Collected Novels and Plays (32 page)

This stunned him. For weeks he did nothing more about it. If he spoke of that second conversation it was in a tone of disbelief: could he have heard aright? Was it possible for such malice to lie behind all that tenderness? Prudence tried not to wonder precisely what tenderness of Irene’s he had in mind. Something kept her from pressing him for details. Not once did Benjamin see a connection between Irene’s vindictiveness and that of certain other women he
had discarded.

“I was greeted by the lady of the house,” he now began—and, depressed as he was, he couldn’t let “house” go by without a weary leer—“dressed in a big red beach towel and nothing else. She
said
her masseur had just left. I said that’s what she could tell her husband, but
Irene didn’t laugh. She escorted me—oh, very formally—past a dinner-table set for at least
twenty people. I’ll be damned if I know what fun she gets out of those big dinners. They knock me for a loop. The garden was looking like hell, too. She’s had freak winds all winter long, blowing soot from Ned’s molasses factory. It’s all over the chairs. We couldn’t sit down till the butler came with towels, buttoning up his uniform, I happened to notice.” Benjamin winked for what it was worth. “It sticks to the leaves. Irene said
some days they can’t even swim, the soot lies so thick on the water. By damn!” he exclaimed, breaking into a great grin, “I wouldn’t put it past your sainted husband to have a hand in the whole business, would you?”

Ned plaguing the Cheeks with soot? To her own dismay Prudence laughed, before glaring sadly off.

“I won’t bore you with the whole story. I asked her for the letters. She said she didn’t have them. I told her she was lying. Do you know what she did? She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You always did have brains, Benji.’ It made me so mad I wanted to cry. I said something mean then. I reminded her of a trust-fund I’d set up in her name two years ago. I said it was still possible to revoke that. It wasn’t like
me to do something like that, was it? I don’t know what I’m like any more, to tell the truth. My appetite’s no good. I feel sluggish and stupid. I don’t know …” He followed his tangent a step further. “All my heart pain has stopped ….”

“
Did
you set up a trust-fund for Irene?”

He gave her an unashamed look. “Yes, Prudence. And she’s still welcome to it. I don’t want the money. Charlie and Irene were very kind to me in the past. I can’t forget that.”

Prudence lowered her eyes. How fine he was, how honorable! Did she truly expect to resist him? She made a motion towards the piano.

“Before I left, Charlie came home. Irene had to dress, but asked why we didn’t sit there, the two of us, under the machineels with the soot floating down. Maybe she was being funny. She said we ought to wait for the Green Flash, when the sun goes down. It’s famous. You can only see it in the Caribbean, she said.”

“Also in the Indian Ocean,” Prudence added.

“Oh, you’ve heard about it? Well, I didn’t know what she was trying to say. It made me mad. I was absolutely sure Charlie Cheek didn’t know the first God-damn thing about those letters. His father and I grew up together, went to Officers’ Training School together. And right then Irene made a long face and told him I’d come to ask for the letters back. Her own husband! He gave me the nicest smile you’ve ever seen, called
me Cousin Ben, and said he hoped our little misunderstanding’ would be settled soon. Can you beat that? A woman with so little pride she could tell her husband a thing like that!” He gazed out the darkening window. “Enid always suspected Irene of mutilating her portrait. By God, I’ll just bet she did!”

“Benjamin, dear—”

“What’s
in
a woman like that? I wish you’d tell me if you know.”

And yet, Prudence marveled, he wanted Irene to keep the trust-fund. How he must have blamed himself for the failure of their friendship!

“Another thing,” said Benjamin. “She told me Orson Bishop had advised her to sell her shares of Bishop Petroleum. Now, I
know
that’s a damn lie. His own company! Furthermore, I gave her those securities. You’d expect her to have asked my advice, wouldn’t you? I don’t know what that kind of behavior means. It’s like cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

Prudence, eyes downcast, frowned at his idiom. The moment, surely, had passed in which to look for returns from his philanthropy. While if what couldn’t be understood about Irene was no more than her giving up of a useful connection—! But an odd noise came from Benjamin. She looked up to see him stare about once, blankly. As if those last words had touched a spring, his puffed face appeared somehow to deflate. He brushed the drooping flower from his
buttonhole. “It’s no good,” she thought she heard him mumble. Was he crying? Rather than have her watching, he made an effort and stood up.

