Strange Sisters (7 page)

Still, it would be sweet to sleep. To sleep and to waken and to go at once to Jacqueline. Sleep was the balm of hurt minds. Who had said that? Surely someone had said it. It was not something that had just come into her mind. It had the nice, round sound of something that someone had said before. The balm, the balm, the balm of hurt minds. Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes! Who else but old Macbeth? Who but the bloody old Thane of Cawdor himself? The Thane had committed a murder, too, though it was a long time ago and for a different reason, so murder gave them a sort of common denominator, and it was right that she should now remember something he had said. But if you wanted to be technical, it wasn't really Macbeth who had said it at all, but Shakespeare. Shakespeare had written a play about Macbeth, and he had made Macbeth say that bit about sleep being the balm of hurt minds, so it was really Shakespeare himself who had said it. Not that one needed to quibble. It was a fine line, a true line, a line big enough to divide its credit among all the people in the world who had ever said it—among Macbeth and Shakespeare and Dr. Vera Telsa. There was probably no line Shakespeare had ever written that Dr. Vera Telsa hadn't repeated sometime or other, and most of them many times. Dr. Vera Telsa loved Shakespeare. She had once settled an old argument by telling Kathy in confidence that

Shakespeare was neither Shakespeare nor Sir Francis Bacon. Shakespeare, she'd said, was a woman.

Dr. Vera Telsa was a teacher of literature in a college Kathy had once attended for a very short while. Her class in Shakespeare had an excellent reputation on the campus, but Kathy had never been in the Shakespeare class, because Shakespeare was not open to freshmen, and Kathy had never got to be anything else. She had been in Dr. Telsa's freshman survey class, however, because the college, Burlington College for girls, was small and select, and that was one of the advantages of a small, select school. Even when you were a freshman, you got good teachers, really top-drawer teachers with Ph.D.'s who had written books and maybe some articles for scholarly and literary magazines, and not someone who was working his way to a degree by teaching a class or two. And even in a survey course, if it happened to be a survey of English literature, you got some Shakespeare. Just one play. Just a taste. Just enough to make the receptive students want more. Dr. Telsa was interested only in the receptive students. It was her mission to make them want more.

Dr. Telsa was tall and fairly young to have a Ph.D., and she had ash-blond hair and a deep, husky voice that was wonderful for Shakespeare and made you forget entirely that she was much too thin and that her hip bones were sharp protrusions under her clothes. Kathy had taken a rear seat in the classroom on the first day, but later she moved up front, and her feeling for Dr. Telsa became more and more intense after Beowulf, and by the time Shakespeare came around, she was thinking of Dr. Telsa as Vera and was even forgetting for short periods of time that Stella was dead, that Stella was nowhere on earth and would never be again.

Vera had intimate little extra-curricular sessions in her own home for those who responded adequately. One sat on a cushion and had refreshment and talked about whatever poet or essayist or critic happened to be most on one's mind. There was a delicious freedom in it, a brave baring of soul, and you could smoke even if you were a freshman. Vera herself smoked. She smoked cork-tipped cigarettes in a long holder that seemed, when you thought about it, to make the cork tips rather superfluous. She waved the holder when she talked or recited, and she blew smoke at the ceiling when someone else was talking or reciting. Kathy was invited to attend because she had moved up front, because her intense concentration on Vera was mistaken for absorption in what Vera was saying, and because, for reasons of her own, Vera would have eventually invited her anyhow.

She had been attending the sessions for about a month when she arrived one night to find that no one was there. No one but Vera, who stood framed in the doorway against a wash of soft light and said, "Have you come for our little session, my dear? I'm afraid it's been canceled for tonight."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"It's quite all right. It is I who should apologize. I must have forgotten to tell you."

This was a lie. She hadn't forgotten at ah". And Kathy knew intuitively that it was a lie, though she didn't specifically categorize it then or later, and she knew also that she was supposed to recognize it as such and was expected to make a decision on the basis of it. She stood quietly outside the door, making no move to leave.

