Bereavements (15 page)

“What on earth is the matter?” And without waiting for an answer, “Do you like these earrings? Or are they too much—with the pearls. They are! Oh! I can’t seem to do anything right today!” Now what is it? You seem determined to irritate me. I ask a question and you don’t reply.”

“The young . . . man has arrived. Mr. Carlson-Wade.”

Mrs. Evans stood. “Oh?” She dusted her shoulders, put the last touch of a comb to her hair. “Has he?” She picked up a bottle of perfume, considered, replaced it without use. “And from the look of you, I thought it might be Count Dracula. Where did you put him?”

“Put him?”

“Yes. It’s a question. In a language known as English.”

“I didn’t put him anywhere. I mean . . . he sat himself down. In the hall. On a bench. Next to the umbrella rack. So I left him there.”

Mrs. Evans had taken a valium or two. Or maybe not. Rose couldn’t decide. The woman was such an actress, determined to play out her moods, that it was difficult to know whether chemistry or the theatre was the order of the day. Frequently, it was both, and probably was so now—quite as if the lights had darkened and the curtain gone up.

The woman gave a half turn, glanced at herself in the vanity, and then looked gravely at the girl.

“Rose.” A lovely censorial gesture. “Wasn’t that a strange thing to do?”

Determined not to be upstaged, the maid placed herself between Mrs. Evans and the mirror.

“What, ma’am?”

“Next to the umbrella stand. In the hall!”

Rose decided to make the most of her few lines.

“May I remind
madam
—” (she never used the word) “—that the elevator is stuck. Again. The door won’t bulge. So I couldn’t take him upstairs. And I didn’t know whether you’d want him in the living room or not.”

“Not want him! But of course I want him! In the living room. Go! Instantly!”

“But—”

“No buts! None!”

It wasn’t a curtain, or a blackout, but certainly an exit-cue—for Rose.

The canny, or perhaps uncanny, girl hadn’t been wrong: two Valiums, ten milligrams each, really too much for the occasion as they were soon embarrassingly to prove, the blue chemical already at work soothing “nerves,” bringing back to normal both rapid breathing and beat of heart.

With a last pained and still-doubtful look at herself in the mirror and another dab of perfume after all, Mrs. Evans descended the narrow corkscrew staircase, prepared as much as she ever would be, to face Bruno David Carlson-Wade who, she hoped, was not still sitting in the hall, where her entrance would be something less than appropriate.

He wasn’t.

Rose had evidently seen him into the living room, but when she opened the door, it was empty. No one! Bewildered, she was about to go, when she heard a slight false cough, a clearing of the throat. She turned back and, seeing the boy standing by the fireplace, realized the reason for her mistake. Her eyes had circled the room, more or less
at eye level,
expecting him surely—as short as he confessed to be—to be within sight, rising politely at the sound of the door.

Actually, he
was
standing, but so much
below
eye-level that only a child of four, standing also and gazing straight ahead, could have found him. Because the boy was a
dwarf,
surely no taller than, good heavens! she hardly dared guess: three-feet-four? six?—no more: the smallest of creatures, handsome of face, truly handsome as he’d said, but with a body, under loose-fitting clothes, that must have been as broken, as gnarled as the dead twisted trunk of an ancient tree, one misshapen shoulder-blade extending so far behind him she was sure it was the crushed, ill-concealed wing of an adult angel.

As worldly, as sophisticated, as old and experienced as she was, as wearily used to meeting an endless variety of people during her long and active life—beggar to king, even an audience with the Pope, not to mention the Padishah of Nef-Nebeezi who, before the first of her three husbands, wanted her as his thirty-second bride—she simply could not conceal the surprise and dismay that flash-froze her face, including tongue, lips, jaw and voice: all iced together so firmly her entire head must have been steaming like solid carbon-dioxide at the sight of this amazing little man—boy—for that’s what he was.

Bruno David Carlson-Wade, on the other hand, was an expert at these meetings, having endured so often the shocked, glazed stare, the disbelief of strangers, that he got to the subject without delay.

“If I had told you,” he said softly, barely smiling but smiling nonetheless, “you wouldn’t have invited me.” (She wouldn’t have.) “I must . . . do it this way, or never meet anyone at all—unless I explore every circus and freak show in town.”

No reply. Ice still. A face drained of color (how well she now understood her flour-dusted Rose!), then, gradually, a flush of faint warm pink. But ah! that’s what was needed: blood, warmth, giving muscles strength to stretch a smile, first fake, then genuine, over a face now becoming alive with growing interest and curiosity.

Finally, but in time—

”I’m sorry. But—knowing how it is, you must know how it is.”

“Precisely.” —White, almost perfect teeth. “I do. Many times over. As monotonous but as tolerable as the sea: wave after wave crashing down on my head.” So he was showing off already, or perhaps a willing victim to his “novelist’s” taste. Well, there’d be nothing she couldn’t match.

“And that’s why,” he continued, “I brought the
petit fours,
after all.”

Mrs. Evans laughed, looking at a small lavender baker’s box on the rosewood table; then, turning to the house phone, she ordered tea.

