The O'Briens (8 page)

“What does your wife think?”

“Oh, she wants us to buy a house,” he said gloomily. “We live in her studio right on Windward. Above the Chink laundry. She says it won't be good for the baby. She's due in a couple of months.”

“Congratulations.”

“I'd like to feel I can up stakes whenever I choose. All rooms are boring, sooner or later. I like the outside.”

Mr. Grattan O'Brien was restless. She wondered if it worried his wife.

It took only a minute to see everything. Dirty windows, plaster dust, stale air. She tried to ignore her lewd feelings and pay heed to the space, the way the light worked within the small rooms. The kitchen sink, brightly tiled counters, yellow and black. Icebox. Bathtub, porcelain toilet, sink, white tiles on the floor. Windows in the sitting room looked out to the green glint of the canal. Could she make a home for herself?

“I guess you like it or you don't,” he said. “It's a nice time of day out here, though, isn't it? The way the light cuts in. These houses are very bright most of the time. Look, why don't you nose around a bit by yourself, get a feel for the place. You don't want me looking over your shoulder. I'll wait outside.”

She thought about his wife: busy, pretty, young. More ambitious than Grattan, perhaps, and getting a little impatient.

“Thank you. I won't be long,” she said.

“Take your time, Miss Wilkins.”

He went out, closing the door behind him. She stood still and heard him strike a match. And the gondolier was still crooning, singing for no one but himself.

Alone this time, Iseult took herself once more through the bright, bare rooms. The layout was very simple. It was a nothing little house, the bedroom half the size of her bedroom in Pasadena. Still, it was bright. Hard to imagine someone dying in these rooms. The spare room that could be her library, studio, thinking room.

What sort of passion might spill in this house? The houses she'd known had all spoken her family's dark language. Venice, California, was awfully far from everyone and everything, but did that matter? She had enough income to live modestly. She was prepared to be lonely for a while. In a bare little house of her own she might find clarity and calm, she might find her own purpose.

~

As they were gliding back along the Grand Canal, Grattan didn't ask what she thought of the Linnie cottage. He didn't say anything. Something in him seemed to have turned off, or turned inward.

They disembarked and he insisted on walking her to the electric car stop, where a three-car train was boarding passengers.

“I hope it hasn't been an utter waste of your time,” he said.

“I hope it hasn't been an utter waste of yours.”

“Certainly not.” He smiled and they shook hands, then she boarded the last car. The floor was gritty with beach sand. She found a window seat and looked out. Grattan O'Brien was still standing there, hat in hand. There was something unfinished about him; some protective carapace was missing. She would want someone tougher. Stubborn, forceful. A man to take her places she couldn't get to on her own.

The train started with a jolt and she turned away from the window. The car was packed with sunburnt mothers and infants, beach umbrellas and picnic baskets, fathers and uncles already nodding asleep, older children fussing. She seemed to be the only person travelling alone.

The day before her mother's death, the son of one of her mother's friends, home from his junior year at Yale, had telephoned Iseult and invited her to a tennis and tea party at the Pasadena Club. “Tomorrow afternoon at, say, three o'clock?”

That was when she broke for the first, the only time. Holding the telephone receiver to her ear, feeling the oxygen being squeezed from her lungs and not having the strength to pull it back in.

The telephone was on a wall in a dark panelled hallway that reeked of cleaning fluid. For weeks her mother's housekeeper, Cordelia, displaced by shifts of hired nurses, had had little to do but dust the barren rooms of that mostly unlived-in house. She was a tall, stringy coloured woman from Oklahoma and it was hard to guess her age. She was slender and long-waisted and there was something mannish about her, a sense of power and fluid strength. Determined to earn her keep, she had been scouring, buffing, and waxing so ferociously that the Pasadena house shone with a kind of cruelty, everything glossy, ugly, and perfectly arranged, so that the house itself seemed like a kind of funeral.

