The Judge’s stare, baffled, recalled me. It was the first time in my life I had ever felt this hysteria and I knew where to blame it. I should not have come here, to a house where I took things so personally. This was a dangerous house.
“And does he show no signs at all?” asked Stukely. “Of his rise? This Edgar?”
“Well,” said the Judge. “Perhaps he has to be a trifle more learned than anybody.” He spoke jauntily, like a man who had no need to keep up appearances, but my sense of my own unreality, suddenly after all these years so exacerbated, opened like a nostril, scenting his. Edgar. Edgar wrote that article.
“Nonsense!” said Miss Selig. “Simon, I’m surprised at you. We are what we are, from the cradle.” She spoke with the authority of one who had known him from his. “And whatever has made you think that being good enough for anybody is good enough!”
“Bravo!” Stukely, behind her, mouthed this silently, making a face like a horse at his wife.
“Up, down, up, down. It’s all nonsense,” Miss Selig grumbled. Her thick, gray hands, gripping her brandy glass, trembled from age, anger or greed. “I should know, shouldn’t I?” I’d never before heard her refer to her own circumstances, and it struck me now that our delicacy with the subject had been unnecessary. There wasn’t a crevice of doubt in her. In her squat, gray mass she reminded me of stone figures I had seen in the East during the war, palace garden ornament now, once ballast in the holds of ships from China. She was far less bruisable than I.
“You’ve known me forever, Augusta,” said the Judge, managing a number of avoidances at once.
“Yes.” Miss Selig tossed off her brandy and put out a hand to wake the sleeping Chummie. She stroked him. “Oh, yes.”
It was then that we heard Anna greeting someone in the hall.
The newcomer came forward, radiant from travel, dropped in on us from the air with eyes still changeling. She had not yet seen me. Behind her, Anna, shunning mine, slunk away.
“Ruth, Ruth, my dear. My dear Ruth!”
She knelt in front of his chair, laying her head down. So much taller than he, she looked improbably near me, like those penitents drawn in the early days of perspective, so much too large for the throne.
He put a small, papal hand upon her. “Why didn’t you let us expect you?”
“Anna knew—it was to be a surprise.” Her eyes were glistening. “It’s your birthday tomorrow. Did you think I would forget your birthday?” Then she saw me, following his glance to where I stood, in my corner. Can a person feel his own face whiten? In her blanched one, I thought I felt it, as I felt myself walk toward her without moving, exactly as she, immobile as I, approached me, and I was half prepared to hear a cry from one of the others, “They are twins!” Then the confusion of introductions, inquiries and answers, intervened.
“What kind of a dog does Austin keep now?” said Miss Selig, when they had all settled again, but on the arms of chairs, as a sign that the evening was breaking.
“Why, I don’t know, Aunt Augusta.” She had her hand on the back of his wheel chair now, in the familiar, antiquated posture, and the two of them no longer looked out of drawing. His head was down, gazing in his lap; one couldn’t tell whether it felt its punishment over. “He probably has one down in the country, but I only saw them in London. The house in Smith Street has no garden. And Ursula has enough on her hands with the children. Plus her own commissions.”
“Still, I can’t imagine Austin without one. Will you ever forget that Airedale?”
She shook her head, smiling, a finger creeping to the mark on her cheek. I touched it with her.
“Why, that’s Ursula Walker, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Stukely. “The architect? She and I were at Roedean together!”
Ruth nodded, leaving a smile here, a nod there, in every direction but mine.
“I heard that she married an American,” said Mrs. Stukely.
“Prue—I think we ought to—” said her husband. I guessed that he knew Fenno’s relationship here, or former one.
“You’ll have to imagine him with children now, Aunt. Four. The new baby’s a darling.”
As if in answer, Chummie made his only sound of the evening, a disparaging one. Facing the general laughter, he rose unsteadily, his eyes as obtuse as Anna’s when she knows some remark of hers has made her socially useful. Anna herself was nowhere to be seen.
