The Goddess Abides: A Novel (2 page)

“I do.”

“So do I.”

He sat down and without effort played a movement from a Beethoven sonata. Halfway between table and sink, her hands fall of dishes, she listened and was amazed. A musician, a real one, playing as she had not heard a man play since her father died, playing with precision, elegance and depth! No one really understood music unless he was a scientist, her father had declared, and not just a scientist, either, oh, no, only the real ones, the theoreticians, whose language was mathematics. She had not understood mathematics until he had explained to her that it was the symbolic language of relationships. “And relationships,” he had told her, “contain the essential meaning of life.”

She set the dishes down softly and tiptoed to a chair. He played on until the last movement before the finale. Then he stopped abruptly and turned to face her. “I don’t play the finale. It doesn’t belong. Beethoven never knew how to stop the great music, and he just subsides or ends with a sudden bang. He had to finish somehow.”

She laughed. “You’re a blasphemer, but you’re right. It’s what I’ve often thought and never dared to say.”

He was walking around the room restlessly and went to the window. The edge of the full moon was shining over the horizon.

“Do you live here all the year round?”

“No—just since my husband’s death.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“No children?”

“Both married and living their own lives—thank God!”

“You don’t like children?”

“I
love them, but any self-respecting woman likes to see her children on their own. Then she knows she’s done a good job.”

“You don’t look—motherly.”

She evaded this. “Is your own mother living?”

“No, nor my father. I don’t remember them. In fact, I never knew them.” He stopped by the piano and repeated a few bars of the sonata, then stopped again and went over to the fire and stood gazing into the high flames leaping into the chimney. “I grew up with an uncle, an old bachelor who always seems surprised to see me in his house, however long I’m there.”

“What is he?”

“Retired—ever since I can remember. Kind and confused—writes books about classical French poetry that no one publishes, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s been awfully good to me, especially since he’s never had the least idea of what I busy myself about. My mother was his sister.”

He murmured this abstractedly, as though he were talking about someone else.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“No, but I think about it—now and then.”

“The girl is chosen?”

“Well, she’s chosen me, you might say.”

She laughed again. Living alone, laughter was what she missed. “Is that what they do nowadays?”

“A good thing,” he said, unsmiling. “I doubt I’ll have time to choose for myself. My sort of work takes up the mind.”

“And the heart—”

He looked at his watch. “I say, do you mind—may I stay? I’ll get up early so as to have an early go at the mountain—if that doesn’t upset you? I can make my own breakfast. Shall I put on another log?”

“No,” she said, “and I get up early, too.”

They parted then with nod and smile, and when she had cleared the table and washed the dishes she sat down at the piano and played softly while the fire died to ash.

…And then later, when she had finished her ritual of bath and brushing her long fair hair, when she was lying in the big bed in her own room, the fire blazing upon the high stone hearth, she fulfilled the end of each day, she lifted the telephone from its place and dialed seven digits and she listened until she heard the gentle old voice.

“Is that you, my darling?” the voice inquired.

“It is I,” she said.

“I have been waiting for you—a long evening, waiting.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes. Henry had an errand in the village. I have been rereading my essay on myth in the crowd mind. The boundary between myth and reality is very delicate. Myth is the dream, the hope, the faith, the vision of possibility which grows naturally into planning, and so possibility is very close indeed to reality, may indeed at any moment become reality, and that is its ineffable magic, its luring charm. Do I bore you, my love? I am company only for myself, I am afraid, and yet you will never know what you supply me now—King David and his Bathsheba—I doubt they talked, you know! I imagine it was just the warmth of her young flesh against his—no talk needed. Lacking that, I talk—”

He broke into mild laughter, and she laughed with him.

“You are laughing at me?” he inquired. “I don’t mind, dear child—so that I make you laugh.”

“I am not laughing at you,” she told him. “I am thinking how glad I shall be when I get so old that I, too, can say anything I like. Have you taken your medicine today?”

