Nothing That Meets the Eye (23 page)

“Goodness, do you really think I could eat all this?” she said with a laugh. And really she couldn't eat a thing. She was so delighted that Klett had brought her tea. She knew that he must have insisted, for Alantha or her mother always carried it up themselves.

“If you like Chopin, you must like Debussy.” Klett had pulled the chaise longue close by her bed and sat on the end of it, nibbling at the fruitcake, leaning forward eagerly. “I wrote an essay at the conservatory on his influence in modern music.”

“Oh, do tell me about it!”

Agnes did not know how the hours flew. But then it was suppertime and Klett was gone, with her promise that she would join him at the piano after dinner if she possibly felt well enough. She thought she would if she took a quiet bit of supper by herself.

He came to escort her downstairs. Dusk had grown to darkness in the last five minutes. She knew her face seemed purely white on the side lighted by her lamp and, asserted by the thin nose and softly curved lips, faded into pale shadow on the other. It was the most poetic hour, her most poetic pose, the simple one in the center of the great bed.

“Can you really? Will you come down?” he asked, offering his arm. “You make me so happy!”

“Of course!” she whispered.

She saw him look at the Ivanhoe, which had slid into the hollow made by her body, its title plainly legible in black letters across the blue cover. Somehow she did not like it that he had seen.

Margaret and her mother had gone out to visit one of Margaret's friends, and the living room was silent, lighted only by the two lamps on the pianos. So quietly had they come down that Mowgli did not look up from his corner of the blue velvet sofa.

“You will play mine,” Agnes said, for Klett had led her to her own piano. “I will play my father's.”

He nodded, his eyes the least bit wide and troubled, and Agnes wondered if he had noticed her voice in that instant, mellifluent but, she admitted, higher than she meant and with a slide of uncontrol.

Carefully, she began to play the Chopin nocturne, and Klett followed. Their hands, the one pair pinkish, silken-looking in the lamplight, the other pale and far larger, lifted in unison, lilted in waltz tempo like two voices. Smoothly they returned to a phrase in the middle and finished the song with a sweep of treble notes that left Agnes breathless and laughing for happiness. Their last chord lingered throbbingly in the silence. Agnes closed her eyes, her fingers still on the keys. The chord pulsed like a living voice itself. Across from her, she felt so sure that the sensitive young man watched her, she could afford to relinquish the pleasure of witnessing his admiration. She did not mind now that the pianos were out of tune. She felt their tones accorded with the house. She heard in their hollowness, their circumvention of the notes themselves, a kind of majestic expansion, as though each tone or chord created a small world, a mirrored hall with chandeliers.

Klett struck his chord again and laughed, but when she opened her eyes, his head was bent and he began another nocturne she knew less well. She followed in the waltz bass well enough, but she was aware that she made a few errors in the treble. Klett evidently knew it very well, for he interpolated runs between phrases, trilled certain notes far beyond their demand in a brilliant display. Dismayed, Agnes left off her right hand, feeling shy all at once and almost like crying. Klett played in his own dramatic tempo, slurring or rushing, leaning with the keyboard's needs. She felt somehow that he had seized a whip from her hands (and yet she had not really imagined herself with a whip against Klett, so how could it be?) and had begun to use it upon her more vigorously and skillfully than she could have hoped to use it. His skillfully young fingers, she thought. His brilliant young fingers!

“Bravo!” she cried when he had finished. “You could not have played more superbly at a concert!”

The crashing chord with which he had concluded teetered like a tightrope walker maintaining balance after a final spectacular sault upon the wire. Klett was standing, daubing his moist brow with his handkerchief, smiling. But, Agnes thought, he smiled straight through her now, as though he smiled at a wildly applauding audience.

“I know you will be great, Klett!” she whispered, feeling the start of tears.

Klett nodded and sat down. He seemed too elated even for speech.

Agnes heard footsteps on the front porch, and the door opened with an unpleasant cracking sound.

