Eva Trout (17 page)

Paralysis has passed over. Back here, I found you awaiting me, Mrs. Trout. Had it ever been your impression that I defaulted, you are more than avenged. You can be denied no longer; I am faced by totality of recall. I endure it in the semblance which is my office, on the campus I could once have traversed blindfold but which now gives me to hesitate when I seek my way, and in the constricted apartment in name mine. In the faculty club I find myself prone to abeyances, lacunae. These, not unnoted by those who know me, are I find attributed to slow readjustment after my drastic sickness, and are tolerated in consequence with kindness. My work, I am able to tell you, is not affected. I found much to be dealt with, and am doing so. I drink additional milk to regain weight. Seemingly back where I was, I shall no doubt be so. What alternative is there? But what did you bring about?—and where are you now?

Poetry is latent in the banal, I have often maintained. It now comes dangerously near the surface. The impedimenta on this table I write at, in this office, files, folders, books, memoranda, paper cutter, pins and clips in their tray, and not only those but coats on the rack in the caféteria, the desk I stand at to meet classes, the lamp at my bedside, all make felt a stormy inner existence. Inanimate, rarely vegetable, mostly mineral, they nonetheless put me in danger of Animism. I know I am most beset when I see what I do not, an apple rolling.

Mrs. Trout, do I destroy this, or do I mail it? It may not reach you, it may. Which is to be desired?—I am not certain. In either event, I remain as below inscribed,

Yours,

Portman C. Holman.

(This unclaimed letter was in due course returned to the sender, Professor Holman, nothing further having been heard of the addressee since she telephoned cancelling her reservation.)

Silent Night,

Holy Night,

All is calm,

All is bright…

IT WAS late November, some days after Thanksgiving. Eva, encumbered by a large gift-wrapped parcel, made her way into the coffee shop. She was glad to.

A ferocious wind off one of the Great Lakes tore through the city, bouncing the Stars of Bethlehem, clawing at garlands, setting festoons, transparencies and Noël streamers awrithe tormentedly as they swung from the many filagree arches anxiously creaking over the avenues. All the way down perspectives, a flapping twisting went on amidst jewel illuminations; as it might be, angels blown off course. Here or there, flying fragments of tinsel caught at the stripped-down boughs of the curb maples, harassed enough.

It was evening. Though early homegoing traffic already piled up at intersections, waiting on traffic lights, nothing drained off the crowds perceptibly. Glass-built stores, floor upon floor, were transparent ant-heaps; through their whirling doors gusted out renditions of sleigh bells. Stores cast slabs of synthetic daylight on to the sidewalks: not a soul was unseen. In or out, being buffeted bothered nobody: phlegmatic masses of people, flowing like lava, contrasted with the aerial agitation. The hundreds now in two-way procession exhibited not more than three makes of face, as though with regard to this city and its environs the invention of the Almighty had given out. And these three makes of face in use were not unalike, all being weatherproof, sizeable though coming in different sizes, innately wary. One great stalwart teeming family, roots Nordic. Not animated, adults nevertheless gave off a collective sound of some volume, while children escaped on roller skates, blew on squeakers or aimed guns at each other with lifelike pops. Bright the night was (or the evening). Calm it was not. Eva, having completed her one purchase, had had enough.

This coffee shop, true to the Middle West, was, though blameless, obscurely lit like a dive or night spot. In the assuaging raspberry-tinted darkness, Eva’s sentiments homed to the piped-on carol. Ignoring somebody seeking to direct her, she ploughed through the gloom with its density of assembled women, whose hands, busts, throats fitfully did appear, though those only: all were decapitated. For this reason: each of the tables sat at had a downturned dwarf lamp simulating an oxblood toadstool—above lamp-level (for these first minutes) visibility nil. Each lamp showed just enough of its table to show it not only taken but full to complement; the marauder would be lucky to come upon one place vacant. She was, she did. Inserting herself, she squared off what had been a trio. These three were presences only in glints and glimmers: one wore octagonal spectacles, one a dangly charm-bracelet, the third was smoking. There was a rustle as they resigned themselves. (She was their penance for sitting on—they had done eating, plates held nothing but smears; they were starting in over again with coffee.) Gloves, purses were whisked punctiliously out of the Eva area. She, stooping, lodged her bulky, slippery parcel upright against a leg of her chair. Righting herself, drawing a breath, she pulled off her gauntlets. She left a forgotten hand lying, in outline, under the lamplight.