“Chummie,” said Miss Selig, “we must go home.”
“I’ll ride along with you. I bear all kinds of messages.” She turned to her father, whose head was still bowed. “Charlie’ll bring me right back. I won’t be long.”
“It’s Friday.” He spoke in sour triumph, as if her lapse on this canon measured her neglect, past any efforts on birthdays.
“There’s plenty of room,” said Miss Selig. “I’m sure Mr. Goodman won’t mind.”
So she was caught, if she had meant to escape. She took up Chummie without a word.
“Oh, he can walk down,” said his owner. “Chummie likes to walk when he can. Good night, Simon.”
Good night, we all said, in a catching of cabs, closing of doors that put us out again into the fresh, illimitable dark. Good night, we said in a round, snatching at the phrase, wistful even between enemies or bores, which must last us until we were somewhere inside again, good night, good night.
In the silent car, there were no messages forthcoming, and the old woman did not press for them. So many emphases that I had never noticed before had seemed to come from her lips tonight. Like that marble in which one saw the infinitely flattened snails of pre-time, she must be—tough old stone in which the Mannix confidences were embedded. “I’ll get a cab back,” her companion said when we reached Miss Selig’s street. “Don’t wait. Good night.”
The street, not yet sinister but a mean one, was a dead realm to cabs. When she came down, after an interval fair enough for confidences, she hesitated in the doorway, seeing me still there. Slowly she came toward me, a statue warmed down from its niche against its own will, and got into the car. We found nothing idle enough to say to each other. The long rest, borrowable from time, from dissimulation, gathered between us, and at last we touched.
For a short time thereafter we gave ourselves up to a metaphysical delaying—the harmless thumbscrew delights with which a man and woman postpone their arrival at an end of which neither despairs. We were like two people watching, hand in hand, through separate binoculars, the inland tending of the same white sail. And we were like two who, chatting noncommittally the while, hid our locked hands behind us, against the spies in our own breasts. I left off going to her house, and my flat was not mentioned. Instead, powerfully urged into each other’s company at least once a day, we met in all the public places, luxury and on the cheap, that a city suddenly seems to offer such preambles, with the air of a great mine opening on treasures that exist for nothing else. We were the engrossed couple on the ferry boat, the two in day clothes (as if this made them incognito) in the opera box, the two met as if by chance in one of the currents of musk or pine sent out by the stores at this season, and fallen at once into an urgent silence which had only the one errand. It was during this period that, when apart, we had those conventionally absurd exchanges on the telephone, and when together, she dropped those bauble confidences which I was as careful to mistake for her simplicity—in which, like any woman shaking out her best attractions, she set up for me the clear sugar-castles of her girlhood, as if she saw that these were what I was best drawn by, and that only they could reassure. I learned why—or several good reasons why—self-apprenticed to the ballet at the age of six, and arduous enough to gain entrance, during a summer tryout years later, to one of the best ballet companies in Europe, she had toured with them for a year, and had as suddenly given it all up, only a week before the troupe reached New York. Oh, she’d been good enough, but if she wasn’t to be superb, then, to one of her background, there was no need. Her family, with a musical past of its own, had never opposed her; per
haps she’d have been better spurred that way, like some of her friends shot out into the arts by the bourgeois outcry behind them; but perhaps she’d been a little too subject, at home, to the idea that excellence was all. “And you know how verbal we are there,” she said. “For a while I did choreography—there was even a ballet of mine. But the best dancers are stupid, you know, to verbal people. Even the great ones. It’s like living in a society of cats busy at watching their own ripplings. It just wasn’t my milieu—even if I hadn’t another on my own.” The family somehow appeared, if benevolently, in all her reasons, as one of those milieus perhaps so binding in its early satisfactions that later on its members needed no other. As such, I admired it—who now, of the two of us, had the guile?