She rose herself, divining that he had put himself in mind of Francis. Francis! “Oh, Benjamin,” she said.

Why hadn’t she seen? If he blamed himself for
that
, how she knew now what was in his heart!—and how blameless he was!

Prudence drew herself erect.
Her
guilt was a different story. One day, a letter had been made public; the next day, Ned … Incapable of seriously viewing these two events as cause and effect—for Ned had known what Benjamin meant to her—Prudence all the same censured the friends who took the liberty of viewing them otherwise.

To be at fault sustained her. She became an expert on innuendo. Xenia’s letter, though touching, carried impertinent overtones. The way Ned was spoken of, the hope expressed that the New Year would bring “all the happiness she deserved,” convicted Xenia of recommending the easy way out. Prudence had shrugged. It amounted, basically, to a defect of sensibility. She had seen it before among continental women—continental but themselves
incontinent. Nevertheless, she slept badly.

Waking one night, she had found her bedroom ablaze with—was it moonlight? No; the sugar cane was burning in a neighborhood field that had once belonged to the house. They hadn’t been offered a fair price, and so had ordered the crop destroyed. For a while at her window she had watched little figures, black against the conflagration, run back and forth, shouting, controlling it. When she turned it was to see her own room in a light so strange, so
devastating, that everything, a mosquito asleep on a black dangling cord, chintz coming untacked from the wobbly vanity, the iron bedsteads painted pale blue, came at her as never before, neither beautiful nor ugly, common nor rare, but
there.
Fantastically, the whole room quivered under the nearby glare.

Now, seeing her life, the way she spent these empty days, in the light of Benjamin’s unhappiness, she was left with an uneasy feeling. There were so many lights in which to look at things, sunlight, moonlight, Francis, Ned, Irene, tolerance, fear …. It was unthinkable that they should all flatter. Even more, that they should all condemn.

“Oh, Benjamin!” she said again. He turned obediently.

Grief was one thing, guilt another. She set out to prove to him that he
wasn’t to blame for what Francis had done. How little it helped, at first! How little it helped
her
, in the weeks that followed, to practice what she’d made up her mind to preach! For a while it seemed to mean the death of her moral self; Prudence wasn’t ready for the lesson of her own innocence. But for Benjamin’s sake a beginning had to be
made.

She didn’t accept him the next time he proposed marriage. The time after that, however, in April, she did.

19.
On the first day of spring many thermometers approached zero. Though Jane had walked only from the corner she felt chilled to the bone. A buzzer let her in; she hurried for the door she supposed was his, but voices from behind it made her hesitate. It opened, however, without her knocking. “Come in, come in, how are you?” said Francis, kissing her numb cheek. “What’s this, ball gown and toothbrush? Put it
down anywhere. Take off your coat. Well then,” he resumed in a bored voice, “I’ll expect a call from you before six-fifteen.
Va bene?
”

“Are you talking to
me?
” squeaked Jane, whose eyes were still streaming from the cold outside. A watery cluster of crystal baubles lit the dim entrance. Presently she made out a fine old mirror doubling a profusion of magnolia leaves. She reached to stroke one; it grated dryly against her hand. Francis hadn’t perhaps caught her question. Where was he? His voice reached her:

“Then it’s settled. You have your ticket. We’ll meet in the box. I particularly hope you won’t be late. And if by any chance you should get away in time to join us for dinner, don’t hesitate to call. Why not say you’ll call in any case? Hmm?”

Someone replied with a brief murmur.

“Oh, wait!” cried Francis, reappearing. “You said you had no black tie. Take one of mine!” He paused long enough to wink at Jane and gesture for her to have patience. “Marcello, come meet Jane!” he called over his shoulder as he vanished down a corridor she hadn’t noticed before. Turning, she saw in the mirror the reflection of a slender, lowering young man who an instant later rounded a corner to
stand before her.

“Hello, I’m Jane Massey.” She put out a hand. To her surprise he expertly kissed it, whispering a surname of which she could identify only the melody.
“Ma Lei è italiano!
” she concluded brightly.

“I speak, however, English by preference.” His accent was good, but he’d looked taller in the mirror.

“Have you been in America long?”

