She would have liked to say this, but it was not possible. It came too close to something that they had never talked about in so many words, she and Bel.
Her eyes still following a perplexed little boy who was discovering that he could not narrow the distance between himself and a pigeon apparently unaware of his existence, she asked idly, “Who goes into the gallery on the other side of the park, Bel?”
“Folks who are interested in pictures, I guess,” Bel replied indifferently.
“I wish I belonged.”
“What do you mean, baby?”
“I wish I were a member, or whatever you have to be to get in.”
“Far as I know, all you have to do is pay your way.”
Psyche’s attention no longer wandered. “You mean anyone can go in there? You and me, for example?”
“Far as I know.”
Psyche was on her feet in one swift, graceful movement. “Come on, Bel, we’re going to go and find out, right now.”
“Who, me? Have a heart, baby! I’m not a great one for art.”
“Come on,” Psyche said firmly. “I’m not going alone. Bel, think of it, paintings! Perhaps I’ll see something I know, something I saw in one of Nick’s books.”
In the face of her vivid excitement, Bel ceased to resist, but she made no secret of her reluctance. “I don’t belong in that type place,” she said, straightening her brief skirt as she rose, and taking a firmer grip on her capacious handbag.
They were alone as they mounted a short flight of stone steps to revolving glass doors.
“Maybe it’s closed,” Bel remarked hopefully.
Psyche, looking at a framed notice beside the doors, said, “No, it will be open for another hour. It’s the middle of the week, and late in the day, that’s all.”
Bel, exploring the depths of her handbag for a change purse as they went through the turnstile inside, did not look up until they were approaching the Sculpture Court, a sunken square lit from above by a single enormous skylight. When she did look, all she could do was stare in stunned disbelief, her coat a brilliant splash of colour against the austerity of tall pillars, marble floors, and plaster and bronze figures cast in a fluid but everlasting immobility. An opulent scarlet statue, momentarily as motionless as those others on which she gazed, she scarcely seemed to breathe.
Then, expelling a long breath, she said in a hushed voice, “Well —call me a dirty name! And they’ll throw a girl into the clink for showing her navel at fifty paces.”
Psyche, who had moved on toward the arched entrance to a long gallery, said, over her shoulder, “Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Bel, what exactly does contemporary mean?”
“Search me,” Bel replied, but her answer was automatic. Turning, she walked back to the attendant near the door. “Tell me, Mac, do they let kids into this joint?”
“Yes, madam, of course. And on Saturday mornings there are classes which”
But Bel was no longer listening. Staring blankly out across the Sculpture Court, she was muttering, “It don’t make sense. It just don’t make sense.”
Psyche’s call was soft, but it echoed in the empty vastness of the great entrance hall. “Bel, we haven’t much time!”
Catching up with her, Bel followed her in frowning silence.
The gallery which Psyche had chosen to start with was a large one, and Bel, after looking, for the most part with open disapproval, at a few of the pictures, retired to a couch in the middle of the room. Failing to see an ash-tray, she sat back with her hands in her lap, her lips compressed as primly as those of any country school-teacher exposed against her will to a burlesque show. “Little kids. Little innocent kids. It don’t make sense.”
Psyche, meanwhile, utterly engrossed, moved slowly from one canvas to another, missing nothing of brush stroke, colour, or composition. All that Nick had let fall in the course of his many monologues came back to her, and his crisp, ironic voice cut so clearly across her memory she almost expected to find him standing beside her. If she had, she knew she would have been unreservedly glad to see him, for she no longer thought of him as anything other than an artist. If she dreamed at all, it was not of Nick.
“Why haven’t I come here before?” she wondered. “Why was I so long in discovering this place? I must come again with Kathie.” And, thinking this, she could not know that it would be a long time before she came back, and that she would never come with Kathie.
Reaching the end of the wall she had been following, she hesitated between circling the gallery in which she was, and moving on through another arch into the next. Looking at her watch, realizing that closing time would make it impossible for her to see much more that day, she decided to take a quick look into the room beyond.
She saw the Venus immediately. With an entire wall to itself, individually lit, it would have been impossible to miss it.
‘Bel— she gasped, and this time her voice was high and clear. “Bel—look! There’s me!”
The sharp tap of Bel’s high heels on the marble floor was the rapid tattoo of soldiery called to arms. Arriving in the second gallery, she had no need to ask questions. The American Venus, aloof and beautiful, was in herself a wordless answer to any question she might have posed.
Colour suffusing her cheeks, dimming bright patches of rouge, she said in a tight voice, “The dirty louse! Why the hell couldn’t he have had the decency to be satisfied with making love to you!”
“That was only once,” Psyche told her, her eyes fixed on the painting.
Bel stared at her. “What do you mean, baby? You said you stayed at that studio place four months.”
“Yes.”
“Then I didn’t hear you right, did I?”
“Yes, Bel, you did, but I’m not asking you to believe me.”
