She looked at me with some surprise at my loud protest and said, “Almost. But he is still a good rug man.”
I was stunned. It seemed a proof to me of all my dour thoughts during the long ride. Oh, the hell with it, I thought; what can it matter to an old ghost that I’m no longer young and beautiful, if once I was, to his peculiar vision? “That hideous hash-rug fell apart,” I said ungraciously, and paid no heed to my mother’s enigmatic gaze.
When he came, he did look somewhat older—or, rather, drier—but certainly not fifteen or eighteen years so. His temples had sunk a little, and his bright, even teeth were too big for his mouth, but his dark eyes flashed politely, and he insisted on moving furniture and carrying in the clean rolls of Oriental carpet without any help. He performed neatly, a graceful old body indeed.
“Do not move, Lady,” he said to my mother, and he whisked a small rug under her footstool without seeming to lift it. I stood about aimlessly, watching him and thinking about him and myself, in a kind of misery.
At the end, when he had carried the dirty rugs out to his car and had told my mother when he would come back, he looked at me, and then stepped quite close.
“Which one are you?” he asked.
“I’m the oldest,” I said, wondering what he would remember of me.
And immediately I saw that it was everything, everything—not of me as a little growing child but of me his creation. His eyes blazed, and fell in an indescribable pattern from my cheeks to my shoulders to my breasts to the hidden cave of my navel, and then up over the bones of my ribs and down again to the softened hollows of my waist. We were back in the silent little house near the college, and I was filled with a sense of complete relaxation, to have this old man still recognize me, and to have him do with his eyes what once he had so strangely and purely done with his hands. I knew that it was something that would never happen again. What is more, I knew that when I was an old woman it would strengthen me, as it strengthened me that very minute when I was tired and forty and thick, that once Mr. Ardamanian had made me into a statue.
The question about seduction still remains, of course, in an academic way. Would he have done any more to me than what he did, and, indeed, would anything more have been possible—not from the standpoint of his indubitable virility, no matter what his age, but from that of our spiritual capacity to pile nectar into the brimming cup? I can never know, nor do I care.
I was filled with relief, standing passively there before my mother in the familiar room. I felt strong and fresh.
He smiled his gleaming smile, bowed to my mother, and then said directly to me, “Lady, it is good that I met you again. Goodbye.”
When he had gone, as poised as a praying mantis under his last roll of rugs, my mother said, pretending to be cross, “I thought I was his Lady, not you!” She smiled remotely.
Mother and I talked together through the afternoon, about children and bills and such, but not about Mr. Ardamanian. There seemed no need to, then or ever.
The Weather Within
Several days after my two girls and I sailed from San Francisco on a passenger freighter bound for Antwerp, I permitted myself, feeling fresh and peaceful again, to look about me on the little ship and notice the actualities of pain and digestion and love in other people, and to face them as fellow-voyagers. By that time, it was plain that many people other than I felt clearer, less blurred by fatigue and the sound of telephones ringing now a thousand miles behind us, and the five-o’clock traffic on the Bay Bridge. They were more in focus, thanks to the sea change. A man who wore an orthopedic boot upon his twisted foot limped heavily, freely, instead of trying to walk as if he had two straight feet, and a woman who at first had sipped sherry before dinner, her eyes desperate, now sat at ease in a beneficent flow of Dutch gin—quietly, openly, and with increasingly good nature alcoholic.
I saw all this with a familiar relief. I drifted through the corridors and up and down the gleaming stairs and in and out of my bed, my dining chair, as untroubled as a dot of plankton, and when in the corridors or on the stairs I met another dot of it we gradually exchanged a kind of acceptance, one of the other, which with the voyage warmed to as much love or hatred as such dots can know. Even in the small, gently tipping room where we ate together, in our most intimate act of public intercourse, we began as the ship plowed south and then northeastward to bandy the looks and smiles and other displays of recognition demanded, ultimately, by our enforced companionship, purified after so many days together upon the heaving foreign sea.
