Nikki (9 page)

Nikki had always sensed a certain vaguely disturbing atmosphere about this sort of byplay. When she was in her teens she became aware she didn’t like his saying that; it was insulting to tell a person she was as characterless as a pillow. Later the intimacy of it became clear to her, and she would get her nose up and, with a look of utter disgust, march out of the room. Or she would start. Often, as she was going, his arms would swoop out of nowhere and his hands would catch her around the stomach and he would flatten her body back against his, giving her a small, pleasant shock of surprise.

“Where’s my little Nico going?”

“Noplace,” she’d say, with an effort at dignity, even though his fingers had begun to squirm with the threat of tickling. “Merely out of the room.”

“I don’t want you getting sulky,” he’d say in a low voice, bending close to her ear, “whenever I show your mother a little affection. Hear?”

Before she could protest at such an unjust accusation, his hands would spasm into motion and reduce her to a fit of dancing, twisting, writhing, giggling helplessness. He’d stop, bend to her ear again, maybe nip it with his teeth and say, “You’re entirely too possessive. Hear?” If she tried to answer more than a “yes,” he’d reduce her to giggles again.

“Claude, don’t tease her so. My goodness, the way you rough her, you’ll hurt her.”

Nikki, by then taller than her mother, standing flushed and comfortably trapped against her father’s tall wiry frame, would look at her mother with a distinct sense of intrusion.

“Huh! He couldn’t hurt me,” Nikki would say scornfully. The scorn would be consciously directed at her father but her mother would look suddenly disconcerted as if Nikki had really said, “He can’t hurt me because I’m no mere pillow of a woman like you.”

Nikki didn’t know now it she’d meant that or not. Probably she had.

Her mother spoke constantly to her of the honor of being a Duquesne as if, being born one, she might not appreciate it. Her mother had become one the hard way, against severe competition, and it was the triumph of her life. Of course her own blood kin, the Morgans, were genteel, she explained loyally, in comfortable circumstances and of good stock, but a Duquesne was a Duquesne. Claude had put a ring on her finger three days after meeting her, but for nearly eleven years he had been settling down, as Nikki’s mother put it—running some of the mills, practicing law, seeing to his business affairs.

It was an open secret that what he’d been doing most, though, was chasing every fast skirt from Richmond to Norfolk and back again. But eventually he had slowed down and installed his “comfortable pillow” as mistress of the Duquesne mansion, which was an hour and a half from Richmond.

The house was on a knoll, the highest point on their two thousand acres, a handsome white Georgian structure with sixteen fluted columns. It had been built in the elegant ‘90s and boasted a ballroom, two vast parlors, and a small-hotel-sized kitchen. In all, there were forty rooms, including two large sun rooms.

There were three smaller houses and a dozen barns scattered over the acreage. The large white main barns, where the horse barns and corrals formed a pattern with the house and hill and white fencing and whitewashed gravelled driveways, made it a show place. Her mother had reason for feeling proud, as mistress.

But her air of smiling certainty that all was right with the world made Nikki want to jolt her. Her slow contentment, her time-killing rituals at tea or dinner or flower arrangement or whatever, made Nikki fret. Nikki got the sensation that time had stopped and she would be forever trapped at her present age and position of inferiority, and she would want to scream and smash!

She would never forget the midnight when they had come home from a small dance celebrating something or other at a cousin’s home. All the boys her age were too young, and all the men were tabooed from courting a girl her age. Furthermore, she had been forced into a gooey pink child’s gown with demure frou-frou at the neck and an altogether messy cut about it that hid the clean lovely young-woman lines of her body. She had danced with uncles and cousins and fuzz cheeks from an academy, and with her father.

Dancing with her father, actually the only good dancer there, she had been impressed with the superb ease with which they moved together; they made one another conscious of grace. It had occurred to her that there was a quality of dash about this man which craved a companion of matching temperament.

Yet there she was in a silly little-girl dress, and across the parlor her father was saying that same asinine thing. “My, but you’re a comfortable woman, Estelle, comfortable as a pillow.”

