This Side of Glory (17 page)

“That’s all I’m asking. Thank you, Kester, thank you.”

Eleanor listened for the click of the other two receivers before replacing her own on its hook. When she did so she found that she had been holding it so tight her fingers were stiff.

“And I was
nice
to that woman,” she said aloud.

She was trembling with anger. To have stumbled across one of Kester’s juvenile sins was not particularly startling, but Eleanor was amazed and wrathful that Isabel should be reaching now into the enclosure of his marriage and that Kester should not have realized at once what she was doing. “Won’t you put up with my dismay for just one afternoon? Kester, I need you!” Anybody but a fool, she thought, could have translated that into “Now that I’ve seen you again, Kester, I want you!”

Hearing the clatter of a horse’s hoofs in the avenue she went to the window and saw Kester riding toward the gates. The rain had stopped, and evidently thinking she was still in town he had not looked for the car. With characteristic belief in his ability to eat his cake and have it too, Kester was going over to hear Isabel pour out her melodious troubles. Eleanor twisted the cord that held back the curtain. She was remembering, as she had remembered while she listened to their conversation: the evening she had promised to marry Kester, herself asking, “Were any of those girls—well, important?” and his answering, “There was a girl who was temporarily rather important. But it didn’t last long… . I haven’t seen her for years.” She had never referred to that again. Kester had given her no reason to doubt that he loved her.

And she had no reason, she assured herself, to doubt it now. Whatever had taken place between him and Isabel, it had been over, at least as far as Kester was concerned. Recalling his half of the telephone conversation she realized that it had been considerably less than half. There was nothing he had said to which she herself could take exception, nothing but his yielding to Isabel’s importunities that he visit her. But Isabel—Eleanor doubled her fists savagely.

She was thinking, Isabel and I are very different. I couldn’t possibly have talked to anybody as Isabel talked to him. I can go after what I want but I can’t sneak up on it. I’m forthright. She’s subtle. That’s what the women of Kester’s world have always been—clever, soft, sinuous, never asking for exactly what they want, asking for something easy and then working around for what they want so cunningly that men think they’re giving it of their own accord. And here I was thinking of Isabel as a cosmopolite from the European capitals. Why, she’s really one of these magnolias that bloom all over the old Southern tradition and hide their tough stems under frail white petals. She was brought up to that and seven years in Europe couldn’t make her forget it.

All right, Isabel. Be as lovely and helpless as you please. But I’m Kester’s wife, not one of his conquests. And you’d better leave him alone.

Suddenly she was ashamed of the violence of her reaction. Crossing the room she looked at herself in the mirror. Behave yourself, Eleanor, she mentally ordered her reflection. You’re not one of these delicate females so unsure of themselves that they quiver with jealousy every time their husbands look at a pretty woman. You can take care of yourself. Kester didn’t tell you anything about Isabel because he didn’t think it was important, but now that she’s trying to make it important he’ll tell you. Only he probably won’t if after spending an afternoon with that exquisite creature he sees you with your hair looking like a rat-nest and a snag in your skirt.

Eleanor took a bath and got dressed. She braided her hair carefully —Kester liked her best with a coronet braid around her head—and she put on a dress of navy blue serge with a starched white Medici collar that stood flatteringly across the back of her neck. It had been one of his favorite dresses, bought last year just before her discovery that she could not afford to buy clothes, and this was the first time she had worn it this fall. Looking herself over in the glass, she was well pleased. Crisp tailored clothes suited her.

The first fire of the season danced in the parlor, and as Eleanor sat down with a magazine Dilcy brought in the baby, adorable in her pink rompers, with dark brown curls fluffed all over her head. Cornelia was playing with two rag dolls. Eleanor smiled lovingly as she watched her.

She was looking at the war-map in the
Literary Digest,
trying to find Pforzheim and Przemysl, when she heard the horse approaching. A moment later Kester, who never walked when he could run, was bounding up the front steps. She heard him in the hall telling one of the boys to put up the horse, and then he opened the parlor door. Eleanor looked up from the map.

“Hello, darling,” she greeted him.