At first, I let myself exist mainly through my children, because I was trying to stay lazy a little longer. I saw that they were in a way in love with our monkey-like waiter, who one minute, with a sly scheming grin, served solid Dutch cookies as if they were almost too leaflike and light to stay properly on our plates, and the next minute, with a near wink at the girls, poured out my coffee the way a murderer might fill a cup with poison—attentively, hopefully. They found him as fascinating as a peacock-feather fan, and through them I did, too. In the same way, I loathed a man who before and after almost every meal would stop and lightly fondle them, murmuring of his own daughter in a subtly lascivious and self-righteous way. My girls drew away from him with admirable delicacy; their soft, rich hair fell over their faces, and with them I held my breath. Perhaps my revolt was deeper than theirs—or, at least, wearier—for I could see a thousand such impositions in the years ahead of them, whereas for them it was probably the first time they had ever had to sit politely through such behavior because they were in a public room and would not kick or spit.
Then there were the old ladies. One of my girls would say something about her old lady, who perhaps was feeling queasy or was having trouble with her dentures, and the other girl would say something even more protective and proprietary about her old lady, and a part of me would twist with a wry regret that I could not be as important as the indistinguishable white-haired females who had provisionally won my children’s warm attention, and a part of me would withdraw with respect before the knowledge that there on the little ship, as everywhere, I could not even guess at the lives my children led.
There were almost more old ladies on board than there were junior officers or tons of canned pineapple, because it was a good time of year for an easy crossing and the food and service were as if designed for stiff joints and gastric crotchets. By the end of the voyage, I could recognize and, sometimes, name a handful of the small, gentle women, but it was mostly through my daughters that I came to have a general awareness of their quiet pains and problems, of how one had stumbled over the step between her bathroom and her cabin and had bruised her leg from here to here, and of how another had put her wedding band in her mouth and swallowed it three years ago and was afraid it was giving her bad pains now that kept her from sleeping. My younger girl’s old lady wore, I was told, beautiful diamond earrings that she had not taken out of her lobes for forty-seven years, so that they had grown into her skin, but without causing any trouble at all. I never did manage to spot her, but after Mrs. Marshall died I noticed that she was not the one, although I forget what earrings it was she did wear. Perhaps they were small pearls; I remember pearls at her throat. I was glad neither of the children lost her own old lady, of course, for it was enough of a startling accident to have death turn up, without having it too immediate. As it was, it changed the complexion of our landing.
A few times after I stirred myself out of my post-sailing snooze, I met Mrs. Marshall walking step by step up to B Deck from where she evidently lived, on C. I judged from words the other passengers exchanged with her during her slow movings that she had been ill and that on coming aboard she had fainted from the excitement and had been in bed for several days—a bad heart. I identified an even older, smaller woman as her sister and attentive companion, and two or three times in the next couple of weeks I asked one or the other how things were going, and they always replied very gently and genteelly, and smiled and smiled. I said to myself t
hat Mrs. Marshall did indeed move as if she was ill, and that she had the patient, sweet, sickening half-smirk so often found on the face of a person who is afraid and at the same time voluptuously involved with her fear. I remember being somewhat ashamed of my feeling of boredom on recognizing this grimace; I had spent a lot of time coping with other people’s capricious outworn organs, and wanted to sit back—temporarily, at least—and contemplate my own.
One night, I was asked to be judge of a costume parade and party, and in all the noise and uninhibited prancing I was astonished to see Mrs. Marshall walk slowly past the official table, of course not prancing but still in step and with a restrained coquettish look about her. She was dressed with prim prettiness as a maid, and I wondered in whose luggage on the little ship she had found that uniform in these days of reduced domestic service. I also noticed, in all the brouhaha, that her sister was not to be seen. Usually she stayed quietly nearby, her eyes worried and her voice small and expressionless. Did she disapprove of this debauchery?
