Collected Novels and Plays (22 page)

Crazy or not, the old man said, her husband would be a pretty lucky fellow. Where was he, by the way? In Connecticut? Teaching? While
Jane catalogued etchings at Harvard? “Oh I see,” he drawled with a comic look of
not
seeing that sent her into enchanted giggles. “And are you going to invite me up to look at the etchings?” he pursued. “Or is that what all the boys say?”

“No,” Jane said demurely. “You’re the very first.”

“Oh I am?” The old man peered round at Francis. “What’s wrong with
you
, my stalwart son?”

Lady Good sent Francis a secret smile, to find Benjamin so full of fun. But for Francis the fun soon took on a darker aspect. “Here I understood I was going to meet my future daughter-in-law,” Mr. Tanning was telling Jane almost petulantly, “and who shows up but an old married woman like you!”

“Is it that you have an exclusive claim over old married women?” said Lady Good.

“Oh dear …” He shook his head and wiped his eye with exaggerated self-pity. His shaky hand held out an empty glass. Jane was laughing away, a bit uncontrollably. Francis tried to do the same, but his mouth hurt from the effort. Clearly enough Mr. Tanning’s day at the hospital had set him, bored and with sterile odors in his nostrils, to thinking about grandchildren, not Lily and the twins, rather a child who should bear his own name,
Francis’s child. He filled his father’s glass in a kind of anguish, guessing more and more. Because he trusted no one else to tell him the truth, he shrank from meeting Benjamin’s eye. He feared reading then and there the old man’s knowledge that such a child would never be—a knowledge that might have come upon him at any time during the past years or the past minutes, watching Francis and Jane together. It wasn’t just that Jane was married.
No, what Benjamin would be wanting was to see his son behave as men
did
behave with a pretty woman—whether she was married, or one’s mother, or one’s daughter. This Francis knew he had never learned to do. So that his fate was clear … was it? He wondered; there would be no child? The thought affected him in the strangest possible way. Not for months did Francis recall that instant, or begin to understand his emotion. Right then, he needed
something to
hold on to. He reached for his glass. Mr. Tanning raised his own, still thinking of the morrow. “Let it not be said,” he sighed, “that the condemned man met his destiny uncheered.”

They went on to dinner. More cocktails were ordered, along with wine and the richest food. “If Mrs. McBride can go out on a heavy date,” said Benjamin, “so can I.” The poor nurse, who as of tomorrow would be on duty at the hospital, was spending the evening with a cousin’s widow.

An hour later Mr. Tanning had ordered
crepes sujette.
Beneath so many half-empty plates and glasses the tablecloth couldn’t be seen. “And clear away this mess, please,” he told the waiter. Then, turning to Francis, “Do me a favor, Sonny,” he said dully. “Put in a call to Xenia tomorrow morning and ask her, as politely as you can, to limit her visit to another ten days. I never dreamed the sittings would be such a strain
on my system. I’d understood they were to last only a week or so, also that I’d be able to move about, talk or write letters. Instead, I’m put in a baby’s high chair and told to keep perfectly still. I like your friend, Francis. You know that. She’s a fine woman. But it’s like eating goose or venison; after a while you just can’t take any more. Tell her whatever you like, that I promised her room to another guest—I don’t
give a damn what you say. I expect to be back there in a week’s time. Tell her she can have two more sittings, but that’s the limit. O.K.?”

These words, uttered slowly and wearily while the women looked elsewhere, appalled Francis. It was true, he wanted never to see Xenia again; but, once away from her, he had easily persuaded himself that by seducing him
she
had suffered wrong at
his
hands. The pity was that he couldn’t recognize the classic remorse of a young man brought up to believe in—if necessary, to invent—some kind of surpassing purity within even the
unlikeliest woman. Experience had taught Francis—at least Vinnie’s experience had, his own amounted to so little—that “the man” was invariably to blame in these matters. He saw no way of complying with his father’s request.

“What about the bust of Lily?” he objected feebly.

“That’s between Lily and Xenia,” said Benjamin.

“You commissioned it, though.”

“Francis, I’m sick and tired of the whole question.”

