A Special Providence (16 page)

“And were they nice ladies?” she inquired.

“Is the hard part over?”

“What? Oh, yes, the hard part’s over. Were they nice ladies?”

“Yes. I liked Irene best because she smelled so pretty and she played with me a lot. Brenda was nice too but she kept wanting to hug and kiss me all the time.”

“I see.”

She put down the tool and got out her cigarettes, and she was just about to say, “Let’s rest a minute, Bobby,” when she heard a startling sound from somewhere in the wall behind her – an erupting, burbling sound that she was a little late in identifying as a lewd giggle of children. In the split second of her confusion she whirled to look at the wall, and she saw them: three or four pairs of eyes peering in through an inch-wide crack in the wallboards – eyes that vanished, leaving only sunlight in the crack, as soon as she. discovered them. The sound of their laughter rose up louder as they ran away, and when she turned back to Bobby he was round-eyed with humiliation, hunched over with both hands hiding his genitals.

She wanted to get hold of the Mancini girl and beat her – hit her across the face – but by the time she got to the door the children had disappeared. She stood looking out across the bright grass for some time before realizing that there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t call up Mrs. Mancini without telling her what it was the children had done, and that would mean having to explain what she and Bobby had been doing.

“They’re gone, dear,” she said, turning back to him. “Let’s not worry about those silly children.”

She persuaded him to pose again, but he was clearly uneasy
about it; in a little while she let him get dressed and went on working alone until the light began to fade. It was nearly five o’clock, and when she went back to the house she found she was exhausted.

She went to the living room first and turned on the radio for the five o’clock news. It was something unintelligible about President Hoover and the Treasury deficit, but she listened to it anyway because she always enjoyed Lowell Thomas – his voice was reassuringly steady and baritone, and there was something nice about the way he always said: “So long until tomorrow.” She turned the volume up in order to hear it in the kitchen while she got the dinner started; she had begun to scrape a carrot when Lowell Thomas went off and Kate Smith came on:

And the ridiculous thing was that it made her cry. “Every beam brings a dream, dear, of you …” She had to put the carrot and the knife down and stand with her forehead pressed against the kitchen window until her sobs abated, and afterwards, though she felt refreshed and much better, she was ashamed of herself. Keats could make her cry but so could Kate Smith.

Neither she nor Bobby were very hungry, so dinner didn’t take very long. She got the dishes washed and Bobby put to bed a little earlier than usual, and then there was nothing to do.

She listened to the radio and then tried to read, but thoughts of Harvey Spangler kept obtruding on the page. After a while she got up and began walking around the room, smoking one cigarette after another. If only there were some way to escape the evening hours!

When the telephone rang it was such an unexpected, exciting event that she let it ring three or four times before answering it,
knowing it would probably be Eva but savoring the fact that it might be anyone at all. It was George.

“Did I get you up?” he inquired.

“No. I wasn’t in bed.”

“Listen, Alice,” he began in a tone that warned her of unpleasantness. “I’m calling because there’s something very important that we’ve got to discuss.”

“All right.”

“They’re putting through another cutback in salaries and commissions next month. That means I’ll be making an awful lot less money, and in fact I’m lucky to have a job at all.”

“I see.”

“So what it amounts to is that we’re simply going to have to economize, Alice. I’m afraid you’ll have to give up that place in the country.”

“But it’s cheaper here than in the city.”

“Alice, I know what that place is costing you in rent alone. Do you know what other people are paying for rent? Do you know what
I’m
paying for rent?”

“And how much—” she started to tremble and had to hold the phone in both hands. “How much did it cost you to take your lady friends to Atlantic City?”

“I – look, Alice. That has nothing to do with – Please try to be reasonable.”

And she did her best. She listened while he explained about good, inexpensive apartments in Queens, and while he offered to find her such a place himself; and she knew that by her silence she was concurring in his wishes, or at least expressing willingness to abandon the house in Bethel.

But then it was her turn, and she gripped the phone in both hands again. At first she was scarcely aware of what she was saying; she knew only that she wanted to hurt him as badly as
possible, and she knew that the force and rhythm of her words were building to an inevitable climax.

“… and I don’t care
how
many lawyers you get; I’ll never
ever
let my child be exposed to you and your – your little whores again, do you understand me? Never!”

She hung up the phone, and when it rang again a moment later she didn’t answer it; she let it ring ten times, and then it stopped.

She thought she heard Bobby crying and went quickly upstairs to see, but he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. She tucked the covers more securely around him and moved his Teddy bear closer to his head, just in case.

Downstairs again, she walked around the living room twisting her hands together, going over and over the things she wished she had thought of saying to George; then, as her breathing and her blood slowed down, she sat quietly in a chair.

After a while she started thinking about the Faun again and wondering how it looked. Sometimes, if you looked at a piece of sculpture under artificial light, after working on it all day, you could see new things in it.

There was a full moon, which made it easy to walk to the barn, and once she was inside there was enough blue-gray glow from the skylight to show her the outlines of the Faun. It didn’t look bad at all. Then she switched on the lights, and after the first shock of brightness she had to stand biting her lip for a full minute before she could admit how disappointed she was: all the work she’d done today looked crude.

But then, moving back a few steps and squinting, she was able to see the beginnings of something promising, and she began to breathe normally again. She knew better than to touch it now, but if she had a good day tomorrow she might still be able to bring it off.

She looked at several other pieces, seeing things she could improve in all of them, but she had to leave the studio soon because she kept thinking of Harvey Spangler standing there with his gaberdine suit and his awful cigar, saying: “Well, you know me on the subject of art, Alice.”