Kester grinned at her and at Cornelia playing with her dolls on the floor. Cornelia looked up, and very clearly she said,

“Fader.”

Eleanor sprang up as Kester swooped to grab the baby from the floor. Together they exclaimed,

“Did you hear her? She can talk!”

Kester threw Cornelia up toward the ceiling and caught her, laughing with ineffable joy, while Cornelia shouted and crowed, every now and then repeating her triumph by exclaiming, “Fader, fader, fader,” aware somehow from her elders’ reaction that this achievement was quite the most notable event of her lifetime. Holding her on one arm Kester flung open the door.

“Dilcy!” he called. “Come hear the little miss! She can talk!”

Dilcy came running, and so did Cameo and Mamie and Bessie and every other Negro in the house, and Cornelia said her one word proudly, and while she was being given her supper everybody hovered around to listen on the chance that she might say something else. While Eleanor and Kester were having their own supper they talked of nothing but how pleased they were, with Kester exclaiming he had had no idea it was such fun to be a father and he’d like to have about five more children, and Eleanor saying all right, only that would take a lot of patience. It was not until Kester had finally told her good night that Eleanor, standing in front of the bureau to brush her hair, remembered that he had not mentioned his visit to Isabel.

But after all, she asked, how could he? Though he might have meant to tell her this evening, Cornelia’s looking up like that to say “Father” would have swept everything else out of his mind. And to be sure, Cornelia’s first word would be Father. It wouldn’t by any chance have been Mother.

“For pity’s sake,” Eleanor exclaimed to her reflection, “what’s happening to me? Am I getting jealous of my own child? Nearly all girls love their fathers best. I do. I wonder if my mother minds? I ought to be glad Kester adores Cornelia so, when before she was born I dreaded telling him because he’s so light-headed I thought he’d regard a baby as a nuisance. And I certainly can’t blame her for loving him. Everybody loves him. I don’t even blame that Valcour-Schimmelpfeng woman for wanting him—wouldn’t any woman want him? He’ll tell me about her tomorrow.”

But the next day Kester did not speak of Isabel. He spent most of the morning reading articles about the cotton situation, and told Eleanor that the governors of the Southern states, in conference in Washington, had decided to urge all planters to substitute food crops on at least half their usual cotton acreage next spring, so as to give the country a chance to use the surplus already on hand. That afternoon Neal Sheramy called for him and they set out for the movies on their weekly expedition to watch Pearl White tumble off cliffs in the rôle of the imperiled but indestructible Pauline. After they had gone Eleanor sat by her desk, drumming her fingers on a ledger and wondering if even Kester’s happy-go-lucky mind could hold the idea that she had no right to know if he was renewing an acquaintance with a woman who used to be his mistress.

During the two weeks that followed Kester said nothing about Isabel, and for the first time in her life Eleanor kept silence on a subject that vitally concerned her. Her perplexity began to take precedence over everything else in her thoughts. She did not know if Kester had visited Isabel again, but whenever he left the house alone she wondered if that was where he had gone. Kester remarked on her abstraction, blaming it on the cotton crisis, and was glad when Bob and Violet invited them to a party. She needed diversion, he told her, to buoy her spirits.

Eleanor went to the party, but she did not enjoy it. Isabel was there, in a black dress of exquisite lines that made Eleanor more than ever conscious of her own tired wardrobe. The conversation drifted to old times—birthday parties, Sunday School. “Remember how Miss Agatha Durham made us memorize the names of all the books of the Bible?” Violet asked.

“Kester won the prize,” said Bob.

“A silk bookmark with a motto embroidered on it,” said Kester, and they all laughed.

“I can remember you now,” Isabel said to him, “in your white linen suit and your hair very neatly parted, standing up piously to recite the Minor Prophets—” she folded her hands and cast her eyes toward the ceiling—“Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.”

“How on earth do you remember them?” Kester asked.

“Miss Agatha’s training,” she returned. “Or maybe because you looked so cute.”

