East Into Upper East (33 page)

Stella's doctor paid regular visits, and he talked gravely to Dora afterward in the drawing room. Annette was always there, and her
right to be there was by now indisputable. Each time, Dora had to recover from what the doctor had told her, waiting downstairs to collect herself before going back to Stella. Annette waited with her, to comfort and strengthen her, but if Dora stayed too long, sitting there in silence, with her head bowed, Annette got restless and began to pace the room. There was a cashmere shawl thrown over a grand piano in one corner, and sometimes Annette took it off and wrapped it around herself and modeled it before the pier glass. Once she sighed and said, “How beautiful,” and, picking up a silver box, she sighed again and opened it and shut it, looking at her reflection there, too, for Paul had polished the box to perfection. “He keeps things well,” she murmured to Dora. “Quite the little housekeeper. He's going to miss all this, you know. When it's no longer here.” She gave a third deep sigh, and, unwinding herself from the shawl, replaced it on the piano—though very slowly, letting her hand linger over the soft wool, as if reluctant to let go.

“What are you going to do with all of it?” she asked, indicating the drawing room and all of its contents—all Stella's beloved screens, fans, clocks, and mirrors. “Sell it, I suppose,” she went on, now almost talking to herself. “No use keeping it, and, my goodness, it should all fetch a pretty penny. A pretty penny,” she repeated, wistfully.

Dora still hadn't spoken, sunk in thoughts of Stella and the doctor's prognosis.

“And what about us?” Annette asked. “What are you going to do about us, Paul and me? We won't fetch much, I'm afraid.” She laughed at that—a deep, cynical, unfeminine laugh—and, looking at her, Dora believed for the first time that Annette was fifty, for this laugh seemed to come out of years of disappointment.

Annette caught Dora's look of surprise, and she went on, “She's not going to leave much to us, you know that—to Paul and me. It's all going to you, naturally. Naturally,” she repeated. “Money like that doesn't go out of the family. It never does.” And again she seemed to speak out of long, long experience.

Dora's mother said, “How is she? I could come over for the weekend.”

“Mother, it's all right,” Dora said into the telephone.

“Dora, are you telling me everything I ought to know? My own sister, after all.”

“It's all
right
,” Dora repeated.

Dora had always had a room kept ready for her in Stella's house, and now she moved into it, locking up her own apartment. She wanted to be there with Stella all the time. Stella had shrunk so much that her own bed seemed to overwhelm her. Her booming voice, too, was down to its own echo. One day, Annette fell asleep by the fireside, and Dora sat by Stella's bed, holding her hand. For the first time in a long while, aunt and niece had the opportunity to talk privately together. Stella talked about Annette; she kept looking at her fondly as she slept. It was the afternoon of a winter day and the light was failing, so that Annette was mostly in shadow. Her head was supported on her hand, her face was flushed by the fire, and she breathed peacefully.

“She's so kind to me—you have no idea,” Stella said. “But that's nothing new. She's always been like that, all goodness and kindness.” She smiled at her memories. “Of course, we had our little difficulties sometimes, but everyone has those, don't they? If they're really close to each other. That's part of it—hurting each other because you love each other so much. It's different when people don't care for you, or only pretend to.”

“Mother calls every day to ask after you,” Dora said.

Stella nodded, as if she knew that and also knew what it was worth.

“I wish—I wish—I wish—” said Stella, after a long silence, swinging Dora's hand about. This by-play was one of the things they had between them, as if they had spent their childhood together.

“What?” said Dora, smiling.

“I wish that
you
had someone you cared for more than anyone else in the world,” said Stella. “I wasn't ever really happy till I had someone like that—a very special person of my own.” Again they both looked at Annette, cozily asleep. “I'd like you to have such a person,” Stella said to Dora in her weakened whisper, which made everything she said into a significant message.

Paul came in with Stella's supper tray. He wanted to turn on the light, but Stella said it would disturb Annette. Now it was almost dark in the room, except for the warm and glowing space where
Annette sat by the fire. The window framed the last gleam of winter daylight, through which snowflakes could be seen falling.

“We were just talking about you, Paul,” said Stella.

“Nothing but good, I hope,” said Paul with his stiff humor.

“Tell him, Dora,” said Stella. “Tell him what I wish for more than anything in the world.” She squeezed Dora's hand. “Isn't it lovely to be here all together? Isn't it the coziest thing? God bless this house,” she said, “and all of you in it.” Annette stirred in her corner, and Paul and Dora remained quite still in the still room, with only their thoughts rustling inside their heads.

At night, in his bed, Paul slept like a lead soldier laid to rest in his box. He slept very soundly, so that Annette had to call him several times that night before he woke up. Then he sat bolt upright and called out like a sentry.

“Sh-h-h,” said Annette. “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h. Don't be a fool.”

“Something's happened to her,” said Paul, and jumped out of bed in a great fright.

“Nothing's happened,” said Annette. “Not yet.”

Paul realized that Annette had come to him on a personal visit, which might be of some duration. He put on his dressing gown and sat down on a chair, facing her.

