The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (23 page)

Her having chosen me as the special object of her attentions had the effect of making Alice all the more uneasy with me. Her fear of failing to impress me made her urgent and shrill. She always had a look of being too concerned with what she was going to say when I was done talking to pay any attention to me. This made conversation with her rather a sequence of non sequiturs. On top of this, when she did begin to talk she forgot what she had been so carefully planning to say, and chattered desperately, frowning with anxiety over my opinion of her. If I had not observed all these things on first meeting her it was because, unlike most people, who grow more relaxed with you with time, Alice was at her best in the first five minutes of your acquaintance.

She was worried about the invitation, she said, the way she had worded it, afraid she had written asking me please
not
to come to tea Friday at five, and would not let me assure her that she had made no such mistake, but kept me ten minutes at the door while she told of the many embarrassments this habit of hers of being positive when she meant to be negative and vice versa had got her into, how she once lost a dear friend through the constraint between them after she had written and then not been sure whether she said she was glad to hear that she was now home from the hospital, or glad she was not home.

By the time she came to the end of her speech she was frowning with irritation, for she always feared that in her urge to be intimate she might have let something slip that showed her unfavorably. But mostly she was annoyed with the time it took her. Words did take time, and—strange as it may seem in a person who rarely stopped—Alice hated to talk. One ought to appreciate her nature, she felt, without her having to explain it to him, through silent, sympathetic feeling.

When at last she let me join the guests I saw at once the reason for her unusual discomfiture. Her sister had come—uninvited, I was sure, just as I was sure that Victoria's sole reason for coming would be to make Alice uncomfortable.

My acquaintance with Victoria had begun when I turned to find her standing behind me in the Cressett gallery one day, asking me please to tell her why I had avoided her. She was not used to being snubbed for three months by new young artists in town, she said, and when I tried to say something she stopped me with, “Why not say right out that my little sister has told you what a witch I am? Then I can prove what a false notion you've been given.” When she left me I realized that she had not felt it necessary to tell me who she was.

Now Alice left her station by the door and joined us and did just what I had told myself she would if she ever got her sister to one of her parties. To be known as Victoria's sister had been the burden of her life, and yet in front of others she was willing to take the credit they gave it. So now she was exhibiting her to her guests and loudly praising her latest work, a series of billboards that had been plastered all over the nation and which among us artists had caused a lot of talk. And joining in with Alice's praises was Robert, Victoria's husband.

Even in writing it, it is hard not to call Robert Mr. Metsys. But already this afternoon Victoria had loudly let a new person know that her name was Mrs. Hines. It amused me that she, who had made the name Metsys famous, was superior to it, while Alice, who had suffered from being the sister of the woman who had made it famous, and who had certainly not done much to enlarge its fame, clung to it to the point that she signed checks and invitations and laundry lists with it. But if it amused me, it amused Victoria much more. She also enjoyed belittling poor Robert by using his undistinguished name. A subtle pleasure, but Victoria's pleasures were.

Now she had taken all she could of Robert's and Alice's praises.
“Kitsch!”
she said. “That's the word for what I do. At least
I
”—she looked pointedly around at the members of her audience—“know it.”

Alice smiled to her guests to indicate that this was Victoria's modesty. I had once made the same mistake. Now Victoria's eyes flashed as they had flashed at me. She had no more mock modesty than she had genuine modesty. She was genuinely irate. She wanted everyone to know that she was superior to the way in which she made her money.

She spoke of the men from whom she had stolen, of Picasso and Klee and Miro, and of her guilt for what she had done to them—“What I have done to them in the process of converting them into this,” she had said to me my first night at her place, waving her hand around her sumptuous drawing room, and I had remarked to myself that nothing could have better shown how very expensive the room had been. It was an unexpected attitude and gave her, if I may so express it, a marvelous extension of personality. In fact, before that evening was over she had made it seem almost purer in spirit to have done what she had and
know
it, than to have refused to do it, and I had felt myself beginning to appreciate the moral pleasure she took in this role.

