Tender Is the Night (11 page)

“But
what’s this?” exclaimed Dick. “You told me you didn’t drink.”

“I
didn’t say I was never going to.”

“What
about your mother?”

“I’m
just going to drink this one glass.” She felt some necessity for it. Dick
drank, not too much, but he drank, and perhaps it would bring her closer to
him, be a part of the equipment for what she had to do. She drank it quickly,
choked and then said, “Besides, yesterday was my birthday—I was eighteen.”

“Why
didn’t you tell us?” they said indignantly.

“I knew
you’d make a fuss over it and go to a lot of trouble.” She finished the
champagne. “So this is the celebration.”

“It most
certainly is not,” Dick assured her. “The dinner tomorrow night is your
birthday party and don’t forget it.
Eighteen—why that’s a
terribly important age.”

“I used
to think until you’re eighteen nothing matters,” said Mary.

“That’s
right,” Abe agreed. “And afterward it’s the same way.”

“Abe
feels that nothing matters till he gets on the boat,” said Mary. “This time he
really has got everything planned out when he gets to
New York
.” She spoke as though she were
tired of saying things that no longer had a meaning for her, as if in reality
the course that she and her husband followed, or failed to follow, had become
merely an intention.

“He’ll
be writing music in
America
and I’ll be working at singing in
Munich
,
so when we get together again there’ll be nothing we can’t do.”

“That’s
wonderful,” agreed Rosemary, feeling the champagne.

“Meanwhile, another touch of champagne for Rosemary.
Then she’ll be more able to
rationalize the acts of her lymphatic glands. They only begin to function at
eighteen.”

Dick
laughed indulgently at Abe, whom he loved, and in whom he had long lost hope:
“That’s medically incorrect and we’re going.”
Catching the faint patronage Abe said lightly:

“Something
tells me I’ll have a new score on Broadway long before you’ve finished your
scientific treatise.”

“I hope
so,” said Dick evenly. “I hope so. I may even abandon what you call my
‘scientific treatise.’”

“Oh, Dick!”
Mary’s voice was startled, was shocked. Rosemary had never before seen
Dick’s face utterly expressionless; she felt that this announcement was something
momentous and she was inclined to exclaim with Mary “Oh, Dick!”

But
suddenly Dick laughed again, added to his remark “—abandon it for another one,”
and got up from the table.

“But
Dick, sit down. I want to know—”

“I’ll
tell you some time. Good night, Abe. Good night, Mary.”

“Good
night, dear Dick.” Mary smiled as if she were going to be perfectly happy
sitting there on the almost deserted boat. She was a brave, hopeful woman and
she was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person
or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path, and sometimes
realizing with discouragement how deep in him the guarded secret of her
direction
lay
. And yet an air of luck clung about her,
as if she were a sort of token. . . .

XV

“What is
it you are giving up?” demanded Rosemary, facing Dick earnestly in the taxi.

“Nothing of importance.”

“Are you
a scientist?”

“I’m a
doctor of medicine.”

“Oh-h!”
she smiled delightedly. “My father was a doctor too. Then why don’t you—” she
stopped.

“There’s
no mystery. I didn’t disgrace myself at the height of my career, and
hide away
on the
Riviera
.
I’m just not
practising
. You can’t tell
,
I’ll probably
practise
again
some day
.”

Rosemary
put up her face quietly to be kissed. He looked at her for a moment as if he
didn’t understand. Then holding her in the hollow of his arm he rubbed his
cheek against her cheek’s softness, and then looked down at her for another
long moment.

“Such a
lovely child,” he said gravely.

She
smiled up at him; her hands playing conventionally with the lapels of his coat.
“I’m in love with you and Nicole. Actually that’s my secret—I can’t even talk
about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful
you are. Honestly—I love you and Nicole—I do.”

—So many
times he had heard this—even the formula was the same.

Suddenly
she came toward him, her youth vanishing as she passed inside the focus of his
eyes and he had kissed her breathlessly as if she were any age at all. Then she
lay back against his arm and sighed.

“I’ve
decided to give you up,” she said.

Dick
started—had he said anything to imply that she possessed any part of him?

“But
that’s very mean,” he managed to say lightly, “
just
when I was getting interested.”

“I’ve
loved you so—” As if it had been for years. She was weeping a little now. “I’ve
loved you so-o-o.”

Then he
should have laughed, but he heard himself saying, “Not only are you beautiful
but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everything you do, like pretending to
be in love or pretending to be shy gets across.”

In the
dark cave of the taxi, fragrant with the perfume Rosemary had bought with
Nicole, she came close again, clinging to him. He kissed her without enjoying
it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her
eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She
clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the
innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked
beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She
did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when
she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her
without question or regret.

Her room
in the hotel was diagonally across from theirs and nearer the elevator. When
they reached the door she said suddenly:

“I know
you don’t love me—I don’t expect it. But you said I should have told you about
my birthday. Well, I did, and now for my birthday present I want you to come
into my room a minute while I tell you something. Just one minute.”

