A Charmed Life (16 page)

As she listened to Mr. Sandy Gray, echoing the familiar cavils, this resentment suddenly exploded. “But I
am
precious,” she exclaimed, leaning forward on the footstool and striking a blow on her chest. “I’m inhibited. I’m afraid of life. I’m decadent. That is
me.
Why can’t I paint that if I want to?” Sandy Gray smiled. “You can’t paint a negation,” he said. Dolly clenched her fists. “What about Bosch?” she demanded, seizing the name arbitrarily as a standard to rally to. “Bosh, my dear girl,” he answered. “You know better than that. Horror isn’t a negation. Only fear. You mustn’t be afraid.” Dolly sighed. She could not tell him the truth: that every moment of her life was shot through with terrors; peril stirred all around her, whimsically, in the rustling of the trees, in the sound of the icebox running or the gurgling of kerosene in the tank. This was what she was straining to show in her painting: the absurd powers that were bending her to their will—nature as animate and threatening and people as elemental forces. But what her critics saw in her small canvases was only “meticulous craftsmanship,” “timid conceits,” “quaint charm.” If they did not urge her to break through, they advised her to illustrate children’s books.

“Are you afraid of me?” Sandy Gray queried. Dolly considered and then shook her head, smiling. Strangely enough, she was not; she was only afraid of what the Sinnotts would think of her for letting him stay so long. He was so much like one of her bogeys that she could deprecate his terrors. He had come out of the pond just like a myth, she said to herself with amusement. She was far more fearful of what she called normal people: John and Martha, for instance.

Even if they had not told her, she would have known how her visitor looked to them. She could borrow their sharp eyes, alas, as easily as she could have put on Martha’s severe, horn-rimmed reading glasses. To the normal vision, Sandy Gray was just another rusticated bohemian, solemn and loquacious and self-vaunting, a not-very-intelligent and pretentious bore. And yet, to Dolly’s eyes, there was something Christlike about his appearance. His hair and beard were a soft, delicate brown. His skin was white, and he had deep-set, light-brown eyes with strange bluish whites. He carried himself stiffly, almost as if he had a spinal injury, and his long arms were frail. The black shirt and jeans and boots and gruff manners were deliberately misleading. He was really a gentle person.

As soon as she had said this to herself, Dolly felt a defiant quiver of pleasure. She had two kinds of friends: those she described to herself as “gentle” and the others. The second kind was always criticizing the first kind and saying they were unworthy of her. The more the second kind criticized, the more she clung to the first. Her aunts, who themselves were oddities in the New England manufacturing town she came from (one of them smoked cigars and was deaf and enormously fat), always used to complain that she had odd, unsuitable friends. They would never let her choose her pets either, and all her life Dolly had felt herself in the position of a little girl in a big house stealing out to give a saucer of milk to a stray cat, which, as her aunts used to warn her, was probably diseased. She had loved her aunts; she loved John and Martha and all the other sensible, sharp-spoken people who had succeeded to her aunts’ place in knowing what was right for her—her trustees, her teachers, and their European-born wives, who fixed her hair for her and put mascara on her quivering lashes, before an art opening, and told her when to let her hems down and how to walk into a room. These rational guardians of her interests were all somewhat alike; the world admired them, and so did Dolly. Her “gentle” friends were all different, resembling each other only in the stubborn quaintness of choice that had selected them. She had the queerest collection, picked up on her travels, priests and nuns, elderly doctors with tropical diseases, destitute baronesses, progressive high-school principals, housewives, young soldiers, broken-down artistes; many of her friends were children. A psychiatrist once told her that she was afraid of being overrun by strong people and sought out weak ones, whom she could protect. This was not quite exact, Dolly herself recognized.
Everybody
wanted to tyrannize over her, the weak far more insistently, she had to admit, than the strong, who sometimes had other things to think about than telling her what to do.