All
was
calm …

“Trout,” said a voice from across the table, a voice so tiny it should have been tiny-printed, “isn’t that you?”

It was Elsinore.

She had hardly grown. Inside the haze of thistledown hair her waif beauty was as it had been, not child’s or woman’s. The silver fox cape smothering her shoulders, the brilliants studded into her ears might have been borrowings from an acting box. She sat slidden down, face back as on a pillow, shadow giving her temples their known bruised look. She wore frosted lipstick, more frost than colour. “To think,” she said —to nobody. Fatalistic.

Eva, in the same tone, said: “How did you know?”

“Your hand.”

The other two looked at Elsinore, then at Eva.

Now with time to be mystified, Elsinore said: “What are you doing here, Trout?”

“What are you doing?”

Elsinore only gave an ethereal, feckless giggle. She knocked one cigarette out and lit the next. “I never did die,” she remembered, “wasn’t that funny?” The interest of her companions became ardent; Elsinore, yielding under the pressure, sighed: “I should like you to meet the girls.—This is Trout,” she made known to them, “we were room-mates a while ago. —Trout, this is Joanne. She is Joanne Hensch.—That is Betti-Mae. She is Betti-Mae Anapoupolis.”

“Hi!” said the girls in unison.

“Hi!” said Eva.

They were young matrons. As such, they materialised rapidly and became complete, to the last detail—more so than Elsinore, who between them still wavered like ectoplasm. They obtained an immediate grasp of the situation. Joanne, turning on Eva her brimming octagons, only wanted to know: “At school in the East?” Betti-Mae, jubilant, rattled her lucky bracelet. “Elsi-
Nora
, this is some night for you!
And
to think you almost didn’t come! Now you two, you must have lots to talk about. Don’t mind us.”

“No don’t,” said Joanne.

“We’ll be quiet as mice.”

Joanne, before going into oblivion, had a remaining matter to clear. “You’re visiting here, visiting with … ?”

“No. I—”

“—Don’t tell
me
, just a stopover?”

“Yes,” said Eva.

Betti-Mae protested: “For Heaven’s sake!”

Elsinore made a muddled, feathery gesture, signifying, she could no more. At this present moment, she wanted out. All had become beyond her—she shook her hair. Stopping on the way for a sip of coffee, she slid down, down again, face dropping back on the pillow that was not there. Her cigarette, miscarrying to her mouth, scrawled round and entangled itself in her fox fur. Eva hallucinatedly watched this—she then stared hard, disbelievingly, at the table, then, in the same manner, round the half-seen coffee shop. All swam, curdled, thinned, thickened, was blotted out. Her jaw had weight, for she felt it drop. Silence roared in her ears; cold-hot-cold tightened her forehead. In exterior space, there was someone saying: “She’s not sick, is she?”

The tower room in the castle, the piteous breathing. The blinded window, the banished lake. The dayless and nightless watches, the tent of cobwebs. The hand on the blanket, the beseeching answering beating heart. The dark: the unseen distance, the known nearness. Love: the here and the now and the nothing-but. The step on the stairs. Don’t take her away,
DON’T
take her away. She is all I am. We are all there is.

Haven’t you heard what is going to be? No. Not, but I know what was. A door opening, how is my darling? Right— then
TAKE
her away, take your dead bird. You wretch, you mother I never had. Elsinore, what happened? Nobody told me, nobody dared. Gone, gone. Nothing can alter that now, it’s too late.
Go
away again.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
? Better not——Betti-Mae came through, on another line. “Hey—take it easy. I had blacked-out once.” Joanne suggested: “She should probably eat.” Joanne signalled a waitress, who gazed through her. “That waitress is tense this evening,” said Betti-Mae. “She already botched up my order.”

“She’s a Moravian.”

“She once had a drinking problem.”

Eva acted. She reached across for the menu with an unexpected vigour which made her chair quake: the surprised parcel heeled over, pitching under the table on to their feet. Soft, uninjurious, it was heavyish—”My, how you ever carried this!” After an all-in kicking-match, dive and scuffle it was laid hold on, hauled back to Eva, who, feeling some explanation owing, said: “It contains a bear.”

“Trout,” Elsinore said faintly, “what do you need a bear for?”

“A little boy.”