Her mother had not simpered and answered, but had looked past him in Nikki’s direction, as if knowing that he had said it only to trigger off something. And, as usual, Nikki had started out of the room, and he had caught up with her and yanked her back against him.

“Not going to bed before we have a snack, are you, Nico?”

“Let me go!”

She had squirmed and the feel of his hands on her body was somehow so just right that her eyes were almost nakedly resentful when her mother came slowly across the room, her round face unsmiling, her eyes grave, her figure in the rather dowdy lavender gown looking saggy. Nikki had unconsciously stretched herself taller, drawing her figure into even longer, slimmer lines.

“Are you coming, Claude?”

“Nikki and I are hungry.”

“Well, I think I’ll go on up,” her mother had said. “I—well, I don’t think I’ll bother to go to any more dances.”

“What’s she talking about?” Nikki cried.

“You and your Daddy do very well together. You made a very handsome couple. Everybody commented,” she said bitterly, “everbody there on the sidelines where I was sitting all evening.”

“What are you
talking
about?” Nikki had cried, frightened, and her father had released her. “Sidelines! What’s she talking about, Daddy?”

Nikki flung her arms around her mother, kissed her mouth, her cheek, her forehead, then stared urgently at her, her cold lips shaping a smile. Her mother not only would not smile in return but looked at her with unblinking hostility.

“Now you look here, Estelle. You’re acting like a spoiled child. If I neglected you a little …”

“I’m not blind, Claude. No matter how much you claw at each other, you love your daughter more than anything.”

“Well, I’m not blind either, and whether it’s manners or not to know my own daughter was the prettiest girl at the dance, I know it. And I’m damned proud. If you think that has anything whatsoever to do with my love for my first girl, my best girl, you’re talking like the petty-middle-class Morgans you spring from. So shut your mouth. And you, Nikki, get the hell to your room!”

“Well, damned if I’ve done anything, and I won’t be ordered …”

He’d tightened his jaw and given her one of those long, black, no-nonsense looks, and she’d turned and run.

Her mother’s temperament had been passive to begin with, her pace slow—sweet and slow, Nikki remembered, and felt a stabbing little pang in her breast. But as she began to feel out-shone and out-womanned a certain desperation had tricked her into trying to change herself.

She had begun splashing her mouth, suitable for pastel colors, with raw-red lipsticks, and to wear tight, sexy clothes and to try to become silly and coquettish. Trying to sustain a faster pace, she had started drinking too much, too often; it had been worse than futile, it had destroyed her balance and poise and her dignity. Nikki bit her lip, shook her head angrily.

Nikki’s father had taken to jumping on her mother about the change of character, and Nikki had shrilled in to her defense. It had been a mistake; she’d stood up to her father in a way her mother had never been able to do, and it had underscored the changed relationships, that Nikki should presume to stand, the protector, above her mother.

Her mother became petty, tyrannical. The bond between Nikki and her father had become stronger, and he had begun those spankings, and the mother had felt herself being shunted farther out to the edge of their world so that her attempts to assert authority seemed foolish and trivial.

When Nikki had finished high school at fourteen and had wanted to proceed to college, her mother had insisted she wait. That had been reasonable enough, but her mother had insisted that she go to a finishing school, which would have meant repeating courses she had completed, and marking time mentally. Nikki had got herself expelled in one week from the first school, in two weeks from the second.

She refused to go to a third, and demanded that she either go to college or be provided with tutors. She was refused. She couldn’t go to college until she was sixteen, and she couldn’t have a teacher. Nikki had set herself a schedule of encyclopedic reading at home, and locked herself in her room for hours on end, icily determined that during the enforced two years of idleness she would learn seven times as much as she might have done in a formal school.

Her mother had resorted to small snipings … constantly sending up snack trays, or proposing all sorts of diversions, anything that might interrupt her. She’d call in the doctor to convince Nikki she might be ruining her health, or she would pad to Nikki’s room late at night and beg her to get her proper sleep, not the four and five hours she managed on. Nikki’s decision to prepare for “the best” college brought out protests that the school was too serious, that it lacked the proper emphasis on the social, that it was somehow “unladylike.”