She was taken in too easily, her trustees said, examining her check stubs. But that was not the case. She knew very well when she was being exploited by the kind of person she called gentle, and she claimed the right to be exploited, hugging it to herself like a toy that somebody was trying to wrest from her. Down deep, in the bedrock of her soul, there was a mistrustfulness of good sense. Behind every caution, she suspected a deprivation; something was being withheld. The demand to see
for herself,
ever since her thirtieth birthday, had been developing into a secret mania; she wanted to
live.
Outwardly, she was just the same, quiet and decorous, but in her soul she pioneered obstinately, inverting every notion that was offered her, especially where people were concerned. Much as she loved John and Martha, whenever she was with them she had to fight off the suspicion that her judgment was being constrained.

The first night she had arrived here, they had had her to dinner and put her to bed afterward, in their guest bedroom, despite her insistence that she wanted to sleep in her own house. The water was not turned on yet, John pointed out, and the house would be damp and cold from having been shut since Labor Day. In the morning, he would settle her in and see that everything was in order. He and Martha were extraordinarily helpful; they loved preparations and bustle and giving advice. After dinner, in their parlor John had handed Dolly a list of all the people she might need: the plumber, the electrician, the laundress, the odd-job man, the woman who would clean, if Dolly wanted her. Her garbage, he said, she would do best to take to the dump, and, for one person, it was wiser not to have the milkman; better buy milk when she needed it from the store. Between them, they had thought of everything. They told her the best places to swim at this time of year and where to get the freshest eggs. John drew a map, showing where mussels were to be found, on the old pier, and where you could dig clams and collect oysters; he marked some painting sites on it in red pencil, with stars. Martha made him show where the Indian pipe grew and where a file of cigar-colored boletus marched down a sand road, like a Mexican army on parade. They did everything, Dolly felt, but paint the pictures for her, so eager were they to be useful and anticipate her needs. It was a sign of love, and she knew it; moreover, it was a sign of intelligence. She was pleased (or had been, until today) with the painting ideas they had given her, which suited her painstaking brush. The frail Indian pipes, gray-white shading into pink, with a delicate black fringe on the petals, like a glass-blower’s flowers, had turned out awfully well; the boletus picture was not finished, but the conception was splendid.

And John had done everything for her, without being asked. He had come to put back the screens when the late mosquitoes bothered her and he had dug her a garbage pit when he saw that she did not like to take the can to the dump, which had a horrible smell and rats and human scavengers, eagerly picking over the refuse. He chopped some pine wood for her and found out what was wrong when the chimney smoked. Martha had come, with extra pots and pans and dishes. She had brought Dolly a cook book with the best recipes marked. And she always knew the best; that, to Dolly was the worst of it. If Dolly followed instructions, everything came out right; and if she tried a different recipe from the one recommended by Martha, the result was a disaster. The Sinnotts always knew; it was an instinct with them. And they never compromised or pretended that anything was other than it was. This quality had never failed to amaze Dolly, in all the years she had known them—their sense of life’s topography. Everything in New Leeds was where they said it was and looked precisely as they had described it, the good and the bad, the wilted lettuces and withering carrots in the grocery-store bins, the sunset from Long Hill. When Dolly, hopefully, would find that they had been wrong in some particular, it would turn out that she had not followed the directions. John, especially, was a born guide. After a day in Hell—Dolly felt certain—he could conduct a guided tour of all the circles, walking ahead with his long, bounding step, commenting on the architecture and pointing out the denizens whom it would be worth while to meet.

This trait, to Dolly, was both wonderful and terrible. It was the distillation of all she feared and mistrusted, admired and envied. John and Martha were like parents to her, though they all three were nearly the same age. They could not help thinking for her (no one could, apparently), and if she let them, everything sparkled with high spirits and certainty. In these bright October days, they were living, the three of them, in a sort of idyl, full of games and laughter. They made a charming picture—Dolly had studied it, as though in a mirror or in the still glass of one of the roseate ponds: the dark young man and the two fair-haired girls. In the mornings, John worked on a brochure he was doing for the Historical Society, while Martha wrote and Dolly painted, on a schedule he had devised. Nearly every afternoon, they met for a swim or to go musseling or mushrooming. On especially good days, they picnicked on the beach, with a hamper of fried chicken and a cranberry pie. They often had dinner together, cooking over Dolly’s fire or eating, more formally, in Martha’s pink dining room. They read poetry and argued heatedly about books and pictures; Martha spun theories out of John’s and Dolly’s perceptions. Late at night, armed with a star book and a flashlight, they went out to have Dolly identify the stars for them. There was the promise of a French play-reading at the Coes’, about which the Sinnotts appeared to be squabbling.

