Psyche

by Phyllis Young

  4

  PSYCHE stayed on at bel’s throughout that winter as a result of a conference at which she herself was not present.

  Her own intention to leave unweakened, she had had several unproductive talks with Bel on the subject of what she could, or should, do, before the Sunday morning after Christmas when Bel sought the advice—for what it might be worth—of the girls.

  Sunday morning, toward noon, always found all of them, in various degrees of dress and undress, sitting around the living-room drinking coffee, Kathie, in tailored shirt and slacks, would have been up for some hours correcting homework and laying out schedules for the coming school week. May, in a pink or a blue satin négligé, would have only just got out of bed. The others might or might not have been up earlier. Bel, who at one time had slept as late as any of them, had fallen into the habit of breakfasting with Psyche at ten, after which Psyche would go downstairs to spend the balance of the morning with the old lady.

  “The kid wants to get herself a job,” Bel told them without preface.

  “She must be nuts,” May remarked, yawning.

  “What kind of a job?” Kathie asked curiously.

  “That’s the trouble,” Bel said, “she doesn’t know, and no more do I. I thought maybe some of you girls might have an idea or two, seeing you all work at something.”

  Monique, having searched the radio dial for dance music, and finding none, was making the best of a bad job by jerking her hips in time to a hymn. “Elle sait déjà bien danser. With some more lessons maybe she could be an instructress.”

  Bel snorted. “The kid’s got brains as well as feet. She can do better than that.”

  “I like that! J’ai aussi——”

  “We’re not talking about you, hon,” May put in pacifically. May liked peace. She also liked the small jewelled hand mirror in which she was regarding herself. That the jewels were synthetic, she had yet to discover, and for the moment both the donor and his gift were enjoying her highest regard.

  Ruth and her sister Joan giggled, for no apparent reason.

  “She could look for a job in a store, maybe,” Ruth said.

  “And where would that get her?” Violet asked acidly. “At best into a two-room hole in a wall filled with squalling brats and a man without enough take-home pay to bury himself decently.”

  “She wouldn’t get anywhere,” Kathie said slowly. “She’s never been taught any arithmetic. She couldn’t handle the money end of a job like that.”

  “She does all the shopping,” Bel reminded her.

  “When you’re buying, people will wait. When you’re selling— they won’t,” Kathie replied. “It takes her several minutes to add two and two and arrive at a satisfactory four.”

  “She’s bright. She could learn,” Bel persisted.

  Kathie got up and walked restlessly over to the window. “You have to learn first. That is the difficulty, Bel.”

  “Maybe she could go to school a while,” Joan put in brightly.

  It was Kathie’s turn to snort. “And sit in the eighth grade—if she could qualify for it—with little children! Don’t be a fool.”

  Violet looked at no one in particular, and her blank amethyst eyes were as unrevealing as always. “She hasn’t really got a chance. When you’re down, you’re down, and you don’t ever get up again. You don’t get any second chance.”

  Monique’s shrug was expressive. “Speak for yourself, chérie. Moi—I’m going places.”

  May yawned, but she was not bored. She had been thinking. “With her looks, and being—well, you know—not really experienced, as you might say, I could probably get her as nice a set-up as a girl could want. Place of her own, real good address, and just the one guy to put up with. Real respectable”

  Bel turned on her like a she-wolf. “You don’t know what respectable is! You keep any ideas like that to yourself, you hear me?”

  May’s good humour remained undisturbed. “Just a suggestion,” she said lazily, and yawned again.

  They went on discussing the problem for some time, but no matter what they said they always ended up against the same stumbling block. Psyche was not only untrained, but also basically untaught in any way which could be of practical use to her.

  Bel’s worried frown deepened. “She’s got to learn things, things in books, that’s the hell of it. She just don’t fit in anywhere, the way she is. The trouble is the kid was meant to be a lady. Not one of your la-li-dah fakes that are only skin-deep, but a real honest-to-God lady. The kind that goes to church in her second-best duds, and doesn’t kick a girl when she’s down.”