Both women were what can most easily be called nice. They dressed in good black or navy-blue clothes for dinner, even through the Canal Zone, and their hair was soft instead of in the tight waves of most elderly middle-class American women. They were dainty, their nails lacquered with an almost colorless pink and their stockings very fine. All in all, they were as nearly invisible as one can be after sixty-five and still breathe and defecate and chew.
Toward the end of the voyage, the mother of a small boy gave what was called a thé dansant to honor his seventh birthday, and all of us were invited. I did not want to go, because I hate to have to look at little cakes in the late afternoon, but the mother had toploftily stayed away from a cocktail party to which another woman and I had invited all the passengers, and I felt duty-bound to be polite and appear at her silly tea. I made myself look as proper as possible, and was pleased to find that the giddy if disapprovingly non-alcoholic mother was paying no attention at all to anyone but the captain and the third mate. This gave me a chance to feel self-possessed and superior, as well as to ignore the table loaded with sticky tidbits, and I made myself useful to the nearest social victim—in this case the smiling, quiet little Mrs. Marshall, whose name I still did not know. I only remembered that she had been ill and that she lived somewhat as if she thought of herself as a premature child in an incubator, on a gauze-and-cotton pillow, with a rarer air about her than she would have to breathe later when she became truly born.
She sat very straight, with her pretty ankles crossed, and I fetched cakes and tea for her, and sat beside her in another chair and listened to her talk softly and with a surprising degree of intensity about the year she and her sister planned to spend together, mostly in England. She had read a lot of books about English history and architecture and so on, and I was lucky to recall some of the things my mother had managed to pass along to me about people who were important to her, as disparate as Cardinal Wolsey and Victoria. I even managed to come up with Grinling Gibbons—names like that.
I got her more tea, feeling infinitely attentive beside our loutish hostess, who paid no attention to any of us. It was a tiny but enjoyable revenge, there in the confines of the ship world, and as I sat by the nice old lady who was without knowing it serving as my victim-tool, I noticed that she fumbled with a word, and then a few seconds later that her lips trembled slightly and that she looked once or twice around the big room. Her eyes did not seem frightened or even troubled, but, without knowing how or why, it was horribly clear to me that she had passed through one of those almost mortal waves of panic very sick people are prey to. Her voice did not change, nor did she turn paler than her plump withered face had always looked, but her fear was as plain and as dreadful to me as if she had screamed out or moaned. I told myself that she was tired, saw that she had a table where she could sit by her cup and plate, and left as fast as I could.
It was an incident that is, of course, much more meaningful to me now, but even then it left me questioning and scorning myself for using—no matter how unwittingly—someone weaker than I was simply in order to feel better mannered than a foolish fellow-passenger who did not know how to go to or give parties. I thought about the panic I had spied on, and I admired it; the woman was in terror, and she was handling it with grace. I reached this conclusion easily, and then went on to more immediate problems of survival for my own self and my children, since it was evident that Mrs. Marshall had things well enough in hand not to drop her teacup or even cry out.
The morning we debarked was one of generally repressed hysteria, after the slow crawl through the lines of sunken convoys in the North Sea and then the noisy night of docking and unloading all the canned pineapple. Breakfast was early and crowded, and my girls were pale with unheeded love for the table boys too busy to smile one last time with them. After the casual weeks, people looked strange in dark suits and stylish hats. There was an air of almost hostile caution everywhere, as if we regretted having been gay and friendly and unsuspicious for so long, and suddenly feared what the mysterious sea change might have let us in for.
For reasons at once too obvious and too intricate to unravel even within my mind, I wanted to be quiet and late in leaving the little ship. I stalled this way and that, and when almost everyone had gone I was glad to find that my girls could talk happily and quietly with their friends in the crew while I stood looking far down at the thinning crowd upon the quay and at the growing piles of cargo from the holds. The ship rose slowly, so that the end of the long gangplank was off the pavement by the time we headed grudgingly for it and the first touch of land.
