The Theoretical Foot (13 page)

vii

When they rounded the last curve of the road, Nan saw Dan Tennant leaning on the iron gate. She glanced quickly at Lucy.

Oh, I hope he goes before we get there, she wished fervently. Will he notice that Lucy has been crying? Will Lucy lilt over him, the way she usually does? Will he stop me and make me talk? No, no! I want to go to my room and lie on the bed. I am thinking of something.

But Daniel stood resolutely there and—as they approached him—Nan felt her face smiling. She looked up into serious deep eyes, which were so ridiculously like Sara's green ones, yet different because of his maleness.

“Hello, Dan.”

“Hello,” he said. “Hello, Lucy.”

There was an awkward pause. Finally Lucy sniffed and smiled gaily and said, “Well! Well, I don't know about you young people but I must go and get ready for Sara's little entertainment. Don't stay out here too long in the cool of the evening, Nan darling.”

She hurried away, her head held high. Nan looked at Dan half in apology, half in amusement. He raised an eyebrow.

“The sun still rides the heavens, ma'am,” he said in his deepest voice. “The cool of the evening is yet far from us. Mrs. Pendleton exaggerates somewhat.”

Nan looked up at him again as he stood leaning his bare elbows easily upon the wall. She then came through the gate and stood beside him. She was impatient, also bored by his queer unformed
pomposity, but he excited her. She was almost startled to admit that she liked to be near him. He was clean and he smelled good, like all the Tennants. She leaned nearer, sniffing imperceptibly, enjoying herself in a minor way and at the same time hating herself for hoping her nearness would upset him.

For a moment or two they said nothing. Then Dan swung around abruptly and cleared his throat.

“Lake's nice now, isn't it?” He sounded grumpy.

Nan turned with him and stood leaning against the warm stone wall without touching him.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. Inside she said, I really am a bitch.

The idea was surprising to her—it made her feel almost complacent. Then she was ashamed of herself and although she thought she wanted to be quite alone in her room for a time before she dressed, she said warmly, “Do you want to help me find the one blossom of Queen Anne's lace, Daniel? It must be tall and about three inches across.”

He looked down at her and raised one eyebrow slightly and answered in a stiff way, “Yes, I'd rather like to, thank you.”

Suddenly Daniel smiled.

For a dreadful moment she wondered if he thought she was a silly old woman, but now Nan felt all right again and she took his hand.

“Hurry then,” she said. “It's growing late. Lucy will scold me if I keep dinner waiting. Party tonight, too, and I have a new dress for it.”

They slid down the steep bank instead of walking properly out along the path, Nan feeling excited and happy. The shadows lay long and blue on the meadow. Birds called softly and flew shudderingly from one heavy bow to another. There was the faint smell of rotting plums.

“This is the best part of the day,” she murmurred. She started to pull her hand from his, but he held onto her. His fingers felt chilled now and sticky suddenly.

“Nan,” he said harshly.

Nan looked up at him and felt terribly sorry for his pain. She knew he was not really in love with her but that the world here at this moment, so beautiful, must seem terrible to him.

“Nan,” he said, looking down at her and scowling, holding her fingers in his own moist hand, “do you know anything about:

‘Blue-veined and yellowish,

Ambiguous to clasp,

And secret as a fish,

And sudden as an asp . . .'

And so on and so forth, something like that?”

Nan slid her hand. Her mind raced as furiously as an important mouse among all the phrases and old stanzas that were stacked up in neat tremendous piles in her memory. She sometimes hated the way she went on saving them, more and more. They were good. They were apt. If she gave herself time, as now, she could always pull out the quotation for a given moment. She knew all this to be impressive and once or twice this summer she had felt that perhaps young Daniel was teasing her, trying to catch her out. And once or twice she'd been almost piqued to find that his brain, so much younger and less ordered, held line after line of some of her best reserve of more or less immortal doggerel. So now she looked sharply at him in the soft twilight, before she went on in a slow voice:

       
“It doubles to a fist,

       
Or droops composed and chill;

       
The socket of my wrist

       
Controls it at my will.

       
It leaps to my command,

       
Tautened or trembling lax;

       
It lies within your hand

       
Anatomy of wax.”

Her voice sank to a whisper. She could not hear Daniel breathing although he stood very nearby, but the sound of the
little brook came clearly to her, borne from the end of the meadow on a current of blueing air.

“There's more,” Dan said finally.

“Oh, oh yes, something or other . . . I forget and then:

       
“Now, compact as stone,

       
My hand preserves a shape

       
Too utterly its own.”

“And now come help me, Daniel,” she said, “or it will be dark and I must find one more flower. Come on.”

Nan ran across the grass without looking back at him. Why had he made her go on? What might he think of her for so obviously leaving out that stanza? Why had he thought of that poem at all?

       
If I had seen a thorn

       
Broken to grape vine bud;

       
If I'd ever borne

       
Child of our mingled blood;

       
Elixirs might escape . . .