“Can you see how it’s rather embarrassing for
me?
”

“Don’t let it be. Blame it all on the Monster,” Benjamin grinned, alluding to Fern’s name for him since the divorce. People who saw Fern brought back word that she was still very bitter, to the point of forbidding you to speak of the Monster in her hearing. An enormous basket of snapdragons and smilax, accompanied by a letter in the old man’s round careful hand, had gone unacknowledged. At times you wondered, or Francis did, if
he’d done anything in life but give offense to women.

He looked helplessly at his father. He wanted to say, “Please! I can’t be the one to send her away! She’ll think it’s my doing—
I’ll
be the monster!” But he held his tongue, flattered by the novelty of a direct request from Benjamin. He would have to find some way of his own not to carry it out.

It was late when they parted on the street. Lady Good said, “I’ll escort Benjamin to the hospital, Francis, whilst you and Jane go dancing, or whatever young people do. That fearsome ordeal lies ahead of him in the morning, and look at him, he’s worn out!” Benjamin gave them all a crumpled smile. He shuffled forward to kiss Jane, then Francis, on the cheek, contriving to slip a bill into his son’s hand. “Go on now,” he
whispered, “paint the town red!” Francis checked a movement of protest. He was shocked not so much by a gift of money, which just then he lacked wit to refuse, as by the implication that he was caught up with Jane in the kind of romance that fed on dance bands and expensive corner tables. Paint the town red! Hadn’t Benjamin understood that Jane was married? Indeed he had. From the car window he waved and Prudence blew a kiss. And then she tenderly kissed the old
man, before their very eyes. The last thing Francis saw his father do, as Louis Leroy drove away, was wink at them over his companion’s shoulder. That was how you behaved (the wink said) with married women.

“What a dear old man.” Jane spoke in a dreamer’s voice.

“He wanted you for a daughter-in-law.”

“Yes, that was sweet.”

“How is Roger?”

“You’ll see him Friday. He thinks they’re going to draft him.”

“Into the army?” cried Francis. “But he’s married!”

After thinking it over, she said indulgently, “There are lots of things being married doesn’t prevent.”

He stopped and stared. “Aren’t
you
happy?”

“Oh, of course!”

“Of course?”

“I mean, I’ve known Roger all my life,” said Jane, a shadow of impatience crossing her face. “Whether or not he makes me happy isn’t the point.”

“But you make
him
happy?”

“Oh, of course!” she said a second time.

“I see. Have I said that I like Roger? I do.”

“I’m glad you do. He’s a wonderful person. Francis? Are you all right?” He had stumbled, somewhat.

“I’ve had a slight fever these days ….”

“We oughtn’t to be standing here.…”

“Would a taxi be wise?” He watched Jane hail one, seeing her, for all their drinking, a bit embarrassed now by what she had conveyed. Francis hadn’t cared to hear about her marriage, had in fact come close to falling flat on his face, he so much hadn’t cared to hear about it. Both of them leaned back against the creaking leather, frowning. He gave the driver her address. Unaccountably Jane’s mood changed to one of atonement.

“When I think what
a pig
I made of myself!” she groaned. “Letting your father order that second bottle of champagne! Eek! Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Cálmati, cálmati.
”

“Oh dear, you still remember!”

“What?”

“Your Italian. I’ve forgotten all of mine. They just
stare
at me in the fruit store!” In this way Jane recovered her girlishness of before dinner. But Francis had had his glimpse of what dark machinery kept the merry-go-round revolving. While they sped across the river he studied her profile dim against ten dozen watery lights. She was once in love with me, he reflected, letting his eyes glaze as over some ancient
irrelevant bit of gossip.

She ushered him into the apartment. He saw a room spacious but bare; a bed, two chairs, bookshelves partly built, unpacked boxes—all lit by a kerosene lamp in the middle of the floor. The building, it seemed, was being rewired. Sheets had been tacked for privacy across the lower halves of windows. It made Francis think of a setting in which children played at keeping house. Here and there he recognized, perhaps by their look of having been promised a better home,
objects acquired by Jane in Europe—art books, a stylish umbrella, the worm-drilled Negro king from a Neapolitan crèche and, slumped in the lamplight, a straw doll with a felt bean pod for its head. There were three faces in this pod. The first looked out on the world and smiled; above it a smaller one slept, eyes closed, as though waiting its turn; the topmost bean had as yet no features of any description. Francis shivered in spite of himself. The thing gave out an
uncanny air of clairvoyance. If he had had such a doll as a child, he would have told secrets to the little faceless head at the top, then let them filter slowly down into the head that smiled.

