Nothing That Meets the Eye (22 page)

“I'm afraid she's had too much excitement, Dr. Reese. It's all our fault,” Margaret said.

“Well, well,” said Dr. Reese, holding Agnes's thin limp wrist.

Agnes turned her eyes miserably to one side, and saw Mowgli on his pillow before the gas stove, his tousled white head lifted a little, eying Margaret the intruder resentfully. She wanted to snap the thermometer between her teeth. Surely her inner fury would send her temperature higher. Why had Klett gone? But then if Dr. Reese was being so silly, and she might have known he would be, seeing Margaret again, Margaret who had never been sick a day in her life—

“Come in,” Dr. Reese called to the door.

Klett entered with a glass in his hand. “Mrs. Steinach asked me to bring this up,” he said solemnly.

Agnes knew what it was, sodium bicarbonate for possible indigestion after the large supper. Only she hadn't eaten it, she really hadn't! She stirred her legs impatiently beneath the covers.

“Pains?” Dr. Reese asked.

Agnes nodded.

“Dr. Reese,” Margaret began concernedly, “you know there must be something one can do—or find out—”

Dr. Reese squinted his eyes, pursed his mouth. Agnes noticed he dandled his watch, got out the sedative powder more bustlingly than usual. He turned a professional face to Margaret as he poised the powder envelope over the glass. “My dear, we've done everything humanly possible. Our plucky patient here . . .” He looked at her, then back to Margaret, nodding. “Your mother knows our efforts, our failures and our successes.”

Agnes relaxed and stretched her feet into the cool corners of the bed. Dr. Reese's presence was reassuring. He was, she knew, on her side. She looked at Klett, who stood with hands folded in front of him, like a young knight resting on his sword, earnest, attentive. He could not have behaved more fittingly, Agnes thought, more like a gentleman.

“Fever?” asked Margaret as the doctor read the thermometer.

Dr. Reese only looked up at her with an ambiguous sour expression. “Just try to sleep, my dear,” he said to Agnes. “No reading tonight, eh? Not Ivanhoe or anything else.”

Agnes nodded. Then, as they all turned to leave her room, “Klett?”

“Yes?”

“Would you . . . play something quietly for me?”

“Of course.” He smiled, his face brightening as it had downstairs.

“But not for very long, Agnie,” Margaret told her. “You do need rest.”

Agnes lay then and waited. How swiftly time would pass, she thought, if there would always be Klett in the house! With a feline movement, she turned herself to brush with her fingertips the two or three books atop her bedtable. Somehow she always wanted to plunge immediately into reading after Dr. Reese's visits, but tonight she did not. Why, with Klett in the house even Ivanhoe seemed almost dispensable! What need had she now to read of chivalry and romance, of tournaments and fanfare, gonfalons borne on stirrup-set staffs, the smash of armor, and the kiss the mortally wounded knight blows his mistress in the stands? Nevertheless she took the book and laid it on her bosom, composed her hands gently upon it, and fancied herself Rebecca as she appeared in some of the illustrations, jet of hair and white as snow, her figure pliant even in heroic posture as on the battlements of Torquilstone. There was, therefore, no hope but in passive fortitude, and in that strong reliance on Heaven natural to great and generous characters, Agnes thought, memory supplying with perfect accuracy the sentence she felt best suited this moment. But Agnes was, in fact, rather plump. Her long limbs suggested gauntness, yet her body itself was broad and even covered with flabby flesh on the lower ribs. It was as though years of lying in bed had flattened her as some types of fish are flattened one way or the other from intense pressures.

It was an old high school text of Ivanhoe that she treasured, its navy blue cloth and pasteboard covers splayed at the corners, the edges of its pages adorned with nicknames and initials, a skull and crossbones. In the back were questions on each chapter, and Agnes had read the book so often she could answer every one. Now, waiting for Klett to begin, the image of herself as the beautiful Rebecca took form in her mind, in long white dress and barefoot. She had been cast as Rebecca in the stage play the graduating class of Central High School was to give, but her breakdown had come only a few days before, had in fact prevented her from taking some of her final examinations. Suddenly, with a pang, Walter Mergental's face, healthily round and tanned, smiling, the face of an idealistic twenty-two-year-old medical student, rose above the white collar of an intern's tunic, and just as suddenly she knew why she had thought of him—Klett had reminded her! The roundness of their jaws was the same, and though their eyes were quite different, Walter's blue and Klett's brown, they both had the same curve at the back of their heads, the same rise of light brown hair above the forehead. For an instant, Agnes did not know whether she felt ecstatic or miserable. She had not thought of Walter in years. She did not want to think of him. They had been engaged, but a few days before her graduation he had come to her and broken it off, giving no reason except, stammeringly, that he did not think he loved her enough. She had wept inconsolably for days. Foolish child that she had been! She had not wanted to see anyone, not even her closest friends. It had been a complete nervous breakdown, even Dr. Reese had admitted that. He had been worried enough then! Foolish, foolish child! No, she would not think of Walter again. He was married now, with four children. Would she want four—No, she would not think of Walter.

But what was keeping Klett? She listened but she heard no piano. Someone came up the stairs.

Margaret opened the door slowly. “Agnie? Asleep?”

“No. Good heavens, no.”

“Klett's finishing his supper. Wouldn't you go to sleep better without music? He'll play all night with a little encouragement.”

“Let him. I love it.”

“All right.” She laughed softly. “Agnie, haven't you got too much heat with the floor vent and the gas stove, too?”

“I like it.”

“How about covering up and letting me change the air? All it needs is a fresh—”

“The warmth is good for my back,” Agnes said, but she sounded shorter than she intended. “Dr. Reese said so himself.”