"Aren't you going to the dance?" Vera asked.

"Is there a dance?"

Vera laughed softly. "Well, I can see that you
aren't
going. The boys from the University are down tonight, you know. It's a standard fall affair."

"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten all about it I never go to dances."

"Is that so? In that case, why don't you come in for a while? We can have a nice, cozy chat all by ourselves."

She stepped back out of the doorway, and Kathy walked past her into the room. She removed her coat and stood for a moment holding it, and Vera said casually, "Just drop it anyplace, my dear."

She laid the coat over the back of a chair and moved farther into the room to drop, from habit formed in the sessions, onto a thick brocaded pillow on the floor by the sofa. Vera sat on the sofa itself and fitted a cigarette into her long holder and lit it with a silver table lighter. She leaned back and stretched her long, thin legs in front of her. She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling in a blue plume and laughed gently.

"Yes," she sighed, "when there's a dance with boys available, I'm afraid stuffy old Dr. Telsa and her stuffy old literature must take a back seat. I'm deeply touched that you remembered me under the circumstances. Tell me, why don't you like to dance?"

"I don't know. I just don't care for it."

"Such a simple reason for such a pretty girl? Oh, no, my dear, I'm sure it must be much more complex than that. Are you sure it's the dancing you don't like?"

Kathy looked up from her position on the floor, and Vera looked down through a gossamer drift of smoke, and though Kathy was young, she was no fool, and she thought that there comes a time when it is necessary to recognize and accept whatever is inside you and whatever is apparent inside someone else.

She said clearly, "I guess not. I guess it's really the boys."

Vera's pink lips, wide and flexible and rather too thin, curved very slightly in the merest trace of a smile. "Shall I tell you something? We can make it a little secret just between the two of us. I don't like boys, either. Or, in my case, perhaps I should say men. Isn't it odd of us?"

She stood up then and walked across the room to a radio-phonograph combination. Looking back over her shoulder, she said, "Shall we have music tonight with our talk? What would you like?"

"Whatever you'd like."

"Chopin? Some of the waltzes?"

Kathy had no feeling at all for Chopin, because appreciation of fine music was one of the things she had never learned from Stella, but she nodded in agreement, and Vera placed a stack of records on the spindle of the phonograph and continued to stand by the machine until the captive sound of a piano under talented fingers was released to lilting freedom in the room. Then she returned to the sofa and sat down again in her previous position. Her voice, against the background of Chopin's music, was as light and lilting as the music itself.

"You have sad eyes, Kathy. That's the first thing I noticed about you when you came into my class. Why are your eyes so sad, Kathy?"

"I didn't know they were."

"They are, Kathy. They're very, very sad. Come and sit beside me and tell me about yourself, and then perhaps I'll understand. You must call me Vera and talk with me as if I were the very best friend you have in the world, because I have a feeling that that's just what I'm going to be."

And so Kathy sat on the sofa beside Vera and told her all about the significant events from the smell of lilies on, how she lived with Stella and loved Stella and how Stella was now dead, but she didn't tell, not quite yet, how Vera was someone who might fill the terrible emptiness that Stella had left or how she loved the touch of Vera's fingers on her hair and face as she talked. Always after that, the music of Chopin meant one thing, and so long as that thing was fresh and beautiful in the way she looked at it, she would listen breathlessly to the music of Chopin, but after the thing withered and grew ugly, she wouldn't listen to the music of Chopin at all, but would go away as quickly as she could, out of hearing, whenever it was played.

If it was a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn, it was also a long way from a sofa to a park bench. The narrow slats of the bench pressed into her flesh, and she stirred, shifting her weight. She hadn't thought of Vera Telsa in such detail for quite some time, and had wished, as a matter of fact, never to think of her in such detail again. It was not always possible, however, to control the direction or the material of one's thoughts. Thinking, after all, was no more than the making of certain connections in the intricate and mysterious system of nerves with which one was equipped, and connections were made without deliberate or conscious effort. Especially, at this moment, the one that sent into her mind the thought that she would one day also wish never to think of Jacqueline again, and that when she did so, it would be with sickness and regret and self-recrimination.

