Collected Novels and Plays (9 page)

“… I begin to see, I mean,” Francis tried to find his way, “the part
she
must have played, the part she may still be playing. Does that make sense? Did you ever feel something of that in her, a remoteness?” He rose from his chair. “A self-sufficiency?”

Mr. Tanning had waited for him to finish. “It’s a mistake to simplify,” he said.

Francis took it as a clue. “The first time, then, it wasn’t with Natalie?”

“No, it wasn’t. I don’t know why it wasn’t, except that your mother had always suspected Natalie in particular. I was very fond of Natalie, she’d had a hard time. One day Vinnie found a letter from her, a perfectly innocent, lovely letter. Women can be really cruel when they have an easy victim.”

“I’m glad she’s here with you,” said Francis, his fingers on the table, looking deep into its smooth dark. “Shall we go to Enid?”

Mr. Tanning smiled gently. “Don’t you think it’s strange that you and I should be so lonely? I’ve been lonely all my life, and I think you will be, Sonny. I guess we’re just made that way.”

“It’s a mistake to simplify,” said Francis, hoping that his father would laugh. He didn’t.

Enid was waiting in the ocean room.

Her call would have been the most ordinary thing in the world, except that from the outset she created, in spite of herself, a complex impression. She rose with her lilting laugh to kiss them, then at once returned to her chair in innocent confusion, as if remembering how carefully she was dressed, how scented and combed, a pink tourmaline at her throat, and wanting them suddenly
not
to notice. She threw round her
shoulders a light
“daytime” sweater, she pulled knitting out of a bag—some tiny garment all rose and white—but the easy effect failed, proved merely the lengths she would go in order to play it simple. “I don’t feel I
need
to be so formal,” Enid began, after explaining that Larry was dead tired from his week at the office. “If I’ve peeked in at the wrong moment, just say the word.”

Mr. Tanning cleared his throat. “I’d rather see you than anybody I know, Enid. You ought to have learned that by now.”

“Mercy me!” she cried, her eyes shining. “Such complimentary remarks! Actually,” she went on, “we’d hoped to coax everybody over tomorrow afternoon, but when I talked to Natalie this morning she said you were already engaged.”

“It’s no mystery,” said her father. “We’ve been asked to the Cheeks’ tomorrow afternoon.”

“Yes, Natalie told me.” Enid was very gay about it. She chatted on and on, mostly to Francis, never dropping a stitch. What had been his favorite restaurant in Rome and did he know of a good tailor there (she and Larry were thinking of a trip next Easter) and weren’t the Italian people cheerful attractive little souls? Outside it had begun to rain. Wasn’t it cozy, the three of them sitting together? And what did Francis think of the changes
she’d made at the Cottage? Why, it looked lovely, he said—and was startled to see her blush with pleasure. So he went on, beyond plain sociability, to praise as much as he could, the grouping of chairs, the texture of fabrics. He felt himself going too far, but Enid drank it in, nodding agreement, pointing out things he might have missed. The ocean room, she confessed, still needed thought. Well, he was sweet to say so, but it did. And she was thinking, yes indeed, she
had schemes up her sleeve! Francis had the oddest notion of being appealed to, all unconsciously on her part—Enid had never in her life entertained an ulterior motive. From time to time, however, she interrupted herself to ask Mr. Tanning if she’d remembered to tell him how many thousands of dollars her committee had raised for the Hospital, or whom she’d run
into on the street the other day, or what progress Lily had made with her tennis
lessons. Until at last Francis guessed what the matter was.

“You sound,” he said ingenuously, “as though you hadn’t seen one another for a very long time.”

“Well, we haven’t!” exclaimed Enid, her eyes squeezed shut with amusement. “It’s been a whole week! We might as well not be living in the same country!”

“I asked you to lunch the day before yesterday,” her father reminded her.

“But you called up at eleven o’clock! We were leaving for the beach with a picnic, the twins and Lily and I.” Once again she seemed to appeal to Francis. “You just don’t disappoint little people that way, do you?”

“If you remember,” said Mr. Tanning, “I suggested you bring the picnic over here. Grandpa has a beach in front of
his
house, too.”

“I’m sorry,” said Enid, “I felt you had enough on your hands as it was, without the additional strain of three wild Indians.”