Her father, probably as a gesture of loyalty to her mother, taunted Nikki about that “smart little old brain.” But Nikki, unlike Nicolette, didn’t tease worth a damn, and she slashed back, high-tailed and impudent. She’d begun that with him when she was only twelve. He’d remarked, in fact, that her birth as a woman was like a crocodile breaking out of its egg and already hissing and snapping at the world.

Nikki had answered that one with her infuriating newborn impudence, pointing out in a cool, patronizing tone that there was logic in the infant crocodile’s behaviour, inasmuch as it faced a world full of enemies. The logic of crocodile instinct was superior to that of the so-called higher species, such as
homo sapiens
, and provided greater protection than did the parents of the human young, who were fed on tales of Easter bunnies and Santa Clauses and myths about the goodness of mankind. In the face of such vast and irrefutable fact as constant wars throughout history and the current worst war of them all which was absorbing the total energies of every civilized nation and killing millions of men, was not the so-called “love,” in the name of which parents created huge lies for their young, a crippling force and a horrid falsification which left them unprepared for truth and reality?

At first her father had taken these assaults painfully, the idea that his little Nicolette could speak to him in that manner filling him with shocked surprise. He took her precocity for granted and was never impressed with her actual words or their meaning, being too absorbed by her attitude and his own sense of personal injury.

Sometimes he’d look at her during these tirades, break into a big, delighted grin, pull her down on his lap and muss her hair and kiss her forehead and try to enjoy his pretty little Nicolette. Sometimes Nikki would respond, giggling and nuzzling in against him, wanting only the joy of loving him and being loved. But more often she had resisted and stood her ground. One day he had been goaded till he was white-faced mad.

“Now you plant that high tail down on that chair and shut your sassing mouth, because all this high morality you’ve taken to spouting is plain damn lying. You don’t give one tinker’s damn about “mankind.” Who you give a damn about is one Miss Nicolette … pardon,
Nikki …
Duquesne. Now if you want to take pride in that high-shining mind of yours, I would suggest that you begin to use it, instead of parroting thoughts that are totally alien to you.

“Let us test the real strength and honesty of your mind with this trite proposition: if by simply pushing a button you could kill a hundred million unknown Chinese, or men from Mars or whoever, would you do it for the sake of some important advantage to yourself?”

“No.”

“There would be no consequences, no punishment, no guilt. These hundred million people had no real existence for you, and their deaths would not grieve the survivors. Let us say they would have no family or friends who would survive to grieve them. Would you, to get something you needed or wanted intensely, push that little button?”

“I’d push it, I suppose.”

“You know you would. So your grievances come down to this. You ain’t been done right by,” he mocked her.

“I’ve been admirably spoiled and prepared to live in a world that does not exist.”

“You’re reading
The Will To Power
, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t know gentlemen snooped.”

“Now you know. Doesn’t it strike you as inconsistent to be reveling in Nietzche, the intellectual father of the Nazis, while you’re objecting with such zealous purity to ‘mankind’s beastly preoccupation with formal murder’?”

“The Nazis claimed him. He’d disown them. I have to be strong. And he teaches strength.”

“He glorifies brutality!”

“You
won’t
understand him because you have a vested interest in some of the illusions he shatters.”

“All
I’ve
ever done for you is weaken you, cripple you, feed you lies, illusions, eh?”

“I know you didn’t mean it that way, but—”

“But I weakened you?” he demanded.

There was a long, tense silence. Then Nikki blurted, “Yes!”

After a moment her father said with icy formality, “I’m not here to apologize to my daughter for the manner in which I’ve reared her. The end product toward which I strove, miss, was not a crocodile snapping at me and the world, but a
lady!
”

“Youah daughtuh, suh,” she’d mocked his Southern drawl, “has no desiyah to become a layudy. Ladies went out with the minuet.”

“Whatever your immature desires may or may not be, you shall address me—and y’mother—in the tone and manner of a lady.”