They laughed again, and somebody mentioned the games they used to play on the levee behind the cottonfields. The talk had the gay, tender quality of talk among grownups investing their childhood memories with luster, and even if Isabel had not been there Eleanor would have felt out of it, because she had no childhood memories to share with them. Isabel sat at the piano. Turning to the keyboard she began to pick out a tune. “Remember this? ‘Chickama, chickama, craney crow—’”

At length, when they told the others good night, Kester was in high spirits. “Wasn’t that a grand party?” he asked as they started home.

“I haven’t anything to talk about to those people,” said Eleanor.

“Silly. They all like you.”

Watching the trees move past the car, Eleanor wondered if Kester’s friends had accepted her because they liked her or because they liked Kester. She warned herself that she was getting too introspective for her own good. By the time they reached Ardeith she had decided that trustful bravery might have been all right for any other woman of Kester’s circle but it was too remote from her own nature for her to keep it up any longer. “Are you sleepy?” she asked Kester as they went up the stairs.

“No, why?”

“Come in here,” said Eleanor, opening the door of her room. “I want to ask you something.”

Kester followed her in and sat down. “You look mighty grave, honeybug,” he remarked as he lit a cigarette. “What’s the trouble?”

The last time she had heard him call anybody honeybug was when he said it to Isabel on the phone. Eleanor sat down on the bedstep and looked up at him.

“Kester, I wish you’d tell me about Isabel Valcour.”

He gave her a puzzled frown. After a moment’s pause he asked, “What nonsense has somebody been talking to you?”

“Nobody has said anything. You don’t think I discuss my private life with a whole lot of people!”

“No,” he returned smiling, “I can’t imagine your doing that. What do you want me to tell you?”

Eleanor looked down at her hands. They were like the rest of her, lean, hard-muscled, capable. She raised her eyes again to Kester.

“I’m rather ashamed of myself,” she said frankly, “for not asking you about this before. But I thought you’d tell me of your own accord. And I’m rather ashamed of you for not doing it. You and Isabel had an affair before she was married, didn’t you?—and the day after we met her at the Hunt Club dance she called you up and reminded you of it and asked you to come to see her. And you went.”

Kester tossed his cigarette into the fireplace and rested his chin on his hand. He regarded her with a certain regretful surprise, but he did not look guilty.

“So that’s what’s been the matter with you lately,” he said.

“Yes. Don’t you think you should have told me?”

“I suppose so. But I’d like to know,” he added coolly, “what sort of detective work you’ve been doing.”

“I heard her talk to you that day. I was at this phone here.”

He gave a low whistle. “And you,” he said, “are the most honest person I’ve ever known.”

“Good heavens above, Kester! I didn’t intend to listen. But when I heard her say ‘Is your wife around?’ how in the name of human nature could I have helped it?”

“You couldn’t have, evidently. But I wish you’d asked me about it then, instead of imagining awful debaucheries.”

“I thought you’d tell me. When you didn’t—anyway, tell me now. How many times have you seen her—I mean alone—and what have you talked about?”

He returned without hesitation, “I’ve had exactly three private conversations with Isabel since she came home. I’ve sat watching her pace the floor, listened while she told me she couldn’t stand being prisoned in this place, and given her a shoulder to cry on. That’s all.”

“But what on earth is the matter with her?”

Kester answered as though trying to explain simple facts to an obtuse listener. “Eleanor, Isabel is in the status of an alien tourist in the house where she was born. She wants to get back her citizenship. She’s having to learn how to live on an income that wouldn’t have bought her slippers last year. She’s trying to get adjusted to a life that has become strange to her, and she’s discouraged and unhappy.”

“Does she think she’s the only person whose habits have been upset by the war?” Eleanor asked contemptuously.

He smiled a little. “Yes, Eleanor, she does. You don’t know Isabel.”

“It’s evident you do. How can you waste time coddling such a fool?”

“All I’ve tried to be is a friend, honey. It seems to do her good to talk to me.”

“I don’t doubt it. If she needs advice, why doesn’t she get a lawyer?”

“I’ve told her to get one. She’s going to.”

“I wonder,” said Eleanor.

He looked at her keenly. “Just what do you mean by that?”

She answered with another query. “Kester, in those three visits you’ve made to her, have you ever kissed her?”