“Oh I see.” Mr. Tanning swallowed a nitroglycerine pill. “You’ll soon come to realize,” he told Francis, “that your loving father sets an unsavory example for his grandchildren. We can only pray that they manage to live it down.”

“You
know
that isn’t true, Daddy,” she said, her voice quieter and sadder now that she was indignant. Francis had a movement of tenderness. Enid, after all, lived far more than himself in the world of the Cottage; she played the game of kinship in a way that Francis, who tended to make up the rules as he went along, simply didn’t. Mostly he was touched by her having come to make peace alone, without Larry, trusting her
brother—virtual stranger that he was—to see her through. “Sunday,” she was earnestly saying, “when you had us to meet the Goods, I told you I had a busy week ahead. Monday I went into town with Larry for the night. Tuesday—”

“Say no more.” Mr. Tanning smiled wearily. “All is forgiven.”

Enid gave a helpless laugh. “By the way,” she said after a bit, “I took
the portrait to be restored. The little man thought it would take about three months. I said to him, ‘What is this, the
season
for slashed portraits?’”

“Have you found out who did it?” asked Francis.

“Oh dear,” their father sighed, rising.

Did he have a pain? They were both alarmed. But no, he wanted only to wash his teeth. He tottered showily out of the room.

Francis repeated his question. Had they found out who slashed the portrait?

“Alas,” Enid giggled, “the culprit is still at large.”

For no reason that he could tell she lowered her eyes. “It’s such a wild thing to have done,” he said encouragingly. “Who on earth would want to hurt you that much?”

“Daddy’s theory,” she observed, avoiding her own, “is that somebody wanted to hurt
him.
He was very fond of the portrait.”

“Does he still think Fern did it?”

“She couldn’t have done it,” Enid flew to her defense, “unless she hired an assassin! She wasn’t in town. It happened on a Friday, the next day was Lily’s birthday. Not that
that
interesting fact,” she quickly added, her manner growing more and more social, “has anything to do with the case, but it’s one way I’m able to remember. Don’t you find you have funny little ways of remembering
things?”

By way of reply he swung round in his chair. Knowing that Enid suspected her, he had remembered the money Irene Cheek had left for Mr. Tanning. It was, of course, no longer on the desk. He felt sure that his father hadn’t picked it up.

“You have the answer after all, I think,” he said. “There’s nothing a certain person wouldn’t do.”

For the second time Enid refused to meet his eyes. Could she be hiding something? “Oh well,” she murmured, “the milk is spilled. We’ll never find out.”

“
I
will!” Enid blinked. Francis chuckled at the idea of cross-questioning
every woman who came to the Cottage. “I’m serious, though. I’ll find out, you wait and see!”

But she didn’t enter into it. “Sweetie, it wouldn’t do any good, even if you were able …”

“Nonsense! The scene of the crime is overrun with suspects!”

“I mean, I don’t believe Daddy really wants to know. It would upset him so. He’d lie awake—”

“Don’t
you?
”

She looked puzzled. “With my headaches?”

“No—don’t you want to know who did it?”

“Oh, naturally I’m curious,” began Enid lightly. Then with a gentle, almost apologetic smile: “It’s funny, but no, I don’t really want to know.”

It was his turn to lower his eyes. For a long time Francis had dreamed of doing her some important service, of a day when, no longer able to sustain the rare buoyancy with which she went her way—revolving as it were on one toe—Enid would reach out for him to support her full weight. The moment seemed very close. The gravities she withstood, whatever form they took—headaches, committees, another child to bear, the nameless enemy near at
hand—he had felt these things more than once during the past half hour threaten her balance. Francis went so far as to hold his breath. Would it be
now
that she broke down, her eyes brimming over, her head on his knee? He could imagine the very words stammered out: “I cannot bear my life … I’ve never let myself think … he doesn’t love me … so much depends on me ….” And he would be stroking her hair, whispering,
“Let it go, let it go ….” He needed to know that Enid suffered, for proof that his own world was real. Still she gave no sign.

“Did Daddy tell you he was going to Boston next month?” she presently asked.

“What for?”

“He’s found a wonderful doctor there, who treats his kind of heart ailment very successfully. If it works it’s meant to leave you entirely free from pain.”

“How weird,” said Francis.