John did not want them to go, and Martha protested that it would be unkind not to. She had already cast Dolly in the role of the queen, Bérénice, and was sketching out a costume for her, though there was no plan of dressing up. Dolly was troubled by these arguments between the Sinnotts, quick and laughing as they were. In the ten days she had been here, she had become aware of a change in their relation. She could see, behind the screen of persiflage, that John was worried about money and that Martha’s play was not going well. Several times it had been on the tip of her tongue to offer them a loan, but the fear of intruding kept her silent. They were going, she sensed, through a period of testing, in which no outsider, even a second cousin, could help. Dolly often wondered, especially since Martha’s visit, whether it had not been a mistake on their part to try themselves out here, of all places, where there were so many bad memories for Martha to live down. But it was precisely like the Sinnotts to seek out the severest conditions. They would not compromise, Dolly knew, any more than they would drink instant coffee; they demanded the supreme test.

She herself had no doubt about their power of survival; it was her own she questioned as she lay awake at night in her bunk-bed, listening to animals that John assured her were only squirrels. Influenced perhaps by their example, she too felt that she had reached a point of decision. But her own little bark was not even launched yet on the unknown waters that beckoned her, while John and Martha were already at sea, having chosen to sink or swim. It was an awful choice; Dolly could see why they were scared, even though, for once, she thought she knew better than they did and could promise them that it would be all right for them in the end. But they would not believe her if she told them. “You only see the surface,” Martha had said once, gloomily, when they had all had a lot of red wine at dinner and Dolly had been telling them what a beautiful life they had made here. “Are you different when you’re alone?” Dolly had asked in alarm. No, said the Sinnotts; they had fights, sometimes, but it was not that. It was something else, said Martha. “All this,” she declared, with a sweeping gesture that took in her long, shadowed dining room. “We made it, but I can’t believe that it’s real.”

She did not want Dolly to stay on here. Only till Thanksgiving, she told Dolly firmly. After that, Dolly would not like it. The winds would begin to blow and it would be too unpleasant to go sketching and the people would get on her nerves. But it was just here that Dolly disagreed with her. Despite what Martha said, she felt determined to extend her stay through the winter. She did not want only the “best part,” as Martha called the fall season; she wanted the whole thing. And it distressed her to be told, repeatedly, by both John and Martha that it would be fatal for her to get to know the people here. She had heard it from them the first night, in their white parlor, when her head was swimming with the information that was being pressed on her. Sandy Gray’s name, she ruefully remembered, had led the list of persons especially to be avoided, if, as Martha said, she had come down here to
work.
That was the point, both the Sinnotts had averred, talking very fast and underscoring each other’s words. If you came here to work, there were only a few people you could safely see: the Coes, a couple called the Hubers, who were much older, and one or two others whose names Dolly could not remember. The rest were
death,
said Martha, stamping out a cigarette.

“But why?” Dolly had murmured, sleepy and confused. “They don’t work,” said the Sinnotts, with an air of having explained the universe. Dolly did not understand. There were lots of nice people who didn’t work, she protested, feeling a wayward loyalty spring up toward this criticized group. The Sinnotts shook their heads. The local drones were different, they explained: they had turned New Leeds into a hive of inactivity. They not only did not work but they proselytized for sloth. They had even converted the natives. “Do you know,” cried John, “what the carpenter told me the other day when I called him in to look at some sills? He said, ‘Believe it or not, we try to do a good job.’” Dolly laughed dubiously; she could see that the Sinnotts were very much excited. These people here, they continued, had no object in life except to see each other incessantly, over a bottle. They did not read; they did not travel, farther than Digby or to Trowbridge, the county seat, when one of them was arrested for drunken driving or had to appear in a divorce case. They did not even keep house or take care of their children any longer. Their wants were reduced to a minimum—shelter, something to eat, blue jeans and a Mackinaw, and a bottle of Imperial. They were like people of the future, said Martha—a planner’s nightmare of what the world would be like when work had been abolished and everybody took a vitamin pill instead of bothering to cook.