100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “Of course I do. But you won’t always like me best, honey. You’ll grow up and meet somebody your own age and go marry him and forget you ever had a daddy.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” she agreed tranquilly.

  He didn’t go in. He was coming back at nine o’clock and he wanted to keep himself fresh and new for the thing he must say then.

  “When you’re safe inside, just show yourself in that window.”

  “All right. Good-by, dads, dads, dads, dads.”

  He waited in the dark street until she appeared, all warm and glowing, in the window above and kissed her fingers out into the night.

  III

  They were waiting. Marion sat behind empty coffee cups in a dignified black dinner dress that just faintly suggested mourning. Lincoln was walking up and down with the animation of one who had already been talking. They were as anxious as he was to get into the question. He opened it almost immediately:

  “I suppose you know what I want to see you about—why I really came to Paris.”

  Marion fiddled with the glass grapes on her necklace and frowned.

  “I’m awfully anxious to have a home,” he continued. “And I’m awfully anxious to have Honoria in it. I appreciate your taking in Honoria for her mother’s sake, but things have changed now”—he hesitated and then continued strongly—“changed radically with me, and I want to ask you to reconsider the matter. It would be silly for me to deny that about two years ago I was acting badly—”

  Marion looked up at him with hard eyes.

  “—but all that’s over. As I told you, I haven’t had more than a drink a day for over a year, and I take that drink deliberately, so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination. You see the idea?”

  “No,” said Marion succinctly.

  “It’s a sort of stunt I set myself. It keeps the matter in proportion.”

  “I get you,” said Lincoln. “You don’t want to admit it’s got any attraction for you.”

  “Something like that. Sometimes I forget and don’t take it. But I try to take it. Anyhow, I couldn’t afford to drink in my position. The people I represent are more than satisfied with what I’ve done, and I’m bringing my sister over from Burlington to keep house for me, and I want awfully to have Honoria too. You know that even when her mother and I weren’t getting along well I never let anything that happened touch Honoria. I know she’s fond of me and I know I’m able to take care of her and—well, there you are. How do you feel about it?”

  He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated his inevitable resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner, he might win his point in the end. “Keep your temper,” he told himself. “You don’t want to be justified. You want Honoria.”

  Lincoln spoke first: “We’ve been talking it over ever since we got your letter last month. We’re happy to have Honoria here. She’s a dear little thing, and we’re glad to be able to help her, but of course that isn’t the question—”

  Marion interrupted suddenly. “How long are you going to stay sober, Charlie?” she asked.

  “Permanently, I hope.”

  “How can anybody count on that?”

  “You know I never did drink heavily until I gave up business and came over here with nothing to do. Then Helen and I began to run around with—”

  “Please leave Helen out of it. I can’t bear to hear you talk about her like that.”

  He stared at her grimly; he had never been certain how fond of each other the sisters were in life.

  “My drinking only lasted about a year and a half—from the time we came over until I—collapsed.”

  “It was time enough.”

  “It was time enough,” he agreed.

  “My duty is entirely to Helen,” she said. “I try to think what she would have wanted me to do. Frankly, from the night you did that terrible thing you haven’t really existed for me. I can’t help that. She was my sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “When she was dying she asked me to look out for Honoria. If you hadn’t been in a sanitarium then, it might have helped matters.”

  He had no answer.

  “I’ll never in my life be able to forget the morning when Helen knocked at my door, soaked to the skin and shivering, and said you’d locked her out.”

  Charlie gripped the sides of the chair. This was more difficult than he expected; he wanted to launch out into a long expostulation and explanation, but he only said: “The night I locked her out—” and she interrupted, “I don’t feel up to going over that again.”

  After a moment’s silence Lincoln said: “We’re getting off the subject. You want Marion to set aside her legal guardianship and give you Honoria. I think the main point for her is whether she has confidence in you or not.”

  “I don’t blame Marion,” Charlie said slowly, “but I think she can have entire confidence in me. I had a good record up to three years ago. Of course, it’s within human possibilities I might go wrong any time. But if we wait much longer I’ll lose Honoria’s childhood and my chance for a home. I’ll simply lose her, don’t you see?”

  “Yes, I see,” said Lincoln.

  “Why didn’t you think of all this before?” Marion asked.

  “I suppose I did, from time to time, but Helen and I were getting along badly. When I consented to the guardianship, I was flat on my back in a sanitarium and the market had cleaned me out of every sou. I knew I’d acted badly, and I thought if it would bring any peace to Helen, I’d agree to anything. But now it’s different. I’m well, I’m functioning, I’m behaving damn well, so far as—”

  “Please don’t swear at me,” Marion said.

  He looked at her, startled. With each remark the force of her dislike became more and more apparent. She had built up all her fear of life into one wall and faced it toward him. This trivial reproof was possibly the result of some trouble with the cook several hours before. Charlie became increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later it would come out, in a word here, a shake of the head there, and some of that distrust would be irrev­ocably implanted in Honoria. But he pulled his temper down out of his face and shut it up inside him; he had won a point, for Lincoln realized the absurdity of Marion’s remark and asked her lightly since when she had objected to the word “damn.”