They
went in and he closed the door, and Rosemary stood close to him, not touching
him. The night had drawn the color from her face—she was pale as pale now, she
was a white carnation left after a dance.

“When
you smile—” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s
silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby
teeth.”

But he
was too late—she came close up against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take
me.”

“Take
you where?”

Astonishment
froze him rigid.

“Go on,”
she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t
like it—I never expected to—I’ve always hated to think about it but now I
don’t. I want you to.”

She was
astonished at herself—she had never imagined she could talk like that. She was
calling on things she had read, seen, dreamed through a decade of convent
hours. Suddenly she knew too that it was one of her greatest
rôles
and she flung herself into it more passionately.

“This is
not as it should be,” Dick deliberated. “Isn’t it just the champagne? Let’s
more or less forget it.”

“Oh, no, NOW.
I want you to do it now, take me, show me, I’m absolutely yours and I
want to be.”

“For one
thing, have you thought how much it would hurt Nicole?”

“She
won’t know—this won’t have anything to do with her.”

He
continued kindly.

“Then
there’s the fact that I love Nicole.”

“But you
can love more than just one person, can’t you? Like I love Mother and I love
you—more. I love you more now.”

“—the
fourth place you’re not in love with me but you might be afterwards, and that
would begin your life with a terrible mess.”

“No, I
promise I’ll never see you again. I’ll get Mother and go to
America
right
away.”

He
dismissed this. He was remembering too vividly the youth and freshness of her
lips. He took another tone.

“You’re
just in that mood.”

“Oh,
please, I don’t care even if I had a baby. I could go into
Mexico
like a
girl at the studio. Oh, this is so different from anything I ever thought—I
used to hate it when they kissed me seriously.” He saw she was still under the
impression that it must happen. “Some of them had great big teeth, but you’re
all different and beautiful. I want you to do it.”

“I
believe you think people just kiss some way and you want me to kiss you.”

“Oh,
don’t tease me—I’m not a baby. I know you’re not in love with me.” She was
suddenly humble and quiet. “I didn’t expect that much. I know I must seem just
nothing to you.”

“Nonsense.
But you seem young to me.” His thoughts added, “— there’d be so much to teach
you.”

Rosemary
waited, breathing eagerly till Dick said: “And lastly things aren’t arranged so
that this could be as you want.”

Her face
drooped with dismay and disappointment and Dick said automatically, “We’ll have
to simply—” He stopped himself, followed her to the bed, sat down beside her
while she wept. He was suddenly confused, not about the ethics of the matter,
for the impossibility of it was
sheerly
indicated
from all angles but simply confused, and for a moment his usual grace, the
tensile strength of his balance, was absent.

“I knew
you wouldn’t,” she sobbed. “It was just a forlorn hope.”

He stood
up.

“Good
night, child. This is a damn shame. Let’s drop it out of the picture.” He gave
her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. “So many people are going
to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact,
emotionally too. That’s an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?” She looked up at him
as he took a step toward the door; she looked at him without the slightest idea
as to what was in his head, she saw him take another step in slow motion, turn
and look at her again, and she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him,
wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf
him; she saw his hand fall on the doorknob. Then she gave up and sank back on
the bed. When the door closed she got up and went to the mirror, where she
began brushing her hair, sniffling a little. One hundred and fifty strokes
Rosemary gave it, as usual, then a hundred and fifty more. She brushed it until
her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing. . . .

XVI

She woke
up cooled and shamed. The sight of her beauty in the mirror did not reassure
her but only awakened the ache of yesterday and a letter, forwarded by her
mother, from the boy who had taken her to the Yale prom last fall, which
announced his presence in Paris was no help—all that seemed far away. She
emerged from her room for the ordeal of meeting the Divers weighted with a
double trouble. But it was hidden by a sheath as impermeable as Nicole’s when
they met and went together to a series of fittings. It was consoling, though,
when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: “Most people think everybody
feels about them much more violently than they actually do—they think other
people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
Yesterday in her expansiveness Rosemary would have resented that remark—to-day
in her desire to minimize what had happened she welcomed it eagerly. She
admired Nicole for her beauty and her wisdom, and also for the first time in
her life she was jealous. Just before leaving
Gausse’s
hotel her mother had said in that casual tone, which Rosemary knew concealed
her most significant opinions, that Nicole was a great beauty, with the frank
implication that Rosemary was not. This did not bother Rosemary, who had only
recently been allowed to learn that she was even personable; so that her
prettiness never seemed exactly her own but rather an acquirement, like her
French. Nevertheless, in the taxi she looked at Nicole, matching herself
against her. There were all the potentialities for romantic love in that lovely
body and in the delicate mouth, sometimes tight, sometimes expectantly half
open to the world. Nicole had been a beauty as a young girl and she would be a
beauty later when her skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones—the
essential structure was there. She had been white-Saxon-blonde but she was more
beautiful now that her hair had darkened than when it had been like a cloud and
more beautiful than she.