“Here.” Jane handed him a tumbler. “Tell me if you like it. It’s apricot brandy.” He noticed that her hand was trembling. “What do you
think
about it all?” she added vaguely.

He had been wondering at her nervousness. He wasn’t going to touch her. Still—thanks to Xenia—the idea had crossed his mind, angering him. “I think we are drunk,” he said.

“Be serious! I mean, tell me what colors I should use.”

“Violet. Violet on this wall. Perhaps a gamboge pouf below.”

Her brow puckered.

“And at the windows something blue and gauzy, so people outside may know that the room is filling up with tears.”

“Oh, Francis …”

“What’s wrong?”

“Aren’t you happy?”

The question caught him off guard. He’d fancied her on the verge of some further confidence. “Of course!” he replied quickly, but missed the natural note she had sounded with the same words.

Jane didn’t miss it, evidently. She gave him a strange calm smile and brought out for the occasion her flattest idiom. “I’m glad,” she said. “Because you deserve to be.”

It provoked Francis to say more. He couldn’t bear to have
her
take him at face value.

“You ask if I’m happy,” he declaimed, “when you’ve given yourself to another man!” Whereupon he grasped her by the shoulders and shook her, insolently, the way he’d seen it done in the movies. Even then Jane didn’t understand it as a joke. For a moment her puzzled face wobbled back and forth, eyes seeking his own until, puzzled now himself, he had to turn miserably away. “I’m too conscious to be
happy,” he began, addressing the bean-pod doll. “If I were to fall nobody would catch me. I have to keep dodging people on the street. They never look where they’re going. They could walk right into me and knock me down. It’s always
my
consciousness. He sits in that house like a Pasha in his harem, while I run to and fro delivering messages, making peace, like a—like a … I’m sorry,” Francis lowered his voice and sipped
the sweet liquor, “I mustn’t talk about myself.” But Jane was gazing at him with parted lips.

“I should like,” he pursued therefore, “to do something at cross-purposes, something
against
my consciousness. I should like to feel, no matter what I thought I was up to, that the real meaning of my action was hidden from me. I want—”

“Please!” Jane held up a hand. “This isn’t
you
talking.”

“Isn’t it? So much the better!”

“You’re so wise and sure of yourself,” she almost pleaded. “When other people are with you they feel that what they do makes sense. Roger said this, though you’d hardly—”

“I’m not talking about other people,” said Francis. “They have their lives. I want mine to be like the ship that seems to sail for a certain mark, but instead gets sucked miles and miles out of its course by an unseen current.”

“You wouldn’t enjoy that,” said Jane unhappily. “It sounds too much like what I go through every day.”

“I’d
enjoy it. Other people would have to watch out for me, for a change. No,” Francis managed a dark gleam, “better yet: someone who resembles me as I am now would have to watch out for me.”

They were sitting on the floor by now. “Besides,” Jane presently said, “I’d never describe you as
specially
conscious of things.” Francis looked up amazed. Why, she was arguing with him!

“Of what things, pray?” he snapped.

Not answering, Jane bent sideways, towards the chimney of the lamp, to light her cigarette from its invisible uppouring of heat. She was asking to be let off, but the damage had been done. It remained for Francis to show her something about his consciousness.

“If you’re trying to say I never noticed,” he said, pleased by his own cunning, “how close you came—how close
we
came, in Rome, to … to loving each other …” He stammered to a halt, however, in the gentlest, mournfullest of voices. Each sat silent with surprise. These might have been the first intimate words ever to be spoken between them. For Francis, who felt he’d given himself away, the moment
held an unbearable anxiety. It was easier for Jane, he supposed; that is, she could fall back upon her new role of matron, “lady of the house”: she would rise now offended, show him firmly to the door, quite as any woman in his mother’s world, confident that he would obey out of his regard for Forms. But to Francis’s astonishment, to his despair—he took it as the clearest sign yet of the power he had over her—Jane did no such thing.
Far from stiffening with outrage, she seemed to have gone weak, acquiescent, sadly nodding over what he had said. She actually untied the ribbon in her hair. The black curls, shaken, fell below her shoulders.