meek. Her teeth were always needing fillings, and she bore this unpleasantness with resignation.

  “Surely there must have been something of note in your day?”

  “I went to the dentist, Papa.”

  “Your mother,” said Felixity’s father, “had only one tiny filling in her entire head. It was the size of a pin’s point. It was gold.” He said this without cruelty, more in wonder. “You must have some more dresses,” he added presently.

  Felixity hated it when clothes were bought for her. She looked so awful in anything attractive or pretty, but they had never given up. Glamorously dressed, she resembled a chrysalis clad in the butterfly. When she could, she put on her drabbest, most nondescript clothes.

  After half an hour or so of his daughter’s unstimulating company, Felixity’s father sent her away. He was tactful, but Felixity was under no illusions. Beneath the dentist’s numbing cocaine, she was aware her teeth were being drilled to the nerve, and that shortly, when the anesthetic wore off, they would hurt her.

  Inevitably, as time passed, Felixity grew up and became a woman. Her body changed, but it did not improve. If anyone had been hoping for some magical transformation, they were disappointed. When she was sixteen, Felixity was, nevertheless, launched into society. Not a ripple attended the event, although she wore a red dress and a most lifelike wig fashioned by a famous coiffeur. Following this beginning, Felixity was often on the edges of social activities, where she was never noticed, gave neither offense nor inspiration, and before some of which she was physically sick several times from neurasthenia. As the years went by, however, her terror gradually left her. She no longer expected anything momentous with which she would not be able to cope.

  Felixity’s father aged marvelously. He remained slim and limber, was scarcely lined and that only in a way to make him more interesting. His hair and teeth were like a boy’s.

  “How that color suited your mother,” he remarked to Felixity, as she crossed the room in a gown of translucent lemon silk, which made her look like an uncooked tuber. “I remember three such dresses, and a long fringed scarf. She was so partial to it.” Again, he was not being cruel. Perhaps he was entitled to be perplexed. They had anticipated an exquisite child, t
he best of both of them. But then, they had also expected to live out their lives together.

  When she was thirty-three, Felixity stopped moving in society, and attended only those functions she could not, from politeness, avoid. Her father did not remonstrate with her, indeed he only saw her now once a week, at a rite he referred to as “Dining with my Daughter.” Although his first vision of her was always a slight shock, he did not disenjoy these dinners, which lasted two hours exactly, and at which he was able to reminisce at great length about his beautiful wife. If anyone had asked him, he would have said he did this for Felixity’s sake. Otherwise, he assumed she was quite happy. She read books, and occasionally painted rather poor watercolors. Her teeth, which had of necessity been overfilled, had begun to break at regular intervals, but aside from this her life was tranquil, and passed in luxury. There was nothing more that could be done for her.

  One evening, as Felixity was being driven home to one of her father’s city houses, a young man ran from a side street out across the boulevard, in front of the car. The chauffeur put on his brakes at once. But the large silver vehicle lightly touched the young man’s side, and he fell in front of it. A crowd gathered instantly, at the periphery of which three dark-clad men might be seen looking on. But these soon after went away.

  The chauffeur came to Felixity’s door to tell her that the young man was apparently unhurt, but shaken. The crowd began to adopt factions, some saying that the young man was to blame for the accident, others that the car had been driven too fast. In the midst of this, the young man himself appeared at Felixity’s door. In years he was about twenty-six, smartly if showily dressed in an ice-cream white suit now somewhat dusty from the road. His blue-black hair curled thickly on his neck; he was extremely handsome. He stared at the woman in the car with amontillado eyes. He said, “No, no, it was not your fault.” And then he collapsed on the ground.

  The crowd ascended into uproar. The young man must be taken immediately to the hospital.

  Felixity was flustered, and it may have been this which caused her to open her door, and to instruct the chauffeur and a bystander to assist the young man into the car. As it was done, the young man revived a little.

  “Put him here, beside me,” said Felixity, although her voice trembled with alarm.

  The car door was closed again, and the chauffeur told to proceed to a hospital. The crowd made loud sounds as they drove off.

  To Felixity’s relief, and faint fright, the young man now completely revived. He assured her that it was not essential to go to the hospital, but that if she were kind enough to allow him to rest a moment in her house, and maybe swallow a glass of water, he would be well enough to continue on his way. He had been hurrying, he explained, because he had arranged to see his aunt, and was late. Felixity was afraid that the drive to her house would prolong this lateness, but the young man, who said his name was Roland, admitted that he was often tardy on visits to his aunt, and she would forgive him.

  Felixity, knowing no better, therefore permitted Roland to be driven with her to the house. Its electric gates and ectomorphic pillars did not seem to antagonize him, and ten minutes later, he was seated in the blond, eighteenth-century drawing room, drinking bottled carbonated water with slices of lime. Felixity asked him whether she should call her father’s doctor, who was in residence. But Roland said again that he had no need of medical attention. Felixity believed him. He had all the hallmarks of strength, elasticity, and vitality she had noted in others. She was both glad and strangely sorry when he rose springingly up again, thanked her, and said that now he would be leaving.

  When he had left, she found that she shook all over, sweat beaded her forehead, and she felt quite sick. That night she could not sleep, and the next morning, at breakfast, she broke another tooth on a roll.