“Oh, yes—Henry sees to that.”

“Where are you now?”

“If you must know, you inquisitive female, I am just out of my bath, wrapped in a large towel, dripping water on the floor.”

“Oh, Edwin,” she protested. “You are incorrigible. Yes, you are, talking to me while you catch cold! Put on your pajamas at once and get into bed. Are you wearing your flannel, ones?”

“Yes, darling. Henry put the summer ones away. He put them away the first day of October as usual, and then it turned warm—Indian summer, you know—but be wouldn’t get them out again, so I had to roast until snow fell. But you know all that. I hope you’ve forgotten tomorrow is my birthday?”

“I’ve forgotten how old you are, if that’s what you mean!”

“Seventy-six, my dear love, and I still feel a stir in my central parts when I hear your voice.”

“Edwin!”

“You reproach me?”

“Good night, good night, and I repeat—you’re incorrigible!”

“God’s blessing on you, sweetheart! When are you coming to see me?”

“Soon—very soon.”

She put the receiver into its place again and lay back on her pillows, smiling. How could she explain to anyone the comfort of knowing that she was the center of an old philosopher’s amiable heart? That was what she had missed most when Arnold died. She had ceased to be first with anyone, meaning of course, heterosexual that she was, first with any man. Though Edwin Steadley stirred no central part of her, she allowed him to love her, although of what love was compounded at such an age, she did not know. Perhaps it was only a formula, words to which he had been so long accustomed in the thirty years of happy marriage with Eloise, his wife, dead these twenty-four years, that they had become habit. How long ago could be measured in the terms of her own life, for when Eloise died she had been a girl of eighteen, teasing her mother to let her cut her long hair. She had thought of Edwin as an old man even then, although in reality he had been at the height of his career as a famous philosopher, and she had been his pupil in college.

Handsome and virile she had thought him, in spite of his age, and filled with an
élan
that she had not associated with philosophy until she knew him. How much of this was due to Eloise it would be hard to guess, but a great deal, doubtless, for she had been articulate and ardent, and madly in love with him, developing, no doubt, every element of sex in him. She guessed at that, for Arnold had developed her in the same way, drawing her out of virgin shyness and leading her to her fullest womanhood, until since his death she had felt the currents of her sexuality stopped and protesting. Yet the original delicacy held. She was still to be sought and not to do the seeking.

The fire was dying here in her bedroom, too, and she fell asleep.

Jared Barnow was gone and so swiftly had the time passed that she could not believe the clock said nine o’clock in the morning. They had talked over the breakfast table until suddenly the clock in the corner had chimed the hour and he had leaped to his feet.

“My God, I came to ski! You make me forget. Here, I’ll help with the dishes.”

“No, no—”

“But, of course—”

In the end she had persuaded him and had seen him off, and then had remembered and had called him. “Come back if you don’t find something nearer to the slopes!”

“Thanks!” he had shouted.

She watched him tramp down the hill to the valley road which in turn would lead him up to the ski area on the mountain opposite her window. When he was out of sight in the intervening forest, she turned to the room again. It was strangely empty, a room too huge, as Arnold had always told her.

“It’s a room to get lost in,” he had said one evening when the fire was casting shadows in the distant corners, and suddenly now although the sun was shining through the windows, she felt lost.

She finished the dishes, and then went into the room that had been Arnold’s but now was her guest room. The bed was neatly made, and everything in order. Then he must have planned to come back again? Otherwise he would have left the bed unmade. Or if he had made the bed he would have put aside the sheets. Why did she keep thinking about him? She would call Edwin and tell him about the guest and so free herself, perhaps. This much she had learned about being alone, that she could mull over something and worry herself with it until she did nothing else.

“Although I shouldn’t use Edwin merely to ease myself,” she murmured, and went to the telephone and took off the receiver and dialed. Ten o’clock? He would be at his desk, writing his memoirs, the history of a long and distinguished life, spent among famous men of letters and learning.