During this period also was when she haltingly gave me those light histories of old love affairs—not many—which are traditionally a woman’s sign that she is ready for the new. I learned then why the Mannixes still spoke of Austin Fenno as they might of an absent member of the family or of an associate so close that he could never hope to be really absent, why Ruth could visit him and his wife, and all without the slightest embarrassment. It had been the marriage, lasting for eight months when Ruth and Austin were each twenty-five, which had been the embarrassment—once the unfortunate mistake was over, the waters of friendship could reseal. Could anything be more natural? Even Ursula, the second wife, couldn’t summon up any jealousy over that small, submerged shipwreck. Even she could understand the conjunction, so fostered by the well-meaning, of two childhood friends come of age without other lasting preference, who, finally embarking in a crowd of huzzas, found out only then, in their two-in-a-boat darkness, how fatally all that they had married “because of” could keep them disjoined.
“We never would have,” she said, “if we each hadn’t had a couple of other disappointments, in both cases people our own people never thought too much of. He was always like another brother to me, and now that that’s over, he still is. Oh I know, in some cases that childhood sort of thing is supposed to flower, but not with us. Left to ourselves, we would never have made that mistake. Why—Austin is considered extremely handsome, you know—the girls used to sigh at my having him around all the time through David. Even my father could never get over the fact that such a perfect physical specimen should have brains in the bargain. But I never saw him that way. Nor he me.” She smoothed a bracelet, one sent her by David from Palestine, that she often wore. “It wasn’t even a tragedy,” she said gently, “just a mistake,” and then went quickly on to something else, lest I notice, perhaps, how precisely she understood the difference. Of my origins and history she knew the sparse, public outline and never tempted my reserve further, seeming to take it for the acceptable male silence. A woman’s part was to chatter, on whatever could be made to seem harmless, so she did so, but in a way that almost said to me then as she did much later, “I won’t trespass. I will manage—not to.” Behind our backs, the neatest paradox was forming. I refused to see that she was a person to be feared; she refused to fear what she had already seen.
For the night I slept with her—the night that also dates the beginning of this memoir—she already knew that I was a pretender. Afterwards, absorbed in my own need, I did not examine her bravery, or if I had, I should have put it down to the congenital bravery of women, Nanettes in some way most of them, bearing within, like a secondary egg, an eager tenderness to be torn. A woman takes up her role of mater dolorosa half for humanity’s sake, half for personal glory, exactly as her object, the male, goes off to war. And these means, so separate at the start, by which each hopes to find some comet-path out of time and change, are what will drop them both, tired and old, at the same wayside point where, having eaten of those unities, they must die of them. This is the human condition and she was playing the woman’s part of it, I’d have said until now—nothing more. But the memoir, dredging up one’s own truth, brings up that of others, alongside. If we’d had bystanders that night—our owls gazing down at us from their dimension—what would they have said to one another? “Look at the two of them lying there in each other’s arms. See how she resembles him. She too has something to conceal. They are twins.”
For several nights past, I’d brought her home to an empty house but had done nothing about it. Anna was on holiday, for the Judge, taking Charlie the chauffeur with him and, on impulse, Mr. Somers, had finally departed, much later than usual, for his customary cure in Hot Springs. Ruth had not gone with him, as in the past. The word “finally” had hung between us unsaid, until the night before.
“Are you afraid of my father?” she had said, teasing, when I stood up to go.
“A little,” I had answered. “Now that he’s gone.” I had no idea what I meant by that. Coyness and savagery run hard by each other. The next night, standing in the same posture we had for nights past, saying nothing, we sank down. Behind us, the Chinese horse marshaled its shadows. The light burned.
