A Fox Inside

by David Stacton

  When he had been a brown-skinned kid, in the hot August days at a summer camp in the mountains, the great sport was to strip naked and shoot the rocky rapids of the Stanislaus River. He had been best at it, though it scared him skinny, because of the slimy razor-edged rocks, but being Mexican, being best at it had not helped. But now he remembered how he had felt, leaping up on a rock with his bare feet, while the water pearled on his skin, slicking back his hair, and looking at the others in the rapids with an animal pride that was the best kind of pride, for it was warm and did no harm to anyone.

  His skin was still brown. Hers was pale. But it was warm now, and only because it was over for a little while would it grow for a little while colder.

  “It’s different now,” she said.

  “I guess it is.”

  She settled down, like a patient who has finally decided to trust her psychiatrist, after a long probation.

  “Why did you marry that bastard?” he asked.

  “Lily said she’d have me put away.”

  “She couldn’t do that.”

  “She did it before,” she said sharply, and then hurried on. “I wanted to get away. I thought I’d get away from her and I didn’t think I cared what he was like. I wanted to hurt her, too. And, well…. Oh, Luke, I need you so.

  “I’m here.”

  “I didn’t before,” she said flatly.

  “No,” he said. “I guess you didn’t.” He drew the dress more firmly around them, not because it was cold, but because the arena was getting shadowy and dark.

  “We didn’t get married here. We got married from the house in town,” she said. “I guess it was easier for Lily that way.”

  XV

  SHE WAS NOT SURE HOW MUCH she wanted to tell him. She was not sure how much she wanted to tell anybody. But she could remember it all.

  It had been so fatally easy. It was the beginning of the war, so Luke was away, but even if he had not been he could not have rescued her. Dumbly she believed, or hoped against hope, that someone would rescue her, and the conditions of her imprisonment were so familiar to her that she could not even say rescue from what.

  She knew all about Charles. She could not remember now when she had not known. But she shrank from admitting it, for the less she knew about her mother the safer she felt. She tried to ignore Charles. Then, when he had first begun to pay attention to her, or even before that, when once she had caught him watching her closely, she had thought only that it was something Lily had told him to do, for reasons of her own.

  And then, as he slowly moved up and manœuvred into position she realized what he was up to. And in that big house she couldn’t help but eavesdrop. She had gone into the living-room one day to fetch a book and heard him say, through the library door, which was open, the phrase, “When I marry Maggie.” She was wearing a heavy silver bracelet with a Maria Teresa Thaler hung from it, and instantly she put her other hand to the bracelet, to quieten it, but she heard no more for just then the door closed.

  Most of the time they did not seem to care whether she overheard them or not. She went down to the temple to think it over. She had not been there for some time. It was a foggy day and in the damp fragments of plaster from the ceiling detached themselves and dropped off, like satiated leeches. She brushed one from her hair, staring round the temple that was usually warm and glamorous but to-day was cold and shabby and cluttered with dry weeds. There was even a hole in the floor. If I can’t have this, she thought, not quite knowing what this was, I can at least have that, not quite knowing what that was. She had only one line of defence left against her life and that was to give in completely.

  She got a certain amount of pleasure out of watching Charles. Once you got a lever under the edge of that facile charm, it lifted off like a scab and you could see the smooth pink vulnerable flesh underneath. She also made a private joke about his beard. But she could not imagine how he would propose to her. When she was alone to think it over, it made her giggle a little too much. She had forgotten that efficiency is always quiet, and Charles was an efficient man.

  Though he never took Lily up to town, he took her up frequently. One time they wound up at the “Top of the Mark” at about midnight, which was the sort of place he would take her. It had once been the private penthouse of a copper king, but for years now it had been one big bar slung out into space, with slightly tinted windows overlooking the night-lit city. Most of it, unfortunately, faced towards the slums or the hills, but the view from one side had been reproduced in cigar advertisements from coast to coast. She liked it because it reminded her of H. Rider Haggard’s She, because of the lobby downstairs, and of Helen Gahagan Douglas flinging herself around vengefully in white veils. Maggie could not see herself, however, as the eternal female principle, and she did not think that Charles did, either. The eternal female principle was essentially a story-book thing.

  But the “Top of the Mark” was nice, perched up in the air like a counterfeit zircon. It gave her a twenty-fifth-century feeling that came from being up high, in the lounge of some luxury space ship of the future, not going anywhere in particular, but being awfully rich and enviable.

  “I suppose he feels he has to pump a little romance in,” she thought. It made her feel suddenly tired. She looked around the room for the sort of blond boy she would have liked to have been there with, but could not find one. She never did find one. The room was drowsy and half deserted. They sat in the right windows and she looked out at the magic lights of the city, the harbour, the hills, and the shipping. If I had my own money, she thought, the money I should have had, the money Father would have given me if he hadn’t gone away, I could get on that boat right down there and go to Valparaiso or somewhere, but then what? And she watched the lighted Chilean steamer slowly being nudged out into the open water, half hidden by the dirty white smoke of its tug.