“I have three babies,” Elsinore said pensively. She referred to the others: “Don’t I?”

“She’s a wonderful mother.”

“Yes; I married a salesman.” The boaster giggled. “Mother always told me I had a downward trend.”

The girls looked down their noses into their coffee cups, which they raised with a rotatory motion. No opinion was voiced.

“Elsinore, where’s your mother?”

“She’s there, I guess.”

“
Where
?”

“Wherever she is.” Elsinore blew ash off the fur. “This was hers,” she mentioned. She plucked out a scorched hair or two. “You see?—dated. She had it mailed me; that was the last I heard. No, she cabled her husband died of cerebral hemorrhage. Trout,” she went on in her fated monotone, “I owe you my wonderful life, don’t I?—Trout” she told the girls, “pulled me out of a lake, one time.”

“
That
was not me.”

“Funny, I always thought.”

“Elsi-Nora, how did you get in that lake?”

A giggle. “That was my downward trend.—Yes, that crazy castle: Trout, didn’t your father build it? Those hooting ravens.”

“Elsinore, those were owls.”

“To think. Next I went in a clinic.—Where’s that little boy you have, or didn’t you say?”

“What?” fenced Eva.

“The boy your bear’s for.”

“I am about to fetch him.”

Elsinore, with an instant air of complicity, at that withdrew her quivering gaze. Liberated, Eva proclaimed: “I’m hungry.” She cast about.

“That waitress,” prophesied Betti-Mae, “is never going to come if she sees you see her. She delights in pouncing—you better be prepared.”

Joanne asked: “Do you have to carry that bear far?”

Eva, wrapped in the menu, declared: “ ‘Shirred eggs: sweet corn: asparagus tips’—that I should like.”

“That’s awfully meagre,” said Betti-Mae.

“She can add pie.—Do you have to carry that bear far? Your little boy’s here in this city, isn’t he? Where abouts?”

“No.”

The waitress pounced, the order was given.

“In this city,” specified Elsinore, “I would not know who there is. I’m alone mostly; Ed’s back between times. TV gives me migraine—I look out of the window. Time flows, since I got me those three babies.”

“Elsinore, triplets?”

“No, they’re normal.—I know what I don’t do; in summer, swim; when it freezes over, go on the ice.” She extended a semi-transparent finger, aimlessly, to the oxblood lamp. “Here I am though,” she meditated, sceptically regarding it. “To think. You have to be some place, don’t you, if you’re living.” She said, without rancour: “This is a handsome city, better than most would get for princip’ly mortifying their mother. To think of you, Trout, you and that mixed-up castle. That time, I wanted nothing but to be back on that island we then had: they wouldn’t have me. Do you recall?—I almost forgot. How was I?”

“At the beginning, you wept.”

“Did I do that?”

“Night after night.”

Elsinore marvelled. She then asked: “Which was the time you were all the time there?”

“Later.”

“I didn’t know a thing.—You never did pull me out of the lake?”

“No. That was someone else.”

“Then I don’t know what. Then how did I know your hand?—Who did you marry, Trout?”

“He was no good.”

“That was too bad,” said Elsinore. She knocked one cigarette out and lit the next. “Well, girls,” she told them, “we had our talk.”

In time, the waitress pounced back with Eva’s order. “She got it correct, for a wonder,” said Betti-Mae. “But how come you didn’t order a T-bone? You don’t have those East.”

“They do,” Joanne said, “but they’re fibrous. They’re kind of anaemic, you’d never recognize them—Pardon me,” she flashed at Eva, “but that’s how it is.”

Elsinore exerted herself. “Trout doesn’t come from the East, she comes from England.”

The girls ignored the niggling distinction. It was decided, they sit on while Eva ate—that caused a spectacular, singular failure of appetite which dazed her no less than it astounded onlookers. Co-ordination broke down between her and her fork. Lumping rigidly forward, head low, sideways over the plate like a furtive dog’s, she swallowed as though with a throat obstruction. It pained the girls to see such a poor performance. The music, through with
Jingle Bells
and
Adeste Fidelis
, swooned into
I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas
. “We just fixed our storm windows,” Joanne said. “Did you all?—Elsi-Nora, till when do you have your sitter? Quarter of ten? Then we’ll stop by at Betti-Mae’s, then we’ll walk your friend back.” She addressed herself to Eva. “And where would that be?”