The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

by Nella Larsen

  She had been gazing down for some time at the specks of cars and people creeping about in streets, and thinking how silly they looked, when on taking up her glass she was surprised to find it empty at last. She asked for more tea and, while she waited, began to recall the happenings of the day and to wonder what she was to do about Ted and his book. Why was it that almost invariably he wanted something that was difficult or impossible to get? Like his father. Forever wanting something that he couldn’t have.

  Presently there were voices, a man’s booming one and a woman’s slightly husky. A waiter passed her, followed by a sweetly scented woman in a fluttering dress of green chiffon whose mingled pattern of narcissuses, jonquils, and hyacinths was a reminder of pleasantly chill spring days. Behind her there was a man, very red in the face, who was mopping his neck and forehead with a big crumpled handkerchief.

  “Oh dear!” Irene groaned, rasped by annoyance, for after a little discussion and commotion they had stopped at the very next table. She had been alone there at the window and it had been so satisfyingly quiet. Now, of course, they would chatter.

  But no. Only the woman sat down. The man remained standing, abstractedly pinching the knot of his bright blue tie. Across the small space that separated the two tables his voice carried clearly.

  “See you later, then,” he declared, looking down at the woman. There was pleasure in his tones and a smile on his face.

  His companion’s lips parted in some answer, but her words were blurred by the little intervening distance and the medley of noises floating up from the streets below. They didn’t reach Irene. But she noted the peculiar caressing smile that accompanied them.

  The man said: “Well, I suppose I’d better,” and smiled again, and said good-bye, and left.

  An attractive-looking woman, was Irene’s opinion, with those dark, almost black, eyes and that wide mouth like a scarlet flower against the ivory of her skin. Nice clothes too, just right for the weather, thin and cool without being mussy, as summer things were so apt to be.

  A waiter was taking her order. Irene saw her smile up at him as she murmured something—thanks, maybe. It was an odd sort of smile. Irene couldn’t quite define it, but she was sure that she would have classed it, coming from another woman, as being just a shade too provocative for a waiter. About this one, however, there was something that made her hesitate to name it that. A certain impression of assurance, perhaps.

  The waiter came back with the order. Irene watched her spread out her napkin, saw the silver spoon in the white hand slit the dull gold of the melon. Then, conscious that she had been staring, she looked quickly away.

  Her mind returned to her own affairs. She had settled, definitely, the problem of the proper one of two frocks for the bridge party that night, in rooms whose atmosphere would be so thick and hot that every breath would be like breathing soup. The dress decided, her thoughts had gone back to the snag of Ted’s book, her unseeing eyes far away on the lake, when by some sixth sense she was acutely aware that someone was watching her.

  Very slowly she looked around, and into the dark eyes of the woman in the green frock at the next table. But she evidently failed to realize that such intense interest as she was showing might be embarrassing, and continued to stare. Her demeanor was that of one who with utmost singleness of mind and purpose was determined to impress firmly and accurately each detail of Irene’s features upon her memory for all time, nor showed the slightest trace of disconcertment at having been detected in her steady scrutiny.

  Instead, it was Irene who was put out. Feeling her color heighten under the continued inspection, she slid her eyes down. What, she wondered, could be the reason for such persistent attention? Had she, in her haste in the taxi, put her hat on backwards? Guardedly she felt at it. No. Perhaps there was a streak of powder somewhere on her face. She made a quick pass over it with her handkerchief. Something wrong with her dress? She shot a glance over it. Perfectly all right. What was it?

  Again she looked up, and for a moment her brown eyes politely returned the stare of the other’s black ones, which never for an instant fell or wavered. Irene made a little mental shrug. Oh well, let her look! She tried to treat the woman and her watching with indifference, but she couldn’t. All her efforts to ignore her, it, were futile. She stole another glance. Still looking. What strange languorous eyes she had!

  And gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar. She laughed softly, but her eyes flashed.

  Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?

  Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means: fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a Gypsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn’t possibly know.

  Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her.

  But she looked, boldly this time, back into the eyes still frankly intent upon her. They did not seem to her hostile or resentful. Rather, Irene had the feeling that they were ready to smile if she would. Nonsense, of course. The feeling passed, and she turned away with the firm intention of keeping her gaze on the lake, the roofs of the buildings across the way, the sky, anywhere but on that annoying woman. Almost immediately, however, her eyes were back again. In the midst of her fog of uneasiness she had been seized by a desire to outstare the rude observer. Suppose the woman did know or suspect her race. She couldn’t prove it.

  Suddenly her small fright increased. Her neighbor had risen and was coming towards her. What was going to happen now?

  “Pardon me,” the woman said pleasantly, “but I think I know you.” Her slightly husky voice held a dubious note.

  Looking up at her, Irene’s suspicions and fears vanished. There was no mistaking the friendliness of that smile or resisting its charm. Instantly she surrendered to it and smiled too, as she said: “I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

  “Why, of course, I know you!” the other exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you’re not Irene Westover. Or do they still call you ’Rene?”