  Kathie, who had said nothing for a time, turned abruptly from the window, and spoke to Bel as if they two were alone in the room. “This means a lot to you, doesn’t it, Bel?”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “Does she want to learn?”

  “She’s crazy to.”

  “If that’s the case, I’ll teach her,” Kathie said evenly. “If she’s prepared to work, and work like the devil, I can teach her enough in four or five months that she will have a chance to make something of herself. Whether she does or not will be up to her.”

  That evening after supper Kathie went up to Psyche’s room, a thing she had never done before, and never did again.

  Sitting down on the edge of the bed, she let her glance travel around the room. Her thin face pensive, her eyes shadowed, she remarked absently, “This was my room when I first came here. I suppose you know that. It hasn’t changed. Five years—five years. Dear God, is it possible?”

  Psyche was not always at ease with Kathie. Her brooding expression, lit by the sometimes shocking brilliance of her eyes, and her lovely unhappy mouth, were compelling, but disturbingly so. Kathie’s was a face that, while refusing sympathy, seemed overcast by foreknowledge of something so dreadful that one looked away for fear one might see it as clearly as she so evidently did herself.

  Unable to divine the reason behind this unexpected visit, Psyche did not know quite what to say. “Did you hang The Blue Boy’ there?” she asked, remaining on her feet.

  A glimmer of real interest showed in Kathie’s face. “Yes. Who told you what it was?”

  “Nobody. I knew. I mean I recognized it, naturally.”

  “It doesn’t seem very natural to me, all things considered. How did you know?”

  “Nick taught me about pictures.”

  “Nick?”

  “He is an artist,” Psyche said quietly. “I lived with him for”

  Kathie interrupted her. “I’m not asking for any girlish confidences. Look, sit down, for heaven’s sake, and relax. Find yourself a cigarette and give me one. I’m going to be here for some time. Now, how much do you know about paintings?”

  Seating herself on the window-seat, a cigarette in her hand, Psyche regained her self-assurance. Smiling, she said, “It would take me several days to answer that question.”

  “You think you know so much?”

  “I know I do.”

  “Name half a dozen of the Renaissance painters, and give me some of their principal works.”

  “I can, but why should I?” Psyche asked.

  Kathie pushed a curtain of dark hair back from her forehead. It was an impatient gesture. “I’m here to help you. I’ve been talking to Bel. I want to know what kind of material I have to work with.”

  Grasping the unspoken implication, Psyche’s defensiveness dropped away from her at once. “You mean—you’ll teach me?”

  “Of course. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “I didn’t know. You didn’t say.”

  “Sorry, I thought Bel would have told you. She says you want to learn. Do you?”

  And Psyche, although she was not aware of it, answered with the exact words she had chosen when answering a similar question put to her years earlier by a man whose gift of a small dictionary she still used and prized. “More than anything else in the world.”

  The pattern of their days established itself very qu
ickly.

  Kathie was a hard taskmaster, and Psyche had to rise at six in order to satisfy the increasing pressure of her demands and at the same time do as much for Bel as she had previously done. She had also to fit in two luxuries that she could not bring herself to give up—her walks in the late evening, and the hours she spent with a courageous old lady who never failed to treat her daily visits as unplanned and delightful surprises.

  Handling the marketing and housework she had assumed with an ever greater efficiency, she spent less and less time actually in Bel’s place, passing most of each day downstairs, either in the apartment that echoed to the whispers of a past magnificence, or in Kathie’s large back room.

  In spite of its size, and its pleasant furnishings, by day Kathie’s room was not nearly as attractive as her own. For, when the curtains were open, one saw a weedy back yard, walled in by a broken board fence, and given over to garbage cans and scabrous cats. But she found she could work in this room with a far greater degree of concentration than she could in the room under the eaves. Even when Kathie was not there, some lingering trace of her presence remained to encourage her when she became depressed, to spur her on when she was tired. For Kathie, very soon recognizing in Psyche a pupil to complement her own so far more or less wasted talents as a teacher, drove them both to the limit of their endurance.