“Daddy’s terribly excited over it. So am I. When you think of the years he’s suffered, with no hope at all …”

“But would it really be wise?” Francis wondered after a moment. “I mean, doesn’t pain serve to warn him when he goes too far, physically or otherwise? You saw him take that pill just now, and then leave the room. I don’t think it was to wash his teeth at all, so much as to escape from a painful conversation.” He waited to make sure that Enid knew what he meant. “And don’t we all do that,” he pursued,
“to greater or lesser degrees? We needn’t be as sensitive as he, but doesn’t pain teach
us
what we must avoid?”

He saw it as applying marvelously to his sister. But Enid had a wider experience of the subject. “I’m afraid that it”—she wouldn’t in her modesty say “pain”—“teaches us what we
can’t
avoid.” And Francis knew she was right.

“In a way, yes,” he said. “We can’t at least help
others
avoid it. We’re none of us magicians with ointments or heroes with lances. Look at him. He suffers in his mind from not being strong enough to do—what? To do the things he would suffer ten times as much from the physical strain of
doing
, now.”

Enid hummed a single high note.

“No, I think it’s fascinating,” Francis went on. “He knows what hurts him, but does knowing save him?” His eyes brightened to glimpse the purpler reaches of his thought. “Mightn’t the answer be that
everything
hurts him? Pretend he’s a bad example for Lily, call him a Casanova,” he lingered ironically over the word, “and presto! you’ve offended him. Admit that he’s no such
thing, and you’ve made matters even worse. What do you do at his age? Whatever it is, it injures him! One sees what the Hindus were getting at when they said that all action was immoral. It is. It hurts me to talk as I do, it hurts you to listen!”

He was by now very far afield, and as puzzled as Enid by the passion in his voice. What had happened to him? He felt all elated and nervous.
She, however, knitted and nodded. Francis had a glimpse of the advantages that went with playing by the rules.

So he let her off, fell silent; and yet a lie had been given not just to Enid but to the room they sat in, so rich with her ideas. He felt he had seen through her ceremony of blandness and taste; it wasn’t a ceremony because it concealed nothing, composed nothing, cost nothing. He decided then and there that she had no other way of being. If she had, dear gentle creature, she might have given it a try. Her poise, as she smiled understandingly at Francis, became
the wistful poise of a child, her mother’s hat drooping over her eyes, her feet lost in her mother’s shoes, pouring out colored water and making conversation. Equally with the ocean room, where each piece was so harmonious and so fine. It no longer appeared to Francis an emblem of the truly adult so much as a naive aspiration towards that state.

Ah but in a certain light, how the room sustained Enid! How it sustained, against his will, himself! Even a
real
child entering there would have had to sit as Francis did, its little legs crossed, talking of the weather, refusing a second chocolate, charmed into forgetting the friends outside who waited to play leap-frog or “games” in a garage attic.

Wouldn’t it help, he brooded, to leap up, cry out, smash something? But the room met his eye so trustingly; it was easier to do violence to himself. As if casually he brought his knuckle down upon his knee, once, twice, again and again, feeling the pain that made at last the beautiful room unreal, Enid unreal, and gave Mr. Tanning, when he paused frowning on the threshold, an air of patiently putting up with a good deal of nonsense. “There’s not one
really comfortable chair in the whole damn house,” he had remarked during dinner. “They’re all either too narrow or too low.”

Francis hoped his father would never say this to Enid. She was so easily upset.

For a time the old man stood behind her, stroking her hair. The rhythm recalled words: Let it go, let it go—“In April, 1929,” Mr. Tanning
began, “I convinced Howie Burr to send out a circular I’d written myself, warning all the firm’s customers, here and abroad, that in
our
opinion the stock market was in a most precarious state. Things were sky high. None of our competitors could understand why in
hell we were prepared to lose so much business. But it made sense to the President of the United States; he wrote me a personal letter. I’ll get you a copy of it for your scrapbook, Francis, if you like. The recommendations we made were very simple ….”

Francis swallowed a yawn.

At eleven o’clock Mrs. Bigelow and Lady Good joined them.

“Benjamin, I wished for you!” the latter exclaimed. “We’ve seen such a lovely film, all about the friendship between a crippled boy and an English sheepdog. It brought tears to my eyes.” She took it upon herself—while Natalie conveyed in pantomime that it was no good taking
her
to the movies, she couldn’t see a thing—to tell the whole plot, like a bedtime story.