Now one of her listeners made the second of the mistakes I had made that night, and said that he, too, could probably, if he searched himself for a moment, find a few such thefts on his conscience, whereupon in the look she gave him she revealed her belief that nobody had a conscience but her. Then she turned to abuse her husband with the gusto with which I had seen her do it.

“Kitsch!”
she flung at him. “Bad enough to dirty your own good ideas, but to steal and pervert the ideas of others—and when those others are the big men of the age!”

Oh, she was at least a big thief. We others stole from her; she stole from the source itself.

“Kitsch!”
she flung at him one last time. Poor man, she had left him nothing but his wife, and she would not let him have even a belief in her.

I remembered the first time I saw him. We had left our car at the foot of the steep snow-covered drive, Janice and I. We had not walked far when up at the house a dog barked, and then piano music had started up and floated down to us on the still winter air. It accompanied us all the way, a passage from
The Well-tempered Clavier
, terribly difficult and very well done. After knocking at the door we had had to wait through half a dozen measures for the end. Then Robert, whom I actually did call Mr. Metsys and he did not correct me, greeted us in sneakers, faded corduroys and a tattered denim jumper, which, as he was well aware, made a striking contrast to the splendor behind him as he stood in the door.

I pointed to the piano and said, “Please go on.”

“He can't.”

It was Victoria who had come gliding into the room unheard. “He can't go on, that's all he knows.”

Robert had smiled modestly, as though that was her way of bragging about him. As a matter of fact, it was true. Those thirty-odd measures of Bach were literally all the music he knew. Every time we went there the same passage began when our arrival at the foot of the hill was announced by the bark of the dog, and at the door each time we had to wait until it was finished in a final burst of triumphant virtuosity.

Robert knew music about as he knew sculpture. There was one promising carving in the hall off the drawing room which he modestly owned to. When I asked to see more I was told by Victoria that there weren't any more, he had done that one and then given up. It was not the first such mistake I'd made in the course of our acquaintance, having asked why he never went on with playwriting or anthropology, so to Victoria it seemed time for a general explanation, though I tried desperately to suggest that I didn't want one. Robert looked penitent while Victoria, in a tolerant scolding tone, a tolerant tone which was the most withering contempt I ever want to hear, explained that Robert's weakness had always been a lack of persistence.

I myself had by this time watched him take up hand printing and fitfully resume the playwriting, and I had seen why he never got anywhere with anything. He was licked before he got a start, Victoria so minimized any effort he made—or, I ought to say, she hardly felt it necessary to minimize them now; his own memory of his past failures was enough to foredoom any new undertaking. Robert still cherished visions of himself succeeding at almost anything, but like those photographer's proofs one takes home to choose among for the final print, they had faded and blurred from being kept too long.

“I'm just lazy,” he said.

Yet he worked around the house and grounds ten to twelve hours a day. They pretended their liberal politics as the reason for keeping no hired help, but actually they did not need any. “I'm just lazy”—I supposed he would rather feel he could blame some weakness of his own than admit the true reason for his failures.

I strolled over to talk to Hilda Matthews. Hilda was the woman at whose bidding the country's skirts had once risen an incredible six inches, who had brought back the shingle bob, who had originated the horsetail hairdo. A part of me stood abashed before a woman who could change the look of a whole country like that.

We had talked a while when through the door across the room a new man entered and Hilda said, “Oh, it's my husband. I must go over and say hello.”

“Has it been that long since you saw him?”

“I can still recognize him,” she said.

“Business, I suppose,” I said wisely.

“That's the word we use for it,” said Hilda gaily. Whereupon I, who thought I'd been holding up my end of one of those knowing talks about the husband's absences and his excuses, realized how very wrong I had been. It was
she
who had been too busy, or told her husband so, to get home nights. She had assumed I understood it that way.