“Hello, Agnie! I'm so glad to see you up!” Margaret came across the room to embrace her. “Can you beat it, Molly wasn't even at home. If they'd had a telephone we could have saved ourselves the trip.” She waved a hello to Klett, then said to Agnes in a quieter voice, “I think it's just as well. Mummy's sort of done in tonight.”

Agnes nodded, hating them all, hating everything. Even “Molly” had reminded her of an old high school friend of Margaret's she had never been able to bear.

“Klett, my mother's rather tired tonight. Do you mind winding up?” Margaret said as she took her coat to the front closet.

Klett looked at her blankly as his fingers continued to play. It was an intricate passage of a Bach fugue and his face seemed rapt, as though he had not heard what she said.

Like a fawn alarmed at some subtle though possibly not really significant disturbance in the forest, Agnes arose and fled lightly up the stairs. When she was near the top there came a clangorous discord, and the piano stopped. As she closed her door, she heard Klett in the hall, heard his own door slam. We are like two outcasts, she thought, our quiet heaven torn down around us.

She thought surely it was Klett when a moment later a knock came at her door. But it was Margaret with a flushed and angry face that put her immediately on guard.

“Well, what's happened to Klett?”

Agnes stretched her eyes at her. “What? What do you mean what's happened to him?”

Margaret gave an exasperated laugh. “I'm not used to rudeness, I suppose, not from students. I certainly won't have my mother subjected to it under her own roof.”

“Why, what on earth did he do?” Agnes posed one hand against her bosom, but she could not keep herself from smiling a little, from feeling somehow triumphant that Klett had insulted her mother.

“It's just what I thought would happen. You've inflated his ego till the earth's not fit for him to walk on.”

Of course the earth is not fit for him to walk on, Agnes thought. She smiled. “But what influence have I over him?”

Margaret looked at her, then went to the window and raised it a couple of inches. “If you don't mind,” she said, and stood there.

Without a word, Agnes went to her bed, slipped off her shoes, undid her dressing gown and with the grace of old habit got beneath the covers. She felt better in bed. It was like a fortress.

“I'm taking Klett on tomorrow morning. Frankly I don't think I could stand it until Monday.”

“Why are you taking him?” And with the question she felt her anger gathering. “You're taking him away from me, aren't you?”

“Don't be absurd.”

“You want to deprive me of everything that can possibly give me a little pleasure, don't you?” she wailed, and she heard it herself now, her voice was an eerie falsetto, not breaking but sliding around in the upper register like something gone askew on slippery ice. Her voice sounded more perturbed than she felt.

“Agnie,” Margaret said calmly, “you know that's ridiculous.”

“You don't care how I might feel about Klett!” Now all that mattered was that Klett stay another day. She could not bear the thought of his leaving in the morning.

“People care too much how you feel, that's just the trouble,” Margaret said slowly. “How you think you feel. They've pampered and petted you till you've . . . You're all mixed up inside, Agnie, don't you see that?”

“Nobody cares! They snatch things away from me and here I lie helpless!”

“Helpless!”

“Klett and I love each other and you're determined to separate us!”

“Love each other!”

“Just as you separated Walter and me.” She knew she had gone astray now, but she had to come out with it, like the pianos ringing around the truth and yet, she felt, somehow true, too.

“Walter?—Don't you remember, Agnie, that I went to Chicago to talk with him—afterwards?”

Agnes remembered. “Love each other!” she gasped into the pillows.

“Agnes, stop it!”

“It's true!” She sat up with the closing of the door. Margaret had gone out. She sat rigidly, listening. Her palm hurt, and looking down, she saw she had twisted up the counterpane in a tight fist. She had almost never seen her hand in that attitude and it fascinated her.

When a moment later Margaret and Klett came into the room, Agnes found herself shaking inside with a feeling of guilt. But she held her head up proudly, smiling a little, looking at neither of them.

“I thought Klett and I might say good night and good-bye, Agnie. We'll be leaving early in the morning before you're awake probably.”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to tell Klett what you've just told me?” Margaret asked quietly.

Agnes looked down at the counterpane, at her hand, which was still clenched.

“What is it?” Klett asked finally.