Only a puritan takes the love act for a describable entity; the rest of us know it to be, in its knotting of philosophy with tissue, as ineffable as any other compulsion between creatures who so incurably coexist as we. Like most men, I suspect, I’d devised a few mottoes of inner reference, that was all, and by these I remember it. As it perfected itself in spite of us, there was nothing new under the sun, or needed to be. Afterwards, we lay without grotesquery among the flung clothes. How did I record it before? I look back:
Lying together, palm to palm, after love, is like lying in another country which some Dives had allotted for ten minutes or more. The voices that speak there are already the voices of paradise lost. I remember what I thought when I withdrew my palm. I thought—I could love her, if it were not for myself. We spoke then, or she did, of how we had met, of all the stages that had brought us to this night, in the way women love to do, exactly as children ask again for a story, secure in the fairy-tale end. Her hair was across my forehead. I was only half listening. The moment, with its treble of voices, was over. I watched it as it sped away, pluming into the gathering distance, leaving one of its voices behind.
What a strange disloyalty repeats itself next, as from a split lip. If it were not for myself, I could love her. What sex is it, am I, that asks more of sex than love?
Go on. Remember. But this time, watch her also, if you can.
She was speaking of the circumstance that had brought us together, the encyclopedia soliciting her father for an article, the discovery that I had known David. I was thinking of Walter, sitting up in bed with his hump clinging between his shoulders. I thought of all those whom we leave for dead, either in the grave or in the past, who grow again between our shoulder blades. I thought of the great hump of memory I had made for myself, of such a shape that I could never hope to lay it down. And then I made the accidental slip. I spoke unaware; I was listening, but not to her. And found myself with the enemy lying beside me, in the flesh still quivering in communication with mine. I discovered why I had never looked behind me.
“You’re not listening,” she said.
“Yes, I am.” For my own ends only. I had kept that vow. “I’m listening.” I heard voices black, voices chaste, in a great, impure choiring of all I had not done, all I had.
“And when David left on that plane,” she said (as I thought), marveling, “it was just by chance you weren’t on it also.”
I nodded into the dark. That was how Walter had told it. Delayed at the last minute himself, he had stood on the runway and waved to David.
“And you called out good-by to him. And he turned around and waved.”
And again I nodded. “I suppose one shouldn’t take these things too mystically,” Walter had said. “But of all things, to take it into my head just then to call out to him. He couldn’t have heard me. They were already revving up. And besides—” After a long pause he had spoken again. “Yet, he turned.”
“Tell me,” she said then, her mouth at my breastbone.
“What?” I said, as absently as
to a child. “What shall I tell you?”
She raised herself on an elbow and looked down at me, her eyes lustrous and fixed. Delphine in the hallway, I thought—how women at times resemble one another.
“What I already know.”
I drew her head down and hid it. She was pleading, I thought, for the three words I had not yet said—so that she might say them. “About what?”
After long silence, her answer came, muffled. “About you.”
And mine, after as long. “No, you. No, you do.” And when no answer came—“What do you know about me?”
She had so twined herself against me that she was one warm, felt line. Her words came from below, a puff from my own breast. “That—you never knew David.”
Her nape was beneath my hand. If I were a murderer. Yes, they are brave. My nakedness shivered with hers; then I sprang from her. Trembling, we faced each other. The real danger walks toward.
She sat up, her arms dangling. Her eyes were tightly closed. “It doesn’t matter. If you aren’t—who you are supposed to be. Nor am I.”
“Cover yourself,” I said. “Cover yourself!” Or open your eyes.
She drew something toward her, then opened her eyes to look down at it, my coat. “I have.” She replaced it with the blanket we had taken from Anna’s room. “Can’t we love?” she said. “No matter who we are. Or what?”
If I had not jumped up, would she have known for sure? What does she know?
“What did you mean, about David?”
She didn’t answer at once. In the growing light from outside, that had downed the other, her face looked ugly and sad. “I can lie to everyone but myself,” she said. “That’s what father won’t understand.” Within the coarse cowl of the blanket she shrugged or shivered again. One hand turned itself up and down, up and down on her bare thigh. “Though I try. Though I try.” I thought she wasn’t going to answer me further. When she spoke, it was so listlessly that her words were half echo before I heard them. “There was a friend of David’s who—who thought he loved my brother. But after David’s death he would never mention the one thing that spoiled his dream of him. That David was deaf. Stone-deaf.”
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