And perhaps I should have. For the next moment I was joined by John Coefield, who said, “Charley, where's your wife? I haven't seen her in ages.”

“Neither have I,” I said. “She isn't here.”

“Not sick, I hope?”

“No,” I confessed, “she's at work.”

“Work? Why, I never knew Janice
did
anything.”

“She didn't ‘do' anything until we came here,” I told him. “Now she leaves breakfast for me and takes the early train.” I found myself using the half-humorous tone for this which I'd observed in other men, and it irritated me.

Arthur Fergusson, who had come up in time to hear this last, said, “Oh-hoh. Becoming one of us, eh, Charley?”

“No,” said John Coefield. “That will be when
he
gets the breakfast and
she
takes the later train.”

This had an edge to it, and Arthur Fergusson smiled coldly.

Coefield wore such thick glasses that he seemed to be looking into them rather than through them, but even so he made me understand with a look that he had been trapped once already this afternoon by Arthur. Nothing would ever mean much to Arthur after wartime Washington, his captain's uniform and his desk in the OSS—to say nothing of his African trip. At first, right after the war, while others talked of their experiences, he had made his impression, so I was told, by being silent. Now that that war was a good ways back and people spoke more often of the coming one, he talked incessantly of “his war.” He had tried every way in the world to go, had lied unsuccessfully about his age and suffered the humiliation of having a recruiting officer scan his employment record and ask what earthly use he thought he might be to a war effort. But it was one of the things in that record that got him in. He had worked once for an American advertising agency in Morocco, writing copy for soap in three native dialects. So he was sent to recruit natives for spying against the Germans.

Surely he remembered one or two of the many times he had told us about it.

His wife remembered not one or two but all the many times he had told everybody, so she came over soon to extricate us from him.

“You off on Morocco again?” she said, giving us an indulgent shake of the head over Arthur, and giving Arthur a less indulgent look.

Arthur drew himself up and it seemed for a moment he was going to answer back and cause a scene. Then he subsided and gave a sheepish grin.

Coefield said, “Go on, Arthur. You were about to say?”

I thought it was very considerate of Coefield to do that, and quite convincing the look of interest he put on. After a hesitant glance at his wife, Arthur smiled his appreciation.

“You are much too polite, John,” said Mary Fergusson.

John Coefield's determined answer surprised me. “Not in the least,” he snapped. “Charley and I were absorbed in what Arthur was saying.”

Mary shrugged her shoulders and retreated.

A sigh escaped John Coefield as he settled down to Arthur's war again.

We men had gradually drifted together in one corner, and whenever that happened the subject of gardening was bound to come up sooner or later.

One man was a recent convert to organic gardening and he was telling of the dangers to one's health, to the soil, to the national economy, to the very rhythm of nature that came from using chemical fertilizers. They killed earthworms. Now earthworms, he said with much enjoyment of the words, dropped castings that were simply incredibly rich in trace elements, besides keeping the soil aerated by boring holes, networks of holes in it. The great thing about fertilizing with compost was that it was natural. This was admitted by all to be a weighty argument. The word
natural
was a magic word. Moreover, it was felt that the use of artificial fertilizers was not very sporting somehow.

All this made one man who had been prodigal with superphosphate rather uncomfortable. “Well,” he demanded, “who had the biggest tomatoes last year, Tom, and the earliest? You or me?”

Bigger, Tom was willing to admit. A day or two earlier perhaps. But as nourishing? What chemical fertilizer did to a tomato was blow it up, force it. But the food value was nil.

Then there was the matter of insecticides. Who wanted to eat arsenic and lead and nicotine with his vegetables?

This man was fifty or so, rather fat, and proud of his callused hands. They showed honest toil and he enjoyed the way they fitted so ill with his job of producing radio programs at fifty thousand dollars a year. I got a vision of him out in his garden before going to the train in the morning raking Mexican beetles into a tin can full of kerosene with a little paddle.