A knot of the ship’s men gathered at the top to say goodbye to the children, and I stood back for a few minutes more, tasting the warm kindness and the lonesome searching there, and noticing with only part of my outward civilized self that the two elderly sisters sat in the cabin nearest the last door to pass through. They were dressed in smart, quiet travelling clothes. Their ankles were nicely crossed and their backs were straight. Their faces were like powdered ivory. I smiled at them, but they probably did not see my perfunctory salute; it was as if they were concentrating on something that took them too far away for speech. I thought swiftly of all that the one who had been ill knew about English history, and then we were inching down the gangplank, which now bobbed and wagged foolishly, with at least a couple of feet to jump at the bottom.
The children stumbled along the quay, calling and waving up to the cabin boys and the barman and the bosun, who stood by the C Deck rails. I headed for the almost bare tables where the customs officers waited with my luggage lined up in front of them, and smiled and rallied my rusted French and kept a mazed account in my head of where we all were and what the agent was saying about trunks and what was in the suitcases the officers chose to open.
An enormous bus blasted its horn, and people shrieked goodbyes like sea gulls in a storm, and I felt eased to know that every passenger—and especially the man who had pretended he was not fondling my children—was probably forever gone from our lives and on that bus to catch the Channel boat for London, except the two sisters, who were heading first for Holland for a week and who probably knew more about England than any of them.
The customs man scrawled pink crayon over the last of my collection of some fifty years of family travelling bags. I felt a puff of relief rise from the ground through my body, as if an indiscreet ghost there at the quay to welcome me had blown up under my skirts. I was teased and excited and amused, and called out to the children, who stood, tiny as gnats against the ship’s tall sides, mooning and bleating up at their white-coated friends, their backs to the new world that menaced them, their eyes glistening with tears of farewell.
They turned toward that new world at my call, toward me standing in it, and I saw them pull back, and at the same time I heard the older of the two old ladies, my old ladies, cry out in a small shocked voice, “Just like San Francisco! It happened there just like this. She’ll be all right.”
; On the scarred boards of the inspection table, Mrs. Marshall half sat, half slumped against her older sister. She was as pale as always, with her eyes squinted and rolled upward in her plump face. Her smart black hat tipped crazily over one eye as she rolled back against the shoulder beside her, and I thought that she would hate to look that silly even as I hated myself for a feeling of irritation at the sweet, patient smile on her discreetly made-up lips.
Oh, God, these invalids! My mind was snarling as I put down my big heavy handbag and let her fall more against me than toward her sister. I don’t know why I did this. It seemed natural; the sister was very small and old, and I know that a half-conscious body, which I felt Mrs. Marshall’s to be and which it probably was at that moment, can be extraordinarily heavy. I eased her back against one of my softer suitcases, and behind me I could hear the sister saying in a quiet, desperate way, not especially to anybody but much as a nun murmurs toward a picture or a statue, “Oh, I did everything for her this morning, everything. She didn’t even lift a finger. Not a finger. We didn’t even talk. She was fine, too, just fine, not nervous at all. Get some whiskey. That’s all she needed that time in San Francisco. Just some whiskey.”
While she was murmuring this way, she came around the end of the table and stood near her sister’s head, which I was watching while I took her pretty feet and tried to pivot her up lengthwise. Mrs. Marshall’s face was changing rapidly, and there were no pupils in the narrowed eyes. Her skin became yellowish, and then darker and very subtly blue—lead blue—and I said to myself, “But this woman is dying and she is dying fast,” and then I remembered how three times I had seen another woman turn this strange blue and how three times she had lived to question me piercingly about it all, so I said nothing aloud and pulled hard to lift up the dainty feet.
A dim old man with “Commissionnaire” printed in gold on his cap took the feet from me. He was drunk, with spit caked in the corners of his mouth, and he gave off a feeling of gentle strength. “All right,” I said to the sister. “Yes yes, hold her head up more.…”
Sister Age Page 3