Hearing the Yale boy's treble over the telephone wires, Iseult felt her lungs deflate, withering as grief closed in. Unable to withstand the pressure, she dropped the receiver. As it dangled on its wire, she got slowly down on hands and knees, touched her forehead to the Tabriz carpet, then rolled over and lay on her side on the mottled wool, gasping and wheezing, until Cordelia, hurrying through with a tray, tripped over her and let out a startled yell.

Cordelia telephoned the doctor, who arrived in an automobile and gave Iseult an injection that allowed her to breathe normally; within a few moments she was in a deep stupor. Cordelia summoned the Japanese gardeners to carry her upstairs, then undressed her and got her under the sheets.

Iseult had woken up the next morning with a sour taste in her mouth and a cracking headache. She dressed and went downstairs without first going to check on her mother as she usually did. She was drinking coffee in the breakfast room when Cordelia walked in, placed a brown hand on her shoulder, and said, “I tell you, girl, your mama is gone.”

She had, in fact, died during the night. The sitting nurse had awakened Cordelia, then packed up and left at dawn.

Cordelia poured herself a cup of coffee and Iseult went upstairs alone.

The room had been scoured and the windows opened wide, and much of the smell was gone. Cordelia had gathered flowers from the garden and set them on a table at the foot of the bed. Iseult's mother lay with peculiar stillness under a fresh white sheet drawn up under her arms and crisply smoothed. Her hands had been placed one on top of the other. The pillow was fresh and plump.

First her father, then her mother — each death had hardened her a little. She was alone now, and more boldness was going to be required. Life had to be engaged, life had to be started.

No, she would not stay in Pasadena.

Even with the windows open, the atmosphere in the trolley car stank of hot metal, rubber flooring, and sweet, stale food. Steel wheels made a steady, flatulent grinding underneath. Every seat was taken. Across the aisle a sunburnt girl had fallen asleep with her head on the shoulder of the young man holding her hand.

Animal appetites were embarrassing because they would not be denied, and only with difficulty could they be controlled. Before her parents sent her to Sacred Heart Convent, while she was still taking her lessons at the schoolhouse in their town in New Hampshire, there had been that one rough, wool-smelling boy, Patrick Dubois. One bright afternoon in April, Patrick had forced her, step by step, down the wooden stairs that led to the school's cellar. It was supposed to be a game: she was supposed to be his helpless prisoner.

Confident that she was the one really in charge of this exciting little contest, she had lingered on each step, challenging him. “You can't make me.”

“Aw, yes, I can.”

“Try it, then.”

That was the signal for Patrick to place big, meaty paws on her shoulders and apply pressure until she took another step down. Thirteen steps in all, then they were standing on the dirt floor of the cellar. It must have taken ten minutes to get down there. Patrick was just tall enough that he had to crouch a little below the floor joists.

Patrick Dubois lived with his parents and sisters in one of the tenements her grandfather had put up during the Civil War. He was a pupil at her school but he also had a paid job. Three or four times a day, all winter long, he left the classroom and disappeared into the cellar, where he shovelled and spread coals in the furnace. He kept a towel and a bucket of water warm down there, and a scrap of yellow soap to clean himself with, but it did no good. When he resumed his seat in the back of the classroom, there was always a gash of wet soot somewhere on his face, neck, or forearm. She could smell coal on him; anthracite had a scent like an old, dead fire, the scent of underground.

At the bottom of the cellar stairs they stood facing each other. There was just enough daylight coming down that she could see his expression, and what frightened her was that he looked so nervous.

“Aren't you going to give me a kiss?” he said. Licking his lips. His eyes shiny and wandering. He had probably dared himself into that moment in that place, and now nothing was going to stop him from carrying out his dare. He would hate himself if he did not, and whatever she said or did wouldn't matter. She really didn't have anything to do with it anymore. Neither did he, in a way. Not anymore.

April days were long in New Hampshire. Not like, say, November. Still plenty of light after the school day ended, light falling down the cellar stairs. According to her mother, the town school was well and good for town children, but Iseult's horizons extended beyond the town, which was why her parents would be sending her off to Sacred Heart Convent in New York City, where there were girls from all over the country, from Mexico and South America, and she would learn important things.