“And when it does happen?” she asked him. “What will you do? You'll have to do something.” When he shrugged, she said, “Oh, I see. You'll get another job in a restaurant and share an apartment with one of the other waiters. Off Amsterdam Avenue? Or downtown? One of those houses cut up into rooms, with very dark stairs and a lot of security locks? Charming. After this.” She indicated his room, which had two armchairs, three oriental rugs, a Persian wall hanging, and a walnut desk with an enamel inkstand on it. She leaned toward him and looked into his face. “The girl's not bad,” she said, with a shrug. “Some would say you were very lucky.
I
think you are. My goodness, yes.” She gave her harsh laugh.

Paul cleared his throat. “It's a very difficult position for me,” he said.

“I would like to be in such a difficult position,” Annette went on. “What's the matter with you? Don't you like girls? I've wondered sometimes.” She continued to look into his pale, stubborn, handsome face. “That's nothing,” she assured him. “It doesn't matter a damn.”

He stared ahead of him. His Adam's apple worked up and down very slightly; otherwise he was motionless.

She said, “You learn to ignore little things like your own personal tastes when you get to my age. Which is thirty-five,” she added in parenthesis, smiling at him broadly and tapping her foot. “When you get to that, you don't care the teeniest little bit. Remember when I went off to London? I learned my lesson there, all right.”

“I've got nothing to learn,” Paul said, still staring over her head.

“You soon will have. You heard what the doctor said.”

“I thought you said that was all nonsense.”

“We have to be ready for all weathers—that's another thing we learn.” She tapped his knee and leaned even closer. “I'm on your side, don't you know that? I'm with you. I want to see you stay here, where you like it so much. Just look at you,” she said, amused, watching his knee twitching where she had kept her hand on it. “What are you afraid of? It doesn't hurt with a woman—here, I'll show you.” Dexterously, she slipped from her chair onto his lap, and, taking his face between her hands, she pressed her mouth against his. She kept it there a long while and did all sorts of expert things, and when she had finished she laughed and gave his cheek a little slap and said, “There. You see, you've got nothing at all to worry about. You're doing it very well. Absolutely right,” she assured him.

Annette's visits to Paul were repeated several times, and then one night she was pleased to find his room empty. She put her ear to the door of Dora's room and heard Dora talking. Annette rolled her eyes in amusement. Dora was just the sort of girl to lead a discussion group in the midst of life's business. Stella had had the same tendency, before Annette had taught her better.

If Annette had bothered to look through the keyhole, she would have been even more amused to see the two of them—Paul on a Victorian love seat and Dora on the carpet, with her arms clasped around her knees. Dora was talking as she hadn't since she was a girl at boarding school. She was telling Paul everything about her life—which wasn't much, except that she felt it all with such intensity. She told him about her family, too, and this was the part he liked best. She seemed to dwell mostly on their shortcomings—their conventionality, their narrow outlook—but what he wanted to hear about was her money and family genealogy. It made him shudder with pleasure to contemplate how the proper investments of one
ancestor—a tea importer—had of their own accord and with great dignity (so he liked to think) grown and grown, so that there was now a river of money that flowed without cease for the benefit of the descendants. It gave him an emotion more profound than sexual pleasure to contemplate Dora in the light reflected from this river. But for her the thrill was to think that none of it mattered—the family, the family's position, the family's money. Only she and Paul mattered—Paul who possessed nothing except himself, and she, Dora, sitting there so simply on the floor, hugging her knees and revealing herself to him in her entirety, with whatever inward splendors she might have.

Dora's mother was almost beside herself: “Why aren't you in your apartment? Is she worse? Is that why you've moved in?
Tell
me, Dora.”

“She's not worse,” Dora said, spacing her words. “You don't have to come.”

“I can be there on the next plane.”

“You—don't—have—to—come. Mother,
please
?”

Dora told Paul how her mother and Stella, although they were sisters, had never got on. They were different from each other in just the same way that Dora was from all the other girls in the family. It made her indignant that her mother should now wish to come into this house, as if she had a greater right to be there than those who truly loved Stella.

“Your mother doesn't like me to be here,” Paul said, casting his eyes downward, as if admitting with shame that Dora's mother had reason not to do so. “She doesn't like either of us—me or Annette.”

“As if you had anything in common with Annette.”

Paul kept his eyes cast down.

Stella's nights were restless now, and Annette made Paul install a bed in Stella's room, so that she could be with her. Although by nature a very sound sleeper, Annette woke at the least sound from Stella. She seemed to be waiting and watching, not just for Stella but for the others in the house as well.

“What is it? What are they doing?” Stella asked one evening, noticing Annette alert for sounds from elsewhere.

“He is in her room,” Annette said.

“Ah,” breathed Stella, full of satisfaction.

She dozed off for a while, and when she woke again Annette was still sitting on the side of her bed, although it was very late in the night.

“How good you are, how kind,” said Stella, devouring Annette with eyes of love. There was a night light in the room; the snow had again begun to fall.

“The family won't like it,” Stella said dreamily. “They'll hate it. But I've told her, to hell with the family. When you've found a treasure for yourself, you don't give it up for them. Wouldn't I have been a fool to give
you
up? And not have you sitting here
now
?” She squeezed Annette's hand in gratitude and shut her eyes.