The little brat! Nan felt too cross and disappointed. Why did he push his own youthful agonies impertinently into her life? She wanted things to be as they had been earlier in the summer, easy and silly. She remembered with nostalgia the giddy way Dan and Honor made her feel and how she'd laughed and how poor Lucy had disapproved to see her young again with them. And now things were growing solemn. She wished parts of time would stand still. It was tiresome to have Daniel this way.

It was an interruption. She was waiting for something. She knew this now with her whole being. Daniel and his quotations and his would-be sardonic face above his long delicate body were keeping her from waiting as she longed too. She felt a dreadful impatience and was frightened to find herself on the edge of screaming at him to go away. Be gone! she wanted to yell.

What would he think? She smiled involuntarily seeing his horror, knowing how his dream of her as the moon creature, the goddess in an eggshell, would be torn apart by her shrill shout.

“You win, Nan, that time anyway,” he observed. Was he mocking her again? “Your fund of famous quotations, ma'am, is limitless. I'll catch you before the summer's over, though. What will you do for me if I win?”

This is better, she thought, looking up easily now at his brooding young face and his twinkling eyes. He's stopped being solemn, but I wish he'd go. Go, Dan, hurry, leave me!

“Dan, I was going to ask you . . .” She hesitated, appreciating the timid and ingenious note in her own voice, savoring half-ironically the subtle girlishness. “Dan, would you mind taking me out sometime this winter? I mean, to places like Harlem, and . . .”

“Oh God, Nan! That would be marvelous!” His voice cracked, he cleared it in a perfunctory way. “What about . . . well . . .?”

And as he talked, Nan felt almost excited with the part of herself that was not willing him still to leave. It would be fun to see strange places with this boy and to hear music played in the smoky little rooms she'd read about.

“What would Lucy say?” she asked suddenly and they looked at each other and the darkening air and they laughed and laughed. Oh, he was charming, such an adorable boy! She had such fun laughing with him in the meadow there, and everywhere, about La Prairie!

She was brought up short, surprised when he stopped and said, “Nan, here's the flower.”

He bent down and pulled up one stock of Queen Ann's lace, root and all, and thrust it into her hand. Then without looking at her, he said in a stiff voice, “Will you dance with me tonight?” then,

“Do you mind if I run up to the house instead of walking back with

you?” and he was gone.

She looked after Daniel loping away as if he'd been bee-stung under the tree toward the path. Here I was wishing he'd go, wondering how to tell him to, and now he's gone! And I am a little hurt; really, he's odd. And I do love him for going. Maybe he felt me
telling him to go. Or maybe he suddenly needed to go to the toilet. Anyway, thank you, Daniel.

She smiled dreamily, instead holding the coarse stem of the flower in both her hands, looking down at the root of it all filled with the earth against the stiff yellow of her dangling hat.

I must stand very still, she thought.

viii

The little brook was louder now but the birds were silent. One bee whizzing through the cool sweet air made a strong sound that lasted in Nan's ears long after it had vanished. She stood, as if naked, feeling the currents of the evening flow around her as tangibly as silk. And her eyes saw as they had never seen before.

They saw the lake that she'd often looked down into and the far blackness of the French shoreline and the old trees bending close above her. They saw grass about her knees and the spires of wild sage disappearing with their blue blossoms into blue air. The frosty web of lace in her hand, dry and alive; the bell of her yellow skirt; the soft curves of her own breasts—she looked down at all this as she had done and as she would do again and knew that never before had she seen and never again would she see. She knew, too, that all her life from this moment would be different.

At last she was
seeing clearly
as she had so long prayed to see, her whole being transfigured, lifted up in revelation. She knew now with the knowledge that poured through her like mighty music, that to see clearly means to love without demand. It means to love selflessly.

She knew that all her life she loved possessively, hungrily, absorbingly, and that now such foul destructive hunger was gone from her. She knew her tormenting love for Timothy and her preoccupation with their past together had been a long escape. And escape would never more be necessary for now she was free,
unhampered by a greedy soul. The love and gratitude of other people was no longer food for her. Demanding nothing, she would never more be lonely.

She felt light, bodiless almost. The trees, the air, the far mountains seemed to vibrate above and around her in a kind of ecstatic dance. She sank to her knees. She was as empty as a shell.

Finally she began to think again, but more easily than ever before in her life. She knew she must tell Timothy what had happened. He would be glad. He would give thanks with her, to see her at last free from him, as he'd always been free of her. Now she knew that until this moment in the meadow he loved her more truly than she'd been capable of loving him, and he would rejoice to know her liberated.

Yes, she must tell him. At last she knew what she had been waiting for all this beautiful, difficult summer in the strange peace she'd found here. Her feeling of gaiety and easiness and health, stronger than since she was a child, had been a preparation. She must hurry and tell her beloved brother that she'd cast out the devil of loving him the wrong way. She was free of him. At last she loved him, and all things, truly.