She heard his voice on the telephone at her ear. “Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s I.”

“Oh, my darling—how wonderful to hear from you at the beginning of day!”

“I shouldn’t be interrupting your work but I need to hear your voice. The house seems empty.”

“It makes me happy that you need me.”

No, it is not fair of me, she thought, to use him because I miss someone else, and besides it is impossible that I miss someone I met only yesterday and that someone a man young enough to be my son. It is only that I cannot accustom myself to living alone—not yet.

“When are you coming to see me?” the voice inquired over the telephone.

It had been agreed long ago, without words, that when they met it was she who must go to him. The hazards of traveling were too much for him now, but beyond that fact was her own inclination to keep this house jealously for herself. Even her children she did not welcome here, preferring to put them up in the guest house nearby. This house was hers, inviolate now that Arnold was gone. There were times which she would not acknowledge that even he had sometimes been an intruder, But she had never known herself as she really was until now when she was alone.

Before her widowhood she had been a daughter and sister, wife and mother, dividing herself perforce, though willingly, for she had enjoyed each relationship and treasured her memories. Now she was living with herself and by herself as though she were a stranger, discovering new likes and dislikes, new abilities. Books, for example—she had thought of books as diversion and amusement. Now she knew they were communication between minds, her own and others, living and dead. Such communication was the source of learning and she had a thirst for learning, reviving after the busy years of her married life.

“I have a guest,” she said now.

“Who is it?”

She heard an echo of jealousy in Edwin’s voice, and was amused.

“You’re jealous!”

“Of course I am!”

“But that’s absurd.”

“No, only natural. I’m in love with you.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“No, only reality. Let me tell you an amazing truth about the human being. You’re too young to know, but I know. The ability to love is the secret of life. So long as one can love, really love, another human being, death waits afar off. It is only when the capacity to love ceases to exist that death follows soon. I thank you, my darling, for letting me love you. It keeps death from my door.”

She listened as she always listened to him, accepting and believing. He was still teacher and she was still pupil. “You make too much of me,” she said, “and that is very sweet.”

“So,” he continued, “who is your guest?”

She told him briefly, almost indifferently, ending with the words, “And probably he won’t be back. The weekend rush is over today and he’ll find another place to stay.”

“I hope so,” he replied. “I don’t like your being alone in the house with a stranger. One never knows, these days—and you’re a very beautiful woman.”

Arnold had not been one to praise her looks and she had never been sure of her own beauty. He had been jealous, yes, but without cause, and since he was possessive it occurred to her now that perhaps she had always been beautiful, and he had not dared to tell her so.

“It’s only what you think, Edwin,” she said, “but still I like to hear it, being in my secret heart a vain woman.”

“You’ve never thought of yourself. I’ve always known you were beautiful. I remember the first time I saw you. It was a September day, and your head, true red gold, was shining there among the browns and blacks and blondes of the freshmen. I marked you then, without any thought of course that one day you would become my life. I saw your eyes, clear with intelligence. That’s my prize pupil, I thought—as you were. And I began then to scheme how I could keep you in my department, and failed because that rascal, Arnold Chardman, married you too early! I almost wept the day you came to tell me. Remember?”

She did remember. It was true she had married too young, but she had been so joyful that she had not noticed the professor’s eyes, only his silence.

“Will you not wish me well?” she had asked.

She remembered the long pause before he answered. “I wish you to be happy. You will find your happiness in different ways. Just now you are sure it is in marriage. Well, perhaps so. But the time will come when it will be in something else.”

“So long as it is not in someone else,” she had said gaily.

“Do not limit happiness,” he had said gravely. “One takes it where one finds it.”

They had not met again for years and she forgot him. Then one day, soon after Arnold had died, among the many letters of condolence she found his letter. He wrote as though they had parted only yesterday.