Bel’s eyes swung from the lightly clad Venus to Psyche’s face. She was more confused than she would admit even to herself, but on one point there could be neither doubt nor confusion. “I believe you, baby. It beats me, but, so help me, I believe you. I always said you were a good kid, right from the beginning. You’ve learned the hard way, haven’t you, baby? That punk must have meant a lot to you for you to have said yes and no like that. But at least you learned.” She sighed, scarcely aware of the fact that she did so, so she added, “Me—I guess I was just too dumb to learn.”
“Don’t say things like that about yourself, Bel.”
“I don’t often. To be honest with you, baby, I don’t even think them. But I’m certainly too damn dumb to understand this place. Let’s get out of here. It gives me the creeps.”
“Just a second. This painting of Nick’s. It’s really terribly good, isn’t it? Compared with all the others—well, you just can’t compare it, can you?”
There was no reply. Looking around, she saw Bel walking away down a long perspective of arches, her back uncompromisingly stiff and straight. Watching her for a moment without moving, Psyche’s lips parted in a ghost of a smile that had something protective, almost maternal in it. Then, with a last glance at the Venus, she ran lightly, silently after the receding figure in scarlet.
Sharon sat at the grand piano idly playing selections from pieces she had once known well. She was not a good player, and was aware of it, but she had been good enough in another incarnation to play the Lord’s Prayer each night before a nursery door was shut, to play it, and sing it in a husky, liquid voice. Against her volition, she found her fingers searching for the opening chords, and it was with relief that she heard the telephone breaking across a spell she had no real wish to weave.
The kitchen door opened as she reached the hall. “I’ll take it myself,” she told the maid, her hand already on the receiver.
“Hello?... Hannah, how nice. How are you?” She was glad it was Hannah. With her acrid wit and ultra-sophistication, Hannah was an ideal antidote for nostalgia.
“You busy, darling? Anyone with you?”
“No, I’m alone,” Sharon replied.
“Darling, the
most curious thing” Hannah’s usually decisive voice was uncertain, not easy to hear.
“Go on. You’re being very intriguing.”
“Are you sitting down, Sharon?”
“Of all the silly questions!”
“Are you?”
“Yes. Is this some new kind oí game?”
“No. I was at the art gallery this afternoon. I saw an exhibit by this man they’re all talking about.”
“Well?
“He has one picture I think you should see, darling.”
Sharon injected an interest into her voice that she did not feel. “Why? Is it so very good?”
“It’s marvellous. He calls it ‘The American Venus.’ But it isn’t its excellence as a painting that will interest you. It’s something else.”
“Well, go on, Hannah, for heaven’s sake!” Sharon said, laughing. “You probably don’t realize it, but you’re being irritatingly mysterious.”
The telephone crackled. Then Hannah’s voice came through, shocking in its sudden force and clarity. “Sharon—the Venus— is you.”
5
DEATH had always been, to psyche, quite unreal, a fate too far removed from herself and those she knew well to merit either fear or speculation.
This made Kathie’s death an emotional shock, apart entirely from the personal loss involved, from which she did not recover easily. For, some time in the early hours of a rainy May morning, Kathie hanged herself.
Alone, in darkness, driven by devils she no longer had the will to fight, she climbed on a chair under the light fixture in her room, tied a black silk dressing-gown cord around her slender neck, and ended for all time the strife that had torn her apart since adolescence.
It was Bel who found her; Bel who, unaided, cut her down in the dismal twilight that passed for daylight at nine that morning, and laid her on a bed that had not been slept in. Bel who, her face leaden and her feet dragging, quietly searched the room for anything that might connect it in any way with her own establishment, and then locked the door and went slowly, heavily upstairs.
It was a Sunday, and she woke and talked with May first. After that, for the moment doggedly shelving the appalling crisis facing her, she climbed a further flight of stairs to Psyche’s room.
Psyche, waking to a weight pressing down on her shoulder, tried ineffectively to shake it off while burying her head deeper in her pillow. Then the urgency of that pressure, and the quiet voice accompanying it, cut through the remnants of a deep sleep, and she opened startled blue eyes.
“Bel!” she exclaimed in alarm. “Bel—you’ve been crying!”
Bel sank to the edge of the bed, and took one of Psyche’s hands in both her own. “This is going to be hard to take, baby.”
Pulling herself upright, Psyche whispered, “What is it? Tell me quickly, what is it?”
“It’s Kathie, baby. She’s dead.”
“Kathie! Oh, no, no—not Kathie! Oh, no, Bel—not Kathie!” “It’s true, baby. We can’t change it.”
Driving the knuckles of her free hand into her forehead, Psyche asked, “How did she die?”
As gently as she could, Bel told her.
Listening to words that could not be other than bald, Psyche lived with Kathie through a night that had ended in death; thought her thoughts, suffered her agonies, fought her last losing battle with her, and knew that she herself had unwittingly helped to upset the precarious balance that had been maintained between two ways of life.
Her throat rasped with sobs, she said wildly, “I didn’t help her. Bel, I should have helped her! Oh, God—oh, Kathie—oh, what have I done!”
Bel’s voice was as sharp as a slap in the face. “Stop that! And pull yourself together! Nobody could have done anything, ever. She was never at peace. She is now.”
“But I feel——”
“How do you think I feel?”