But that was not true. She would not permit it to be true. For Jacqueline was far more than Vera had ever been. She was, indeed, far more than herself. She was hope. She was salvation. She was absolution in a cocktail lounge. If only, that is, one could ever arrive at the time and the place. If only one could sleep quietly through the threatening interim.

Then she became aware that the terminus of her line of vision past the cast-iron man was a narrow store on the street beyond. Her eyes adjusted to the distance and focused, picking out details. Behind dirty glass was an upright cardboard figure of a girl in a very brief swimming suit, two scraps of white cloth barely breaking the continuity of golden skin. Above the girl's head was a glaring sun with long spears of flame flaring from its circumference to show how hot it was. The girl's skin remained so beautifully golden under the blistering sun because she used a certain kind of lotion which was spelled out below in cool color. Across the top of the window in flaked letters was the claim that prescriptions were carefully compounded.

A drug store. A shabby, struggling drug store that looked as if it wouldn't let a small point of ethics interfere with a sale. After all, plenty of places must sell barbiturates without prescriptions. She was almost certain of that There was so much of it around in one form or another.

Without thinking any more about it, because she had already sat and thought too long, she got up and crossed the park and the street beyond and went into the drug store. Inside, the store was shadowy and cool and cluttered, scented with the mixed emissions of fountain flavors. The only light was that which filtered in from the street through the dirty display window and two smaller side windows near the ceiling. At first she thought that there was no one present but herself, but then she heard a staccato voice behind the partition at the rear that divided the store into front and back portions. The voice had a cultivated professional vigor, and after listening for a moment, she realized that it belonged to a radio news reporter. She listened a moment longer in frozen attention that possessed an element of terror, thinking that the reporter might be relating local events, that she might hear the name of Angus Brunn, but then she became aware that his remarks were international, and she walked on toward the source of the voice, her heels rapping sharply on the floor, the constriction in her chest slowly relaxing.

A man appeared in a doorway in the partition and moved forward to meet her. "Can I help you, miss?"

"Yes. I'd like some sleeping tablets, please."

He was a tall man, and he leaned forward and down a little to look at her. His face was long, the skin hanging loosely on its bone structure, and his eyes were small and dull and tired. Looking at her, he lifted one hand and took the tip of his nose between thumb and index finger, pinching it gently.

"Sleeping tablets require a prescription, you know."

"I know. I had a prescription, but I seem to have lost it. I'm sure it was nothing uncommon. Any kind of good tablet would do."

"Who was the doctor? I’ll call him and get the prescription for you."

"He's not here. Not in the city, I mean. I got the prescription out of town."

"That's too bad. Law says you have to have a doctor's prescription. Couldn't you get another one?*'

"I don't like to pay the fee. It seems so unnecessary, and I don't have money to waste."

"Sure. Don't blame you for feeling that way. Fees are pretty rough. For something simple like this, it'd probably be three minutes and three bucks." He released his nose and sighed. "Okay, miss. Maybe I can fix you up."

He walked back through the doorway in the partition. She could near him moving around behind the thin barrier, and even though she understood that he knew she was lying, she experienced a renewal of the feeling of cleverness that she had known in Angus Brunn's apartment last night. A sense of triumph disproportionate and briefly exhilarating.

The druggist returned shortly from the rear and handed her a small cardboard box. She noticed that the box had no label to identify either its contents or its source.

"I'm taking a chance doing this, miss," he said. "I could get into a Jot of trouble."

She accepted this as an oblique request for a bonus in compensation for the risk, though it was almost certainly a risk he took frequently and considered negligible. Nevertheless, establishing the lie of her desire to avoid a doctor's fee, she gave him a ten dollar bill and turned without waiting for any gesture on his part to make change.