  “Well,” she thought, “this is it.” The ice-cubes fell in her glass with a soft chink and she felt scared. Charles heard the ice fall, too. He reached his dead hand across the table and patted hers, with a neat mixture of avuncular understanding and a touch of the cardinalate. She might have been his niece.

  “I guess you know I want you to marry me,” he said. He was using the vibrato in his voice that he kept for special occasions.

  “Would it help you that much?” she asked.

  He did not draw his hand back, but if anything it was colder than before. It was also slightly sweaty. She did not like sweaty hands.

  “Every man should get married,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I guess every man should.”

  He withdrew his hand. She guessed he thought she wanted to bargain and his eyes grew sharp, though they tried to look warm, with the knowledge that she had nothing to bargain with. You might at least pretend, she thought, that I’m a person. After all, I move and talk like one the best way I can.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”

  “Well, think about it,” he said, but he sounded impatient.

  She made him sit through two more drinks and then had him drop her at the town house. He did not kiss her, but he pumped sincerity into his eyes for all he was worth. She went into the house alone. It was not until she was upstairs in her own room that she realized that when they were married they would share this house. She supposed Charles would want to change round the furniture and have the decorators in. He usually did. He was that kind of man. It was a pity, for she liked things the way they were. It would have helped a lot if there had been anyone, anywhere, to love her.

  He always rushed things a little towards their conclusion. He got impatient, she thought, because he spent too much time planning a thing and then the fun went out of it for him.

  Her scene with Lily was equally quiet. It was as though they had all suddenly decided to pretend they were in a sickroom. The scene did not occur in town, but at Atherton.

  It was the last week of her s
enior year, but after finals. She knew the pressure would be put on her that week, for nobody wanted her on their hands after she graduated. Lily was wearing her best smile. Charles used his eyes for expressing sincerity, Lily her mouth. The result was the same. Maggie looked at her mother warily, clutching her bag.

  “Let’s go to lunch, dear,” said Lily. “You must be tired.” No one would have guessed that they were mother and daughter. In a way they weren’t. Lily was full of an older woman’s playful bridge club gallantry towards a junior matron.

  They went to the Studio Club, about five miles below the university. In shape like a progressive chicken coop it had, at the lunch hour, the atmosphere of a church social at a fashionable Episcopal church. In deference to the age of most of its clientele the management had the window glass tinted pale blue, to avoid the coarse intrusion of actinic rays. The calories were admirably balanced. It was impossible to eat too much.

  The bar was large and dim. It was scattered with deep sofas, low coffee tables, and arrangements of flowers. The drinks were too elaborately served and usually contained coloured garbage. The place, in short, was fun. In a corner of the bar dimmer than the others, at a large Hammond organ, a thin, elderly, bald-headed man was letting his hands wander idly over the keys. Whether it was Ethel Smythe or “In a Monastery Garden”, he played it all in the proper Sir Arthur Sullivan manner, and at least the sound produced, like that of houseflies angry in a bottle, helped to keep the gossip in separate compartments. With a sigh of contentment, for because of the lighting this was one place where she did not have to worry about her complexion, Lily sat down on one of the sofas, laid her gloves on the coffee table with surgical precision, and settled back. Like a surgeon, she never tugged her gloves on, but carefully rolled them on and off, as though they were powdered and sterile. She preferred thin kid, which had somewhat the texture of surgeon’s plastic rubber.

  “I thought we’d have sandwiches in here, or something,” she said. “The restaurant is so noisy.”

  So they had sandwiches in there. Maggie sat beside Lily, perversely on her deaf side. They might have been two women placidly cutting up the reputation of a third, rather than deciding her future. Maggie was beginning to realize that that was the way futures were decided, at least the only sort of futures Charles and Lily were interested in. She thought it was a pity.

  “It’s time you settled down,” said Lily.

  “I won’t get my diploma for another week,” said Maggie, for no particular reason, except that she could never help saying things like that to her mother because her mother never really understood the point of them. Lily could only follow one trace at a time.

  “Well, we don’t want you going haywire,” continued Lily. It was the time-honoured beginning of all their serious talks. The rest of it bade her remember the example of her father. “You’re too high strung. You need a steadying hand.”

  But not, thought Maggie, manacles, and wondered why her mother was going at it so easily. It isn’t me she’s worried about, it never has been. It’s Charles, she thought. She was too tired to bargain, but she made the pretence.

  “I’d need things,” she said.

  “That can be taken care of.”

  “I mean money.”

  “Your father’s money is tied up. You know why. We can manage.”

  “Suppose I don’t want to get married?”

  “Nonsense. Everybody gets married,” said Lily. She eyed the waiter bringing the sandwiches. They hadn’t got round to Charles yet, but they didn’t have to. Perhaps that was what disconcerted Lily. It was all so easy.