Staring at Bel’s ravaged face through a hot blur of tears, Psyche slowly began to realize what this thing meant to Bel, and with the realization a little of her sense of proportion returned to her. “I’m sorry,” she said unevenly. “Forgive me. I—I didn’t help her, but I can—I must help you now. Give me a few minutes alone, Bel, and I—I’ll be all right.”
“There’s nothing for you to do, baby,” Bel told her gently. “I don’t want you mixed up in this.”
“But I am in it. You can’t keep me out!”
“Take it easy, baby. I’ve got to go now. Don’t come down until you feel like it.”
Psyche turned her face away. “A few minutes. Just—a few minutes.”
“You’re sure you’re all right, baby?”
“Yes, Bel, I’m all right. In a few minutes I’ll be ready to help you. In a few minutes, Bel.”
Bel hesitated at the door. The rigid back, and averted face hidden from her by an uncombed mass of hair, worried her, but she had no choice, she had to go. For her there was no more time for tears, for sentiment of any kind. Later, but not now. Now she must face her responsibility to the living, and she did not know what she was going to do. Deep inside herself she knew she was frightened, but it was knowledge that she would not allow to rise to the surface of her mind. She had come through tight places before, and, she told herself, she’d do it again. The difficulty was that she could not see how.
Going down the stairs, she decided to telephone to Joe at once. Joe could help her to figure out something if anyone could. A projection of Kathie’s face, as she had seen it little more than half an hour earlier, seemed to be hung against the drab morning light. Wherever she looked she saw it.
“You’ve got to get a hold of yourself, Bel,” she muttered, and when she went to the telephone she carried a half-tumbler of straight rye.
It was easy to talk to Joe. He had a mind like a steel trap, and did not waste precious time on sympathy.
“We’ve got to call the doc, Bel,” he said when she had finished. “There’s no way around that. He’s got to see her, and the sooner the better.”
“Would he cover for a thing like this, Joe?”
“I don’t know. Leave it with me. I’ll see him right away, and we’ll figure things. Have you talked to the girls yet?”
“May only.”
“Yeah, you can count on her. The others still asleep?”
Bel hesitated, and then said slowly, “All but the kid.”
“How did she take it?”
“It’s hit her hard, Joe.”
Joe had been thinking while he talked. “It may be that young kid could do a lot for you now, Bel, if she has the guts.”
“She’s got them, but I’m not asking her to do a thing. She’s going to be kept out of this, Joe.”
He had no comment. “I’ll be over as soon as I can,” he said, and rang off.
Psyche and May were alone in the living-room when he came. Bel, who had been with them until a few minutes before his arrival, had gone to her room to dress.
His heavy face grave, the blue shadows on chin and cheekbones more noticeable than usual, he looked at Psyche, and said, “I want to talk to you, honey, alone.”
May, for once shorn of all jewellery, all make-up, her full face oddly innocent, said, “I’ll scram.”
“Better if the kid and I do the scramming, May. It’s Bel I don’t want around when I talk with her, We’ll be maybe fifteen minutes. Tell Bel the Doc will be here in less than an hour.”
Kathie—Psyche thought, as, without a word, she followed the big man down the front stairs and out of the front door. Kathie—Kathie—Kathie. Dear God if there were only something I could do for her even now. Kathie
They went to the park; a park gentle with the tender green of a spring that was Kathie’s last.
“We could have sat in my car round the corner,” Joe said. “This is better. Nobody will notice us here.”
Psyche did not reply. No reply seemed necessary. Kathie
Bel’s wrong this time, the man thought, glancing sideways at the girl on the bench beside him, assessing a whi
te face in which only the blue eyes seemed alive. She’s dead wrong. This kid needs to do something for somebody, for her own sake.
“How good are you at putting on an act, honey?”
This was a direct question. It required an answer. “I don’t know.”
“Can you lie with a straight face?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bel helped you when you needed it. Now it’s your turn to help her. Will you do it, any way you can?”
“Yes,” Psyche said evenly. “Any way I can.”
“You’ll have to do it in spite of her, which may make it tough. She doesn’t want you in this.”
“She has no choice.”
A heavy hand touched her shoulder briefly, a diamond ring flashing in sunlight which would never warm Kathie again. Theclouds were breaking up. It was going to be a nice day. Kathie
“Well, listen carefully to what I’m going to say. Are you listening, honey?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
He knew she was not, but he was good with people, he understood them. “If you help Bel the way I want you to, you’ll be helping Kathie, too,” he told her quietly.
“Kathie——” Psyche turned to him with vital, painful eagerness, and did not know that in saying that name aloud she had thrown off the first numbing effects of shock.
Satisfied that he now had her complete attention, he outlined what he wanted her to do. He was a shrewd man, used to dealing with emergencies, and he had seen, almost at once, that there was only one way of saving Bel without taking risks that might put the lot of them, temporarily at least, behind bars.
“We could try to hush this thing up completely. Call it heart attack. It would cost a packet, but it could be done. It’s a damn dangerous thing to do, though, and it might come unstuck. If it did, everyone who ever knew that girl would be for it. As I figure it, there’s only one other way we can keep the heat off Bel’s place. Keep the whole thing clean. Keep that girl’s name clean for her.”
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