  In the brief second before her answer, Irene tried vainly to recall where and when this woman could have known her. There, in Chicago. And before her marriage. That much was plain. High school? College? Y.W.C.A. committees? High school, most likely. What white girls had she known well enough to have been familiarly addressed as ’Rene by them? The woman before her didn’t fit her memory of any of them. Who was she?

  “Yes, I’m Irene Westover. And though nobody calls me ’Rene any more, it’s good to hear the name again. And you—” She hesitated, ashamed that she could not remember, and hoping that the sentence would be finished for her.

  “Don’t you know me? Not really, ’Rene?”

  “I’m sorry, but just at the minute I can’t seem to place you.”

  Irene studied the lovely creature standing beside her for some clue to her identity. Who could she be? Where and when had they met? And through her perplexity there came the thought that the trick which her memory had played her was for some reason more gratifying than disappointing to her old acquaintance, that she didn’t mind not being recognized.

  And, too, Irene felt that she was just about to remember her. For about the woman was some quality, an intangible something, too vague to define, too remote to seize, but which was, to Irene Redfield, very familiar. And that voice. Surely she’d heard those husky tones somewhere before. Perhaps before time, contact, or something had been at them, making them into a voice remotely sugges
ting England. Ah! Could it have been in Europe that they had met? ’Rene. No.

  “Perhaps,” Irene began, “you—”

  The woman laughed, a lovely laugh, a small sequence of notes that was like a trill and also like the ringing of a delicate bell fashioned of a precious metal, a tinkling.

  Irene drew a quick sharp breath. “Clare!” she exclaimed. “Not really Clare Kendry?”

  So great was her astonishment that she had started to rise.

  “No, no, don’t get up,” Clare Kendry commanded, and sat down herself. “You’ve simply got to stay and talk. We’ll have something more. Tea? Fancy meeting you here! It’s simply too, too lucky!”

  “It’s awfully surprising,” Irene told her, and, seeing the change in Clare’s smile, knew that she had revealed a corner of her own thoughts. But she only said: “I’d never in this world have known you if you hadn’t laughed. You are changed, you know. And yet, in a way, you’re just the same.”

  “Perhaps,” Clare replied. “Oh, just a second.”

  She gave her attention to the waiter at her side. “M-mm, let’s see. Two teas. And bring some cigarettes. Y-es, they’ll be all right. Thanks.” Again that odd upward smile. Now Irene was sure that it was too provocative for a waiter.

  While Clare had been giving the order, Irene made a rapid mental calculation. It must be, she figured, all of twelve years since she, or anybody that she knew, had laid eyes on Clare Kendry.

  After her father’s death she’d gone to live with some relatives, aunts or cousins two or three times removed, over on the West Side: relatives that nobody had known the Kendrys possessed until they had turned up at the funeral and taken Clare away with them.

  For about a year or more afterward she would appear occasionally among her old friends and acquaintances on the South Side for short little visits that were, they understood, always stolen from the endless domestic tasks in her new home. With each succeeding one she was taller, shabbier, and more belligerently sensitive. And each time the look on her face was more resentful and brooding. “I’m worried about Clare, she seems so unhappy,” Irene remembered her mother saying. The visits dwindled, becoming shorter, fewer, and further apart until at last they ceased.

  Irene’s father, who had been fond of Bob Kendry, made a special trip over to the West Side about two months after the last time Clare had been to see them and returned with the bare information that he had seen the relatives and that Clare had disappeared. What else he had confided to her mother, in the privacy of their own room, Irene didn’t know.

  But she had had something more than a vague suspicion of its nature. For there had been rumors. Rumors that were, to girls of eighteen and nineteen years, interesting and exciting.

  There was the one about Clare Kendry’s having been seen at the dinner hour in a fashionable hotel in company with another woman and two men, all of them white. And dressed! And there was another which told of her driving in Lincoln Park with a man, unmistakably white, and evidently rich. Packard limousine, chauffeur in livery, and all that. There had been others whose context Irene could no longer recollect, but all pointing in the same glamorous direction.

  And she could remember quite vividly how, when they used to repeat and discuss these tantalizing stories about Clare, the girls would always look knowingly at one another and then, with little excited giggles, drag away their eager shining eyes and say with lurking undertones of regret or disbelief some such thing as: “Oh, well, maybe she’s got a job or something,” or “After all, it mayn’t have been Clare,” or “You can’t believe all you hear.”

  And always some girl, more matter-of-fact or more frankly malicious than the rest, would declare: “Of course it was Clare! Ruth said it was and so did Frank, and they certainly know her when they see her as well as we do.” And someone else would say: “Yes, you can bet it was Clare all right.” And then they would all join in asserting that there could be no mistake about its having been Clare, and that such circumstances could mean only one thing. Working indeed! People didn’t take their servants to the Shelby for dinner. Certainly not all dressed up like that. There would follow insincere regrets, and somebody would say: “Poor girl, I suppose it’s true enough, but what can you expect? Look at her father. And her mother, they say, would have run away if she hadn’t died. Besides, Clare always had a—a—having way with her.”