  Although she often told Psyche to relax, she never did herself.

  For a time she would sit beside her at the desk in front of the window; then she would get up and pace the room, pausing to lean over her shoulder and mark the work with sharp, strong pencil strokes.

  Arithmetic and spelling were the only two specific subjects, and for the most part Psyche laboured over them alone. “It’s a pity,” Kathie remarked, “that so much of your time and any of mine should be wasted on anything so elementary, but these are gaps that must be filled in.”

  On the first afternoon that Psyche spent with her, a stormy Saturday afternoon with heavy snow obliterating the dismal view, Kathie outlined briefly her general approach to the task she had undertaken. “I agree with you that the sooner you leave this house the better, and so our time together will be short. I cannot teach you individual facts as such. I don’t even want to. But I can and will teach you how to think, how to reason clearly. When I am finished with you, you may not know Archimedes’ Principle, the date of the Spanish Armada, or who invented the telephone. What you will know is how to find these things out for yourself, how to place them in relation to the rest of man’s development and history, and how to retain the knowledge thus gained if you find it of sufficient interest to do so. In short, you will be in a position to make full use of your greatest gift—your mind. I’ve watched you, and you think before you speak, always. You are thinking of the words you will employ as much as of the sense of what you are going to say, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. How did you know that? Do I make mistakes?”

  “Rarely, if ever. That is, in part, how I knew. Chiefly it is because you think quickly, and it would be more natural for you to speak quickly. As a matter of purely academic interest, and I use the word in its true sense, how long did you stay with this artist you mentioned?”

  “Four months, more or less.”

  “Between you, you achieved a miracle,” Kathie commented. “But it isn’t good enough. You are going to have to concentrate on the English language more than anything else. Words are your tools. They must not only be infinite in number, but as brightly burnished as any blade ever forged in Damascus. You don’t know where Damascus is, do you? Well, I am not going to tell you. Later you can look it up for yourself, and copy out those things about it that you find most interesting. To-morrow we will discuss the maturity—or lack of it—of what you have written. You don’t know what infinite means, do you? Well, that you will learn at once.”

  When she saw Psyche’s first piece of written work, she groaned. “My God! Do I have to teach you how to write, too!”

  She taught her a beautiful copper-plate. Much later Psyche learned that such writing was taught exclusively in private schools, and another stone of regret was laid on the cairn of sorrow that by then stood above her memories of Kathie.

  Her life now full to overflowing. Psyche became a confirmed clock-watcher. Joe had given her a small gold watch at Christmas, and she wondered how she had ever lived without one. She was grateful to him during every minute that it ticked off during days that never seemed quite long enough. Bel would have clawed his eyes out if he had given so much as a dead geranium to any of the other girls, but she was immediately pleased that he should have done this for Psyche. It was a palpably seal of approval on what she herself had done, and was doing.

  “That’s real nice of you, Joe,” she had said, when he presented it, “Put it on, baby. It’s real pretty on her, isn’t it, Joe?”

  Although Kathie, and to a lesser extent the old lady, were contributing toward the consummation of the dream Psyche pursued, it was to Bel that she continued to give her greatest measure of affection. And as the winter wore on she began to worry about Bel as much as Bel worried about her. To live forever on the alert, forever in danger of having one’s livelihood taken from one, seemed terrible, regardless of how that livelihood was obtained. Certainly it did not seem right for anyone with a heart as warm and generous as Bel’s.

  “Bel,” she said one day, “aren’t you afraid sometimes?”

  “Afraid of what, baby?”

  “Oh, afraid you’ll make a mistake. That something will happen.”

  Bel, looking sombrely down on a street where steady rain was turning the last of the winter’s snow to slush, said flatly, “Something may happen, baby, but if it does it won’t be my fault. I don’t make mistakes. Only once. I did the wrong thing the day I let Joe into the dump.”