Again, like the first hour with Angel, though her purpose this time was different, the necessity was small talk, preliminaries, His schooling? High school, but nothing more; perhaps he’d go to a university later, Columbia or NYU, after his first book was published, but how much could college really mean to a writer?— disdainfully: mathematics! chemistry!-—though studies in Comparative Literature or The Novel might help.

“Tell me about your extra, not-publishing-house-but-modeling career.”

Well, he would hardly call it that; he did get jobs but not as often as he’d like. His head and hands (which were normal) were wonderfully photogenic (he’d been told), so he did hats of all kinds, winter and summer, ski-goggles, sun-glasses, gloves, rings, even bracelets, now that men wore them—things like that.

They then moved into the delicate and more sensitive area of his coming of age (if not size). Yes, his parents had been normal; in fact, oddly, his father six-feet-four, or so the vital statistics in the family bible recorded; he didn’t remember the man at all— only a few faded photographs.

His mother? (Face pained, brooding but intensely alive) she’d been a saint: lovable and ostensibly loving. Ostensibly because (and this was hard to confess) he was convinced, probably preverbally, that she had never accepted him (in her heart): secretly, sorrowfully repelled and rejecting, not truly recognizing him as hers. “I’ve thought about that a lot. A dwarf can’t be a son. Axiom
ex cathedra!”
And he laughed, suppressing his anguish at his small, sad joke. “She was never, I don’t think ever, forgiving of God.”

This Mrs. Evans could well understand, though she didn’t say so, of course. There could be no getting used to this bizarre little man (“man” because his head was full, adult size, belonging, like his father’s, to someone six-feet-four, though his beautiful face was lineless, the skin fresh and glowing, adolescent young, enormously appealing).

But she also had the slight uncomfortable feeling, a nuance coldly damp (and it was never to leave her while he was alive, though now, at this moment, she planned never to see him again) that he was wearing a fabulous, life-real, perfectly-made, pretty-boy mask; better—an entire, hollow Shrove-Tuesday head that fitted entirely, if illy, over his own head which was never shown, never allowed to be seen.

And under this, neck to toe, a marvelous, monstrous suit for a haunting on All Hallow’s Eve: a disguise so flawless he’d be welcomed on Bald Mountain or made choreographer extraordinaire of the
corps de ballet
for Danse Macabre.

“Once,” Bruno said, “I saw an astonishing drawing; I’ve forgotten the artist, German, I think; was it Grosz? Well, nevermind. Exquisite, pen-and-ink as I recall, depicting quite simply, an immense, gnarled crocodile standing erect on its two hind legs, dancing—whirling madly—with a calm and graceful, beautifully smiling, lovely naked girl.”

“Why ‘quite simply?’ ” Mrs. Evans inquired.

“I beg your pardon—”

“You said—’depicting quite
simply
. . . ’ ”

“Oh!” Laughter. “Merely because, that was all; I mean, just the two of them, against nothing in the background, only white space.”

“I see,” said his patroness. (He dared, even now, so soon, so wildly, ridiculously premature, to think of her as
that,
having decided the moment she entered the room that it would be she to whom he’d dedicate—entirely in italics, of course—his very first and at present work-in-progress, though exactly how the inscription should read would require days, perhaps weeks of contemplation).

“But it isn’t ‘simple’ at all,” Mrs. Evans admonished; “the drawing, perhaps: a pen-and-ink sketch, but not the idea—as symbol, or allegory.”

“You misunderstand,” the tiny boy said with a shrug of his angel’s stunted wing. “It is simple if you don’t allow it to become complicated. To me, it expresses or represents the possibility of love, or at least shared joy and enjoyment, between two creatures one could not possibly imagine more antithetical or incommensurate.”

Incommensurate! Mrs. Evans smiled, hiding it behind a few contemplative fingers. He had quite a vocabulary for a mere eighteen.

“Incommensurate,” she repeated for the pleasure of giving the word back to him. “Yes, I see.”

Actually, it was quite simple and easy to “see” because
he
was the crocodile reared up on its small hind legs; and she (so soon!), the beautifully smiling girl, “graceful and calm,” with whom he hoped to “dance.”

“I enjoy—” and now he was shy in his manner, yet bold in his speech, “I enjoy, at least hearing or reading about clandestine loves: those forbidden or impossible. Quasimodo’s for Esmeralda, for example, and the priest’s too—what was his name?— though that was an insane, tragic love. I could mention Romeo and Juliet, but that is too easy and familiar and in no way—truly abnormal. I don’t mind the love of a man for a man, if it’s passion, and genuine, and not merely sex. Or a woman for a woman. Or how about—” he had become quite playful now “—how about, old, old men and extremely young, young girls. Of whom do you think? All the giants in their graves: Picasso, Casals! Oh!—there are dozens! A child, also, madly in love with an adult . . . to the point of suicide if desire remains unrealized. How is that? A mother in love with her son; a father with a daughter, or the other way around—to pique our interest. I was positive at first that Flora was in love with Quint, and Miles with Miss Jessel, but then, James being the secret devil he was, I knew it was Flora with Miss Jessel and Miles with Quint. Of
course!
How could it be otherwise? Do you remember the play . . .”