Margaret's face flushed, Agnes did not know whether from the heat or irritation. She watched Margaret walk to the dresser, look at the photograph of them with their mother on Lake Michigan beach when both of them wore pinafores. Suddenly Margaret's presence galled her. She wished Margaret might drop in a faint. No one had asked her to come in anyway.

“I think Dr. Reese is leading you on,” Margaret said quietly, without looking at her. “Don't you see it?”

“What?—What on earth do you mean?”

“Oh, I know he's the family doctor and a fine old gentleman and so forth. But I think he's very fond of visiting the Steinach house.”

“Why, I don't know what you're talking about, Margaret.” And indeed, Agnes found her mind quite blank.

Margaret turned away. “Then forget it. Can I get you anything?” she asked at the door.

Klett, Agnes wanted to say. You can send Klett up after he plays. But she knew her sister was trying to keep them apart, was pettily but fiercely jealous that she and Klett had liked each other. “Nothing,” she said.

She waited with her eyes tightly closed, waiting, waiting until she thought she could not wait a second longer, when the first notes of Chopin's Minute Waltz, light and lightly played, found its way to her ears. Then she smiled and relaxed. He is here now, playing for me, she thought. She saw him in profile as she had seen him downstairs, the light from the pink-shaded lamp falling on his forehead, which bulged between the brows and again in two lobes near his hairline. This was Klett, the Chopinesque young man who would one day win tumultuous applause in Carnegie, in Albert Hall, in the capitals of Europe, who would one day write in his memoirs of the strange and beautiful semi-invalid for whom he had played in the autumn of his nineteenth year. He would describe poetically the poetic mood she inspired in him, perhaps, perhaps, the beginning of a love for her.

Now he played one of Wagner's Wesendonk songs. Träume . . . and now Im Treibhaus. She must remember to thank him, to let him know she recognized them. How lovely it all was! And on her piano!

Agnes awakened to bright sunlight in her room, and remembering the day before, remembering falling asleep to Klett's playing, she smiled and wriggled deeper into her down pillow. Absently she ran her fingers through her long hair so it would spread about her head, like Botticelli's Birth of Venus, she always thought. And she got up and started toward the cheval glass, changed her mind and went first to the basin in the corner, where she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She looked at her teeth in the mirror. They were better-shaped than Margaret's, she thought, and very white, though hardly different from her skin. She put on lipstick and powder at the dresser mirror, then returned to the cheval glass, which she unpinned and set in her bed, propped against one of the pineapple-topped footposts. She amused herself for several moments in taking various poses with her head and hands. Favorite was the partially averted face, eyes drowsily half closed, one hand across the top of her blanket and the other arm out and relaxed at her side.

“Miss Agnes?”

“Just a minute, Alantha!” She took the mirror back to the chest, fastened it, then called, “Come in,” and walked slowly back to her bed as though from the dresser.

“How're you feeling this morning, Miss Agnes?” Alantha smiled, mechanically but warmly enough, as she did every morning. She set the breakfast tray on the metal support that pulled from under the bedtable.

“Much better, thank you, Alantha.” She found herself, actually, interested in the breakfast tray, and did not mind that Alantha noticed. “You might tell our guest, Mr. Buchanan, that his music last night was delightful!”

“I will when he comes back,” Alantha said. “He's taken Miss Margaret and your mother to town in the car.”

Agnes thrilled as she had when he played her piano. “Has he really?”

“Oh, and he told me to say he hopes you feel well enough to come downstairs today and play the piano with him,” Alantha told her as though repeating his very words.

“Did he!”

An hour later, Klett knocked and came into her room with a bouquet of pansies. He looked happier, Agnes thought, more sure of himself. And once more his wide, boyish smile seemed to change his whole being.

“Good morning! Alantha told me you were awake. Do you like these? They're very late ones.”

“How like one of the Barrett brothers you are!” Agnes smiled, holding the bouquet beneath her chin. It was the fulfillment of an old desire, to see striding toward her a clear-faced young man like one of the Barrett brothers who had flowed in such abundance, with such an air of devotion, into Elizabeth's sickroom.

“Do you think so?” Klett smiled back, obviously pleased.

“Why, even your clothes are like theirs! You are like something out of another century!”

In the cheval glass that Agnes so often gazed at herself in, Klett touched his silk cravat quickly, tugged down the rather short Tyrolean jacket, while Agnes smoothed out her hair again upon the pillow. She knew well enough how she looked at that moment, centered in the four-poster bed made more massive by her own slenderness, so that her thin oval face, the focus of the entire composition, was almost hard to find, like the frailest white flower in a dancing field. She saw Klett's eyes linger shyly over the expanse of pale blue counterpane until his eyes met hers and she reassured him with a smile.

Klett practiced the rest of the morning and after lunch fingered out phrases, with long pauses, of something he was evidently composing. Perhaps the “Imaginary Adventures” he had told her about, Agnes thought, his series of tone poems. But though she tried hard, and prepared something to say about them, the phrases and the pauses could not hold her interest. She found it more amusing to dream, while Klett provided the musical background, of how pleasant it would be if he stayed on in their house. If he could only go to school in Chicago and commute from Evanston. She might suggest it to Margaret. Probably Klett did not have much money and such an arrangement might help him. How charming of him not to have money and to be so passionately given to his art! How happy it would make her to have him in the guest room, to cater to his tastes and foibles, to play the piano with him on days when she felt well enough.

Once during the afternoon, when the doorbell rang, she heard Klett strike a final cadence and run upstairs to his room. It was a neighbor calling to see Margaret. She smiled at his show of temperament.

That afternoon Agnes washed her hair and set it in rag curlers while she bathed and manicured her nails with colorless polish. Klett called on her when tea downstairs was half over, bearing a cup for her on one of the broad yellow saucers on which he had arranged marmalade toasts, a petit four and a tiny wedge of fruitcake.