  Maggie decided to make it even easier. “I’m going to marry Charles,” she said.

  Lily flinched, but also sighed with relief. Suddenly Maggie understood that Lily was afraid of Charles now, and wondered why.

  “But only to get away from you,” she added.

  Lily was silent, eating the sandwich before she spoke. She put it down on the plate and wiped her fingers carefully on her napkin. “You won’t get away,” she said. “We’d better have another drink.”

  It was not until years afterwards that Maggie realized, that this was not a vengeful or nasty remark, but only the sad truth. The full distasteful physical horror of the whole mess did not strike her until later, and then it was too late.

  That night, in her own room, she heard a souped-up car go charging invisible in the street beyond the hedges; and she thought: there are people alive in this world. Why don’t I know them?

  It did not occur to her that Lily was as uncomfortable as she was. They boarded it up by shopping together. They saw little of Charles. Even so she was frightened at her own decision. When she got a postcard from Luke she tore it up and threw it in the waste-paper basket. Then she took out the pieces and it was like looking at something valuable but taken for granted, that one does not know one is fond of until someone else has smashed it. She wrote him a letter and tore it up. She emptied the waste-paper basket down the laundry shoot.

  They were married from the house in town. She had dreaded it so much, now she was committed to it, that it came more quickly than she had believed possible. And almost as a relief.

  The last night of her freedom she got out her own car, that was the only private world she had, and took a drive through the dusty campus. In her freshman year, at the beginning, during rush week, she had been pledged—that had been taken for granted—but not very eagerly. Chiefly because she had not wanted to join a sorority at all, but also because she had wanted to annoy Lily, she had joined the wrong sorority, not a fatally wrong one, but one that was wrong enough. Lily had been angry. “Why haven’t you made any useful friends?” she had demanded, and it was true, Maggie hadn’t. The scorn in Lily’s voice had hurt.

  She had preferred to learn the hard way with a funny professor in the history department who had halitosis and suffered from a nostalgia for Budapest. He had been dismissed later for liberal tendencies. She had tried the usual boys, too, but she had felt safer with the faculty, at least the younger members of it. And none of it mattered. It was only for an hour or two. And then she was alone again. As for Luke, Luke was only a toy that she was too old to play with, so her mother had put it away. It didn’t matter. It would have broken, anyway. Toys always did.

  She drove out beyond the lake and up into the hills, past the couples in the dark and silent parked cars, and got out and let the wind whip her skirt as she stood on the hill. You could not see much because of the perpetual heat haze, but she could sense grizzled mountains in the distance and the barrier hills of the city to the north, with a pink neon glow behind them. She knew almost no one there. Only Charles. But alone on a hilltop, in the open country, was one place Charles would never get. He did not think it worth getting. So she was glad she had the car. The car would help.

  She went back to Atherton, pleased, in a way, that it was her last night there. It seemed proper she should be married from her father’s house and not from her mother’s, even for a marriage such as this one.

  Lily drove her up to town. The car was piled with luggage. There was not much to say. At least the house, when they got there, would be a familiar place.

  It wasn’t. Even Lily was somewhat taken aback. Charles had had the decorators in and nothing was where it belonged and nothing was the same. That was the first real shock she had, and the next came right afterwards. Charles was in the living-room, fussing with the flowers, which he shouldn’t have been doing. She saw at a glance that everything in the room, most of it new, was arranged exactly and immutably, as though he had a blue-print of it all, down to the ashtrays, perpetually in his head. Some imperceptible movement of Lily’s made Maggie realize that she had not seen the two of them together since the whole miserable engagement had commenced; and now, as she stood between them, for she had gone into the room first, she saw that she was between them; and that, just as they were doing now, they could exchange a glance over her head that even if they made each other uncomfortable now, s
he was not tall enough to intercept. She looked at them both and rushed upstairs, and a strange maid helped her dress. Charles had hired the servants, too.

  They left her alone. The only thing they needed her for was the wedding itself. And she wondered what they were talking about downstairs. But when Lily came out in the hall and called up to her—was she afraid to come up?—and she came to the top of the stairs, she thought her mother looked strained and white and old, perhaps because she was trying to pretend it was a gala occasion and a good reason for a cry.

  It was all pretty brutal. Maggie took some phenobarbital. She had to take something and a bride doesn’t drink. It occurred to her that the only reason they were going through with the wedding was so Lily and Charles, in different places, could read the same guest list in the same papers the next morning, with the same mental reservations about the names. She herself did not know who half the people were. Charles and Lily had arranged the wedding. Though there were to be people there she had known at college, the attendance had been arranged between their parents and Lily.

  The car was waiting at the door, a hired limousine. Charles would go separately. Foster was the best man.

  Lily watched her as she floated down the stairs, holding up her skirt, for that was the only way to move in that ancestral dress, and Maggie wondered if she looked like a fresh-faced eager bride, as they would say next day, or like a rather third-rate actress elevated to the rank of Trilby to other men’s means.