  “Another thing,” Charlie said: “I’m able to give her certain advantages now. I’m going to take a French governess to Prague with me. I’ve got a lease on a new apartment—”

  He stopped, realizing that he was blundering. They couldn’t be expected to accept with equanimity the fact that his income was again twice as large as their own.

  “I suppose you can give her more luxuries than we can,” said Marion. “When you were throwing away money we were living along watching every ten francs . . . I suppose you’ll start doing it again.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve learned. I worked hard for ten years, you know—until I got lucky in the market, like so many people. Terribly lucky. It didn’t seem any use working any more, so I quit. It won’t happen again.”

  There was a long silence. All of them felt their nerves straining, and for the first time in a year Charlie wanted a drink. He was sure now that Lincoln Peters wanted him to have his child.

  Marion shuddered suddenly; part of her saw that Charlie’s feet were planted on the earth now, and her own maternal feeling recognized the naturalness of his desire; but she had lived for a long time with a prejudice—a prejudice founded on a curious disbelief in her sister’s happiness, and which, in the shock of one terrible night, had turned to hatred for him. It had all happened at a point in her life where the discouragement of ill-health and adverse circumstances made it necessary for her to believe in tangible villainy and a tangible villain.

  “I can’t help what I think!” she cried out suddenly. “How much you were
responsible for Helen’s death, I don’t know. It’s something you’ll have to square with your own conscience.”

  An electric current of agony surged through him; for a moment he was almost on his feet, an unuttered sound echoing in his throat. He hung on to himself for a moment, another moment.

  “Hold on there,” said Lincoln uncomfortably. “I never thought you were responsible for that.”

  “Helen died of heart trouble,” Charlie said dully.

  “Yes, heart trouble.” Marion spoke as if the phrase had another meaning for her.

  Then, in the flatness that followed her outburst, she saw him plainly and she knew he had somehow arrived at control over the situation. Glancing at her husband, she found no help from him, and as abruptly as if it were a matter of no importance, she threw up the sponge.

  “Do what you like!” she cried, springing up from her chair. “She’s your child. I’m not the person to stand in your way. I think if it were my child I’d rather see her—” She managed to check herself. “You two decide it. I can’t stand this. I’m sick. I’m going to bed.”

  She hurried from the room; after a moment Lincoln said:

  “This has been a hard day for her. You know how strongly she feels—” His voice was almost apologetic: “When a woman gets an idea in her head.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s going to be all right. I think she sees now that you—can provide for the child, and so we can’t very well stand in your way or Honoria’s way.”

  “Thank you, Lincoln.”

  “I’d better go along and see how she is.”

  “I’m going.”

  He was still trembling when he reached the street, but a walk down the Rue Bonaparte to the quais set him up, and as he crossed the Seine, dotted with many cold moons, he felt exultant. But back in his room he couldn’t sleep. The image of Helen haunted him. Helen whom he had loved so until they had senselessly begun to abuse each other’s love and tear it into shreds. On that terrible February night that Marion remembered so vividly, a slow quarrel that had gone on for hours. There was a scene at the Florida, and then he attempted to take her home, and then Helen kissed Ted Wilder at a table, and what she had hysterically said. Charlie’s departure and, on his arrival home, his turning the key in the lock in wild anger. How could he know she would arrive an hour later alone, that there would be a snowstorm in which she wandered about in slippers for an hour, too confused to find a taxi? Then the aftermath, her escaping pneumonia by a miracle, and all the attendant horror. They were “reconciled,” but that was the beginning of the end, and Marion, who had seen with her own eyes and who imagined it to be one of many scenes from her sister’s martyrdom, never forgot.

  Going over it again brought Helen nearer, and in the white, soft light that steals upon half sleep near morning he found himself talking to her again. She said that he was perfectly right about Honoria and that she wanted Honoria to be with him. She said she was glad he was being good and doing better. She said a lot of other things—very friendly things—but she was in a swing in a white dress, and swinging faster and faster all the time, so that at the end he could not hear clearly all that she said.

  IV

  He woke up feeling happy. The door of the world was open again. He made plans, vistas, futures for Honoria and himself, but suddenly he grew sad, remembering all the plans he and Helen had made. She had not planned to die. The present was the thing—work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for Charlie had read in D. H. Lawrence about the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely. Afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing in all human probability to find it, develop a grudge against love and life.

  It was another bright, crisp day. He called Lincoln Peters at the bank where he worked and asked if he could count on taking Honoria when he left for Prague. Lincoln agreed that there was no reason for delay. One thing—the legal guardianship. Marion wanted to retain that a while longer. She was upset by the whole matter, and it would oil things if she felt that the situation was still in her control for another year. Charlie agreed, wanting only the tangible, visible child.