“A few months only. I’m staying with friends uptown. I’m due there now,” and Marcello consulted a gold wristwatch, frowning to show it had been recently acquired. His pale gray suit, also, was not cut in the Italian style. “You seem cold,” he went on, intercepting Jane’s glance, his voice now tinged with irony. “You must let Francis brew you a cup of hot tea. His tea is extraordinary. It is bought in one special
shop. How is your tea-shop called, Francis?” But Francis, who had joined them, was unsmiling.

“Keep this.” He handed his friend a black bow-tie. “I have two others.”

“Thank you, I shall be able to afford one of my own,” replied Marcello. “I borrow yours only because the day is too cold for shopping.”

Francis winked at Jane a second time. “He’s trying to make an impression on you, my sweet. Ah well,” he sighed, his hand on the doorknob. “And you’ll phone about dinner?”

Marcello kept silent.

“The opera starts at eight-thirty, sharp. We’ll see you there in any event.”

Jane, looking anywhere but at them, caught in the mirror a gleam from the Italian. Intended for her? He bowed to Francis,
“Senz’ altro, mio
signore
,”—mimicking the servile phrase and intonation of a headwaiter. Until he’d left she didn’t trust herself to turn.

“Marcello’s from Parma,” Francis said. He ushered her around the corner and up two steps. “Come into my parlor, do you like it? Downstairs,” he indicated a spiral stair across the wide room, “is the library—where you’ll be sleeping—also the kitchen, the dining-room, and a minute garden in ruins. If you ever run across an old weatherbeaten sphinx, wire me, won’t you? Like those in the Villa Sciarra.
Well,” he said in the tone of one reverting to his main topic, “it appears
the
thing nowadays, to have an Italian friend. I said to myself, ‘Who are you not to follow suit?’ Let’s hope the others are less difficult than Marcello. Oh but Jane, something so unbelievable has come from this! Don’t let me tell you now, don’t let me spill it out. We’ll sit you down, we’ll give you a cup of very good China tea. The
kettle’s singing already, with its breast against a thorn.
Then
, once you’re fortified, I’ll tell you all!” As he started down the stair Francis followed her gaze to a low lacquer table. “That’s a clue to the mystery,” he called, vanishing—“ever tried it?”

What Jane saw wasn’t, as she might have supposed from his words, a rack of opium pipes, but a smooth wooden board on which had been printed the alphabet, the Arabic numerals, and the words
YES
and
NO.
At the top was the likeness of a female face, Oriental in spirit, lit from beneath: she peered down into a crystal ball wherein misty letters had materialized. They spelled
OUIJA
. So
that was the secret, Jane smiled, put in mind of a widowed aunt who’d lifted tables, consulted mediums, and the like. Jane had never before seen a Ouija board.

Scattered about, on the table, on the floor, as well as on the
retour d’Egypte
couch where Francis had motioned her to sit, lay pages of foolscap covered with childish characters. Of two chairs drawn up one was occupied by a mirror in the shape of a lyre. It sat, much like a person, erect and gleaming, surveying the high dim room.

The room!—how on earth to take it in? Looking aloft for guidance, Jane saw a great brass chandelier, eighteen-branched, whose candles had
burned to their last inch; a bit later, stroking the satin bolster, her hand encountered a congealed dribble of wax. Behind her, on the wall, hung a Flemish tapestry, all but the crimsons and greens faded to a dusty buff. It depicted one of those big senseless scenes, the Marriage of Fame and Chastity, or
whatever—since
her
marriage Jane had grown awfully vague about allegory. A harpsichord stood below, across whose painted case, cutting in half a settecento landscape, a length of peacock-blue brocade had been thrown. Upon this lay a tattered roll of music, an ivory flute, and some five or six lemons whose fragrance Jane captured by thinking hard about it. Many white petals, edged with brown, had drifted among these objects. The bare rose stalk leaned from a goblet;
discolorations within the glass showed how full of water it once had been. The room astonished her—it aimed so high and had lapsed into such a negligence. She didn’t mean the witty disorder copied from Dutch painting; she meant the stains, the squashed, dusty cushions, the hearth strewn with cigarette butts and fragments of glass and china. Austrian blinds hanging the length of the tall windows let in a weak light, a …
sorrowful
light—Jane smiled
to think how the word would sound in her next letter to Roger, and felt grateful all at once that he wasn’t there. She could hear him now, remarking on things, beginning to laugh as he felt more at ease. Worse, he would have started
her
laughing, when to Jane’s mind the room evoked feelings almost inexpressible. But Roger had no taste for the ambiguous.