Instead of going back to the house she went up into the field behind the barn – she wanted to be as far as possible from thoughts of Harvey Spangler, and of the Mancini girl, and of George, and even of Bobby.

And no sooner was she standing in the tall, windswept grass of the hillside than she was crying again, but this time there was no pleasure in it. All she could think of was another poem Willard Slade had liked:

Well, she was sick for home, all right; and she didn’t mean New Rochelle or New York or Cleveland or Cincinnati, and she certainly didn’t mean Paris. She was sick for Plainville, Indiana, and for her dead mother and father and for all her sisters – even Eva – and for a lost and innocent time when everybody knew she was the baby of the family.

After Bethel there were three trying but hopeful years in Greenwich Village. They moved to a different studio apartment each year, Alice seeking a new peace and a brave new foundation for her career with each move, and it wasn’t until the end of the third year that all her loneliness dissolved with the advent of Sterling Nelson.

Never, in the most wistful of her longings, had she imagined that a man like Sterling Nelson might exist for her. She had long been resigned, in fact, to the idea that no man would ever exist for her again, not in any kind of responsible, durable way; she had come to accept the probability that the rest of her life would be spent in what Natalie Crawford called “a state of single blessedness.”

Natalie Crawford was her neighbor on Charles Street, a twice-divorced, childless woman who had some sort of job with an advertising agency, who burned incense in her apartment and believed in her Ouija board and liked to use words like
“simpatico,
” and who habitually found respite from her own state of single blessedness with any man she could get her hands on. Alice didn’t like her very much, or at least didn’t wholly approve of her, but for lack of other friends she had come to rely on her – to spend excessive amounts of time with her and attend her
frantic parties, and even to borrow small sums of money from her at times when she couldn’t make her income stretch through the month.

And the ironic thing was that one of Natalie Crawford’s parties should have been the occasion of her meeting Sterling Nelson. He was nothing at all like most of the men Natalie knew – men who drank too much and delighted in their rudeness and got into raucous quarrels. He was tall and dignified and aristocratic, with graying temples and a little graying moustache; he was talking quietly in a small group of other nice-looking people she had never seen before, aloof from the mainstream of the party, and from the moment she saw him she wanted urgently to find some way of breaking through all the noise and smoke and getting close to him, of reaching out to touch the sleeve of his handsome suit (for he was beautifully dressed in tweeds that could only have come from England) and of letting him know that she was different too.

But a dreadful man named Mike Driscoll, who had recently been fired from a publishing house, had her backed into a corner and was demanding to know how she felt about the C.I.O., and she had scarcely escaped him before she got involved in a drunken argument between Paul and Mary Engstrom. “Do you know what you are when you’re like this?” Paul asked his wife, who had been supporting him for nearly a year since he’d lost his job on the New York
Sun
. “I mean seriously, do you know what you are? Because I’ll tell you.”

“I don’t have to take this, do I, Alice?” Mary said. “Is there any reason why I have to take this from him?”

“Listen
, God damn it. You know what you are? You’re a God damn little snot-nosed Jewish bitch, that’s what you are.”

And that was when she heard Natalie’s voice rising up behind them. “Come along over here,” Natalie was saying. “I want you
to meet these nice people. Paul and Mary Engstrom; Alice Prentice. This is Sterling Nelson.”

And the first thing he said to her was the least expected, nicest, and most encouraging thing she could have imagined: “I hear you’re an artist.”

She talked to no one else for the rest of the evening, and Sterling Nelson talked to no one but her. He was indeed English, and from his quiet, reticent talk she learned several other things about him: that he was in New York to represent a British export firm – a businessman with far too much sophistication to take his business seriously – that he was an art lover, and that he had evidently traveled all over the world. (It wasn’t until later that she found out more specific and still more impressive details: that he’d been decorated as a submarine commander during the war and had later held important positions with the Colonial Service in places like Burma.)

The trouble was that she couldn’t stop her voice, or even control it. Helplessly, she heard herself saying one inane or pretentious thing after another while his polite, lightly sweating face continued to nod and smile and the rest of the room swam around them in a dizzying blur. All she knew was that if she stopped talking he might go away, and then she began to fear that if she stopped talking he might be better able to notice all the things she knew were wrong with her: her dress, which was neither new nor wholly clean and which she was almost sure was visibly wet under the arms, and her hair which badly needed combing, and the fact that she was wearing too much lipstick too hastily applied. She wanted to escape to Natalie Crawford’s bathroom and work on herself at the mirror, composing herself, but if she did that there was a terrible chance that he’d be gone when she came back; so there was nothing to do but stand there, gripping her warm, sticky drink with both hands, and go
on talking. Then suddenly the people he’d come with were gathering their coats to leave, and he cordially excused himself and was gone. And no sooner had the door closed behind him than Natalie Crawford was bearing down on her through the smoke. “Isn’t he wonderful?” Natalie demanded. “I can’t imagine where they found him, but isn’t he marvelous?”

And Alice began sidling away, trying to leave before Natalie could say he was
simpatico;
all she wanted then was to get her own coat and get out of here, to go home alone and make sure Bobby was all right and then go to bed and weep, and that was what she did.

So it was much, much more than a delightful surprise when she picked up her ringing telephone the very next day and heard: “Mrs. Prentice? Sterling Nelson here.”

When he came to visit her studio she was a little anxious that he might not like her sculpture, but he was kind and respectful about the few pieces she dared to show him, and soon she found herself wholly at ease. She knew she looked better this time – she had bought a new dress for the occasion and spent a long time over her make-up – and her self-confidence was so improved that she let him do most of the talking. She was aware that most of what few things she said came out exactly right – cool but promising – and one or two of her phrases even seemed to strike him as witty.