  Two days after, a bouquet of pink roses, from a fashionable florist, arrived for Felixity. That very afternoon Roland came to the gates and inquired if he might see her. The servants, the guards at the gate, were so unused to anyone seeking Felixity—indeed, it was unique—that they conveyed the message to her without question. And, of course, Felixity, wan with nauseous amazement and a hammering heart, invited Roland in.

  “I’ve been unable to stop thinking about you,” said Roland. “I’ve never before met with a woman so gracious and so kind.”

  Roland said many things, more or less in this vein, as they walked about the garden among the imported catalpas and the orchids. He confessed to Felixity that his aunt was dead; it was her grave he had been going to visit; he had no one in the world.

  Felixity did not know what she felt, but never before had she felt anything like it. In the dim past of her childhood, when some vague attempts had been made to prepare or alter her, she had been given to understand that she might, when she gained them, entertain her friends in her father’s houses, and that her suitors would be formally welcomed. Neither friend nor suitor had ever crossed the thresholds of the houses, but now Felixity fell into a kind of delayed response, and in a while she had offered Roland wine on the terrace.

  As they sat sipping it, her sick elation faded and a mute sweetness possessed her.

  It was not that she thought herself lovable; she thought herself nothing. It was that one had come to her who had made her the center of the day. The monumental trees and exotic flowers had become a backdrop, the heat, the house, the servants who brought them things. She had met before people like Roland, the gorgeous magicians, who never saw her. But Roland did see her. He had fixed on her. He spoke to her of his sad beleaguered life, how his father had gambled away a fortune, how he had been sadistically misled on his chances of film stardom. He wanted her to know him. He gazed into her eyes, and saw in her, it was plain, vast continents of possibility.

  He stayed with her until the dinner hour, and begged that he might be able to return. He had not told her she was beautiful, or any lie of that nature. He had said she was good, and luminously kind, and that never before had he met these qualities in a young woman, and that she must not shut him out as he could not bear it.

  On his second visit, under a palm tree, Felixity was taken by compunction. “Six of my teeth are crowned,” she said. “And this—is a wig!” And she snatched it off to reveal her thin cropped hair.

  Roland gave a gentle smile. “How you honor me,” he said. “I’m so happy that you trust me. But what does any of this matter? Throw the silly wig away. You are yourself. There has never been anyone like you. Not in the whole world.”

  When Felixity and Roland had been meeting for a month, Felixity received a summons from her incredible father.

  Felixity went to see him with a new type of courage. Some of her awe had lessened, although she would not have put this into words. She had been with a creature of fires. It seemed she knew her father a little better.

  “I’m afraid,” said Felixity’s father, “that it is my grim task to disillusion you. The young man you’ve made your companion is a deceiver.”

  “Oh,” said Felixity. She looked blank.

  “Yes, my child. I don’t know what he has told you, but I’ve had him investigated. He is the bastard son of a prostitute, and has lived so far by dealings with thieves and shady organizations. He was in flight from one of these when he ran in front of your car. Obviously now he is in pursuit of your money, both your own finances and those which you’ll inherit on my death.”

  Felixity did not say she would not hear ill of Roland. She thought about what her father had told her, and slowly she nodded. Then, from the patois of her curtailed emotions, she translated her heart into normal human emotional terms. “But I love him.”

  Felixity’s father looked down at her with crucial pity. It was a fact, he did not truly think of her as his daughter, for his daughter would have been lovely. He accepted her as a pathetic dependent, until now always needing him, a jest of God upon a flawless delight which had been rent away.

  “If you love him, Felixity,” he said, “you must send h
im to me.”

  Felixity nodded again. Beings of fire communicated with each other. She had no fears.

  The next day she waited on the terrace, and eventually Roland came out of the house into the sunlight. He seemed a little pale, but he spoke to her brightly. “What a man he is. We are to marry, my beloved. That is, if you’ll have me. I’m to care for you. What a golden future lies before us!” Roland did not detail his conversation with Felixity’s father. He did not relate, for example, that Felixity’s father had courteously touched on Roland’s career as crook and gigolo. Or that Felixity’s father had informed Roland that he grasped perfectly his aims, but that those aims were to be gratified, for Felixity’s sake. “She has had little enough,” said Felixity’s father. “Providing you are kind to her, a model husband, and don’t enlighten her in the matter of your real feelings, I am prepared to let you live at her expense.” Roland had protested feebly that he adored Felixity, her tenderness had won his heart. Roland did not recount to Felixity either that her father had greeted this effusion with the words: “You will not, please, try your formula on me.”

  In the days which succeeded Roland’s dialogue with Felixity’s father, the now-betrothed couple were blissful, each for their own reasons.

  Then Felixity’s father flew to another city on a business venture, the engine of his plane malfunctioned, and it crashed into the forests. Before the month was up, his remarkable but dead body had been recovered, woven with lianas and chewed by jaguars. Felixity became the heiress to his fortune.

  During this time of tragedy, Roland supported Felixity with unswerving attention. Felixity was bewildered at her loss, for she could not properly persuade herself she had lost anything.

  The funeral took place with extreme pomp, and soon after the lovers sought a quiet civil wedding. Felixity had chosen her own dress, which was a swampy brown. The groom wore vanilla and scarlet. When the legalities were completed, Roland drove Felixity away in his new white car, toward a sixty-roomed villa on the coast.