  Precisely that! The words came to Irene as she sat there on the Drayton roof, facing Clare Kendry. “A having way.” Well, Irene acknowledged, judging from her appearance and manner, Clare seemed certainly to have succeeded in having a few of the things that she wanted.

  It was, Irene repeated, after the interval of the waiter, a great surprise and a very pleasant one to see Clare again after all those years, twelve at least.

  “Why, Clare, you’re the last person in the world I’d have expected to run into. I guess that’s why I didn’t know you.”

  Clare answered gravely: “Yes. It is twelve years. But I’m not surprised to see you, ’Rene. That is, not so very. In fact, ever since I’ve been here, I’ve more or less hoped that I should, or someone. Preferably you, though. Still, I imagine that’s because I’ve thought of you often and often, while you—I’ll wager you’ve never given me a thought.”

  It was true, of course. After the first speculations and indictments, Clare had gone completely from Irene’s thoughts. And from the thoughts of others too—if their conversation was any indication of their thoughts.

  Besides, Clare had never been exactly one of the group, just as she’d never been merely the janitor’s daughter, but the daughter of Mr. Bob Kendry, who, it was true, was a janitor, but who also, it seemed, had been in college with some of their fathers. Just how or why he happened to be a janitor, and a very inefficient one at that, they none of them quite knew. One of Irene’s brothers, who had put the question to their father, had been told: “That’s something that doesn’t concern you,” and given him the advice to be careful not to end in the same manner as “poor Bob.”

  No, Irene hadn’t thought of Clare Kendry. Her own life had been too crowded. So, she supposed, had the lives of other people. She defended her—their—forgetfulness. “You know how it is. Everybody’s so busy. People leave, drop out, maybe for a little while there’s talk about them, or questions; then, gradually they’re forgotten.”

  “Yes, that’s natural,” Clare agreed. And what, she inquired, had they said of her for that little while at the beginning before they’d forgotten her altogether?

  Irene looked away. She felt the telltale color rising in her cheeks. “You can’t,” she evaded, “expect me to remember trifles like that over twelve years of marriages, births, deaths, and the war.”

  There followed that trill of notes that was Clare Kendry’s laugh, small and clear and the very essence of mockery.

  “Oh, ’Rene!” she cried. “Of course you remember! But I won’t make you tell me, because I know just as well as if I’d been there and heard every unkind word. Oh, I know, I know. Frank Danton saw me in the Shelby one night. Don’t tell me he didn’t broadcast that, and with embroidery. Others may have seen me at other times. I don’t know. But once I met Margaret Hammer in Marshall Field’s. I’d have spoken, was on the very point of doing it, but she cut me dead. My dear ’Rene, I assure you that, from the way she looked through me, even I was uncertain whether I was actually there in the flesh or not. I remember it clearly, too clearly. It was that very thing which, in a way, finally decided me not to go out and see you one last time before I went away to stay. Somehow, good as all of you, the whole family, had always been to the poor forlorn child that was me, I felt I shouldn’t be able to bear that. I mean if any of you, your mother or the boys or—Oh, well, I just felt I’d rather not know it if you did. And so I stayed away. Silly, I suppose. Sometimes I’ve been sorry I didn’t go.”

  Irene wondered if it was tears that made Clare’s eyes so luminous.

  “And now, ’Rene, I want to hear all about you and everybod
y and everything. You’re married, I s’pose?”

  Irene nodded.

  “Yes,” Clare said knowingly, “you would be. Tell me about it.”

  And so for an hour or more they had sat there smoking and drinking tea and filling in the gap of twelve years with talk. That is, Irene did. She told Clare about her marriage and removal to New York, about her husband, and about her two sons, who were having their first experience of being separated from their parents at a summer camp, about her mother’s death, about the marriages of her two brothers. She told of the marriages, births, and deaths in other families that Clare had known, opening up, for her, new vistas on the lives of old friends and acquaintances.

  Clare drank it all in, these things which for so long she had wanted to know and hadn’t been able to learn. She sat motionless, her bright lips slightly parted, her whole face lit by the radiance of her happy eyes. Now and then she put a question, but for the most part she was silent.

  Somewhere outside, a clock struck. Brought back to the present, Irene looked down at her watch and exclaimed: “Oh, I must go, Clare!”

  A moment passed during which she was the prey of uneasiness. It had suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t asked Clare anything about her own life and that she had a very definite unwillingness to do so. And she was quite well aware of the reason for that reluctance. But, she asked herself, wouldn’t it, all things considered, be the kindest thing not to ask? If things with Clare were as she—as they all—had suspected, wouldn’t it be more tactful to seem to forget to inquire how she had spent those twelve years?

  If? It was that “if” which bothered her. It might be, it might just be, in spite of all gossip and even appearances to the contrary, that there was nothing, had been nothing, that couldn’t be simply and innocently explained. Appearances, she knew now, had a way sometimes of not fitting facts, and if Clare hadn’t—Well, if they had all been wrong, then certainly she ought to express some interest in what had happened to her. It would seem queer and rude if she didn’t. But how was she to know? There was, she at last decided, no way; so she merely said again, “I must go, Clare.”