  Then the question of a governess. Charlie sat in a gloomy agency and talked to a buxom Breton peasant whom he knew he couldn’t endure. There were others whom he could see tomorrow.

  He lunched with Lincoln Peters at the Griffon, trying to keep down his exultation.

  “There’s nothing quite like your own child,” Lincoln said. “But you understand how Marion feels too.”

  “She’s forgotten how hard I worked for seven years there,” Charlie said. “She just remembers one night.”

  “There’s another thing.” Lincoln hesitated. “While you and Helen were tearing around Europe throwing money away, we were just getting along. I didn’t touch any of the prosperity because I never got ahead enough to carry anything but my insurance. I think Marion felt there was some kind of injustice in it—you not even working and getting richer and richer.”

  “It went just as quick as it came,” said Charlie.

  “A lot did. And a lot of it stayed in the hands of chasseurs and saxophone players and maîtres d’hôtel—well, the big party’s over now. I just said that to explain Marion’s feeling about those crazy years. If you drop in about six o’clock to-night before Marion’s too tired, we’ll settle the details on the spot.”

  Back at his hotel, Charlie took from his pocket a pneumatique that Lincoln had given him at luncheon. It had been redirected by Paul from the hotel bar.

  DEAR CHARLIE: You were so strange when we saw you the other day that I wondered if I did something to offend you. If so, I’m not conscious of it. In fact, I have thought about you too much for the last year, and it’s always been in the back of my mind that I might see you if I came over here. We did have such good times that crazy spring, like the night you and I stole the butcher’s tricycle, and the time we tried to call on the president and you had the old derby and the wire cane. Everybody seems so old lately, but I don’t feel old a bit. Couldn’t we get together some time to-day for old time’s sake? I’ve got a vile hang-over for the moment, but will be feeling better this afternoon and will look for you about five at the bar.

  Always devotedly,

  LORRAINE.

  His first feeling was one of awe that he had actually, in his mature years, stolen a tricycle and pedaled Lorraine all over the Étoile between the small hours and dawn. In retrospect it was a nightmare. Locking out Helen didn’t fit in with any other act of his life, but the tricycle incident did—it was one of many. How many weeks or months of dissipation to arrive at that condition of utter irresponsibility?

  He tried to picture how Lorraine had appeared to him then—very attractive; so much so that Helen had been jealous. Yesterday, in the restaurant, she had seemed trite, blurred, worn away. He emphatically did not want to see her, and he was glad no one knew at what hotel he was staying. It was a relief to think of Honoria, to think of Sundays spent with her and of saying good morning to her and of knowing she was there in his house at night, breathing quietly in the darkness.

  At five he took a taxi and bought presents for all the Peterses—a piquant cloth doll, a box of Roman soldiers, flowers for Marion, big linen handkerchiefs for Lincoln.

  He saw, when he arrived in the apartment, that Marion had accepted the inevitable. She greeted him now as though he were a recalcitrant member of the family, rather than a menacing outsider. Honoria had been told she was going, and Charlie was glad to see that her tact was sufficient to conceal her excessive happiness. Only on his lap did she whisper her delight and the question “When?” before she slipped away.

  He and Marion were alone for a minute in the room, and on an impulse he spoke out boldly:

  “Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to my rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin t
hat won’t heal because there’s not enough material. I wish you and I could be on better terms.”

  “Some things are hard to forget,” she answered. “It’s a question of confidence. If you behave yourself in the future I won’t have any criticism.” There was no answer to this, and presently she asked, “When do you propose to take her?”

  “As soon as I can get a governess. I hoped the day after tomorrow.”

  “That’s impossible. I’ve got to get her things in shape. Not before Saturday.”

  He yielded. Coming back into the room, Lincoln offered him a drink.

  “I’ll take my daily whisky,” he said.

  It was warm here, it was a home, people together by a fire. The children felt very safe and important; the mother and father were serious, watchful. They had things to do for the children more important than his visit here. A spoonful of medicine was, after all, more important than the strained relations between Marion and himself. They were not dull people, but they were very much in the grip of life and circumstances, and their gestures as they turned in a cramped space lacked largeness and grace. He wondered if he couldn’t do something to get Lincoln out of that rut at the bank.

  There was a long peal at the doorbell; the maid crossed the room and went down the corridor. The door opened upon another long ring, and then voices, and the three in the salon looked up expectantly; Lincoln moved to bring the corridor within his range of vision, and Marion rose. Then the maid came along the corridor, closely followed by the voices, which developed under the light into Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles.

  They were gay, they were hilarious, they were roaring with laughter. For a moment Charlie was astounded; then he realized they had got the address he had left at the bar.

  “Ah-h-h!” Duncan wagged his finger roguishly at Charlie. “Ah-h-h!”

  They both slid down another cascade of laughter. Anxious and at a loss, Charlie shook hands with them quickly and presented them to Lincoln and Marion. Marion nodded, scarcely speaking. She had drawn back a step toward the fire; her little girl stood beside her, and Marion put an arm about her shoulder.