  Psyche was completely taken aback. “But Joe’s the only one with you, Bel! I thought you liked him a lot.”

  “I do, baby. I do. That’s where I make the mistake. It don’t pay for a dame like me to get too soft about any one guy. It makes you think too much. Too damned much.”

  “There isn’t any way” Psyche began hesitantly.

  “None, baby. No way at all. Go pour me a drink, will you, there’s a good girl. This weather sure gives me the pip.”

  When Psyche came back to the living-room with Bel’s rye and water, it was to find the curtains pulled, the lamps lit, and Bel herself as bright and gay as her red dress.

  “That’s better, isn’t it? When it’s lousy outside, you can always make your own weather, can’t you? Tell me, baby, are you still learning as fast as you want?”

  Psyche smiled, and made a small grimace. “Even faster!”

  It was true. Kathie was forcing the pace as if each day might be their last. Spending very little time on anything else, she now carried the lessons with Psyche over into the evenings, something she had not done previously.

  One evening, after they had picked up and closed the books that were scattered half across the room, Kathie paused midway between desk and door. Psyche, looking at her, realized that she was even thinner than she had been, and that her strained face was more haunted than ever.

  “Kathie,” she said softly. “Kathie, you’re doing too much for me. You’re making yourself sick.”

  “It’s the only worth-while thing I do. It’s all I’ve got left,” Kathie replied harshly. Then, her voice tight and unnatural, she said, “If you’ll give up that damned walking for one night, I—I’ll stay down here, and we can go on.”

  Psyche rubbed the back of a slender hand across her aching eyes. “It wouldn’t be any good. I can’t think straight any longer.”

  “All right,” Kathie told her quietly. “Good night.” And turning she went swiftly to the door.

  Psyche’s coat lay across the bed, but she did not at once make any move toward it. Leaning against the edge of the desk, she stared at her reflection in the long mirror above Kathie’s bare-topped maple dressing-table. Seeing herself more ob
jectively than she usually did, she saw that she had changed in appearance. The planes of her face were sharper than they had been, and she had lost the golden tan which had been her skin colour summer and winter at a shack where the brilliance of sunlight on snow had been as strong as that of the midsummer sun. But the change went deeper than that. The blue eyes looking back at her were more thoughtful than they had been, the clear-cut mouth was firmer, and there was something faintly questioning in the lift of the dark eyebrows. I am not as pretty as I was, she thought dispassionately, but I am more me—and I am glad. Thinking this, she remembered a time when she had been mortally afraid of losing herself in a mirror, and smiled at the child she had once been.

  Still smiling, she rose, put on her coat, and went out.

  Spring was late in coming that year, and it was not until the end of April that crocuses bloomed in the park, and the naked skeletons of the trees began to veil themselves in delicate cobwebs of soft green. But, if it was late, when it did come it was benign, the lengthening days warm and sunny. The birds came back from the south, flock after flock, to mingle with sparrows that knew no other compulsion than a year-round search for bread crumbs on a familiar asphalt heath. The loungers reappeared on the park benches. The Lithuanians emerged from a crowded hibernation. And Bel resumed her regal, late-afternoon sorties to the park.

  Psyche, made lazy by the season, by a gentle breeze and golden sunlight, deserted her books one day in favour of strolling with Bel and sitting with her once again on, as it happened, the same park bench where she had met her some eight months earlier.

  “It doesn’t seem long, does it, baby?”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Not long in time, certainly, but in every other way a small lifetime. A little lifetime in which she had acquired friends, confidence in herself, some money, and, above all, the varied knowledge that would make it henceforth possible for her to at least support herself.

  Watching a small boy follow a pigeon across the gravel path onto fresh green grass, she knew, contrary to what anyone else might think, that her meeting with Bel was one of the most fortunate encounters of her life, past, present, or future. Never, as long as she lived, would she ever deny Bel.