“Like what?” she'd asked.

Her mother had smiled. “Such as not to say ‘Like what?'”

“Why not?”

“It sounds common.” Her mother, born in New York City of French parents, had grown up mostly in Europe and had a slight timbre of accent, delicate and French.

“Why?”

“Because it's ugly. And brusque. It sounds rude.”

So in five months Iseult would be going off to boarding school, but at that moment she was still down the cellar with Patrick Dubois and the game that had run out of words after that question of his.

She finally said, “No, thank you.”

Whenever she recalled that afternoon, what came back first was the April light. Had it been November she never would have gone down there with him.

“Aw, come on.”

“I believe I'll go upstairs now.”

“Don't be a minx. One little kiss.”

“I believe I'll go upstairs.”

“Aw, come on. It's not going to hurt, Iseult.”

“I must go home now. Please let me go.”

“Not until I get a kiss,” Patrick Dubois said. “Come on now, Iseult, I don't want to get your clothes dirty. You're so clean, Iseult. The cleanest person in the world, you are.”

He hadn't moved, or touched her. He was just looking at her, and she sensed that, if she acted wisely, the situation might be brought back under her control.

“All right,” she said.

“On the lips. Has to be on the lips, now. A real kiss.”

Crouching under the floor joists, arms by his sides: a big boy, clumsy. If she was quick she could dodge him and probably beat him up the stairs. She didn't move. She wasn't afraid of him anymore.

“Sheesh,” he said. “Are you going to or not?”

She took a step closer and, standing on the tips of her toes, brushed his lips very quickly with her own. “There.” She stepped back. “Now you're going to tell everyone I kissed you. You're going to say it was my idea, aren't you.”

His lips rough, dry, tasting of carriage drives on dusty roads.

He shook his head. “I won't, Iseult.”

“Promise.”

“I promise I won't.”

“If you don't tell anyone, maybe we'll come down here again sometime.”

She left him standing at the schoolhouse door, a broom in his hands, while she went out into the lucid light. Sweeping up was another of his duties, also washing blackboards, straightening desks, locking up. How much did the town pay him for all those chores — twenty dollars a year? His father would have kept all the money.

Silver bare trees lined her walk home.

How often after that had she gone down the cellar with Patrick Dubois? She never let him put his arms around her or touch her, but their kisses ripened. She learned the taste of his mouth and tongue. And she wrapped her arms around his powerful neck, folded her knees, and felt his erection scuffle through their clothes as she lifted her feet off the ground, so that he was taking her weight on his neck and shoulders, so that she was hanging from him — he the trunk, she the branch.

Everyone who had ever been close to her had tried to insist on their right to control her. She knew her own body only slightly. The sexual feeling was like turning her face to the sun.

Another person could seem as clear as a glass of water, but water was still a mystery, wasn't it? Springing from depths as it did. Drenching from the sky.

~

Her mother's Pasadena lawyer, a Spaulding of the Massachusetts Spauldings, said, “There'll be no trouble selling the house, but Venice? Really, Iseult. Those beach towns are tawdry.”

Spaulding was a stern Yankee gentleman and a founding member of the Pasadena Theosophical Society. He had persuaded Iseult's mother to join when she became ill with the stomach cancer that would kill her. Iseult had been to a few theosophy meetings; it sounded like nonsense to her. Something happened to stern New England Congregationalists — and devout Roman Catholics — in California. Maybe it was the sunlight, or the orange juice, or the sweet desert dust in the air. Iseult couldn't imagine the same people back in New Hampshire earnestly discussing reincarnation, astral bodies, and oneness with the universe.

“Have you ever been to Venice?” she asked Spaulding.

The lawyer shuddered. “No, but I read in
The Times
that the red cars carried twenty thousand out there last weekend. Quite a horde! Not the place for me, thank you very much.”

“I own Pacific Electric stock, don't I?”

He nodded. “You do. A little.”

“Do you?”