She had never felt so strange. She felt in a way prideless, yet prouder than she had ever been. She knew it would be like a great scalpel slicing through her, worse than the pain along the spine yet like it, too, when she spoke. “That we love each other.” She had said it, and the pain came in her back, stiffening her, driving her nails deeper into her palm. But she must not let her head drop to the pillow.

Silence.

I have never cared less for myself, Agnes thought, feeling she soared through heavens, heard wind in her ears. All the banners of Ivanhoe, the thunder of battle, the bobbing plumes of Brian de Bois-Guilbert and the Templar a-gallop on the rocking-gaited armored horses, lances ready to tip for combat, all seemed to strike her, naked and vulnerable, with collective impact. The consequences of the encounter were not instantly seen, she thought, for the dust raised by the trampling of so many steeds darkened the air, and it was a minute (a moment?) ere the anxious spectators could see the fate of the encounter. When the fight became visible, half the knights on each side were dismounted . . . some lay stretched on the earth as if never more to rise. . . . Memory rushed on, and she had not known she remembered so much! . . . and several on both sides . . . were stopping their blood with their scarfs, and endeavoring to extricate themselves from the tumult. The mounted knights . . . were now closely engaged with their swords, shouting their warcries, and exchanging buffets, as if honour and life depended on the issue of the combat. In another moment, she thought, her heart must burst inside her and she die!

“Agnes!” It was Klett's voice, gentle, astounded.

She looked at him, so dazed by what she felt she could not see him, but only where his voice had come from. When ever had a love been revealed like this, she wondered, in the presence of a third person, the jealous sister, vanquished by the revelation? “It's true, isn't it, Klett?”

“Yes”—Klett smiled shyly—“it's true.”

“Klett!”

Agnes laughed. “Why, you look perfectly horrified, Margaret! You never wanted me to have anything, did you?”

“Klett, are you as out of your mind as she?”

How boldly he faces her, Agnes thought. Never had he looked more handsome or more courageous. Then suddenly he turned, seized the hand Agnes extended weakly above the covers and kissed it.

“We're leaving tomorrow, Klett,” Margaret said. Her voice was trembling, crawling with defeat, Agnes thought. “Whether you come on to New York or not is your own business now. In fact you can go to blazes!” She seemed about to say something else, but she turned and went out of the room.

Agnes laughed again. “You will stay? You don't have to go with her, Klett. You can go to school in Chicago, can't you?”

He nodded, troubled. Then he released her hand and went toward the door.

“You will stay, Klett?”

“Yes, I'll stay,” he said as he went out.

She lay then in a kind of recuperative exhaustion, too exhilarated for the moment even to listen to the brief exchange of voices in the hall. She heard Klett's door close, and she closed her own eyes. She wanted to lie in a half sleep, thinking of the happiness that had come to her, letting herself only half believe it, as though it had been something she had read about or merely hoped for, letting it finally rise into her consciousness as a fact. Then her curiosity to know what Margaret had just said to Klett began to prod her. Suppose after all he had decided to leave with Margaret? He had not seemed quite sure.

She got up and went barefoot, tying the satin belt of her gown, down the hall. She knocked softly on Klett's door, feeling she fled from Margaret's light under the door behind her. She went in and saw him get up from the side of the bed.

“Klett!” She held her arms gently open. Now, really for the first time, she wanted to embrace him. The desire to feel the solidity of his shoulders in her arms, the side of his hair against her cheek, was less a pleasurable thing to anticipate than a relief of a sensation that seemed to rise from the core of her nerves.

But he shook his head. “Give me time to think.”

Something had happened, she knew. She felt as though everything trembled on an edge, about to topple to one side or the other. “Klett, my darling, we should be rejoicing! We should sing!—You won't leave me, Klett.”

He looked at her, holding himself proudly, though his eyes were miserable. “There is such a thing,” he said, “as destiny.”

She knew it was the proper answer, the answer to which there was no further question. “I know. Your music,” she said quietly. “But you won't leave me, will you? We can be just as close, Klett.” He would study in New York, perhaps, but at least he would write her wonderful letters, see her often. Finally he would be free to be with her always.