Eleven (12 page)

Mrs. Holland nudged her. “We’re going to get some ice cream now. Then we’re going back to play some gin rummy.”

“I was just at the most exciting part of the book.” But Alice rose with the others and was almost cheerful as they walked to the drug store.

Alice won at gin rummy, and felt pleased with herself. Hattie, watching her uneasily all day, was much relieved when she decreed speaking terms again.

Nevertheless, the thought of the ruined cardigan rankled in Alice’s mind, and prodded her with a sense of injustice. Indeed, she was ashamed of herself for being able to take it as lightly as she did. It was letting Hattie walk over her. She wished she could muster a really strong hatred.

They were in their room reading at nine o’clock. Every vestige of Hattie’s shyness or pretended contrition had vanished. “Wasn’t it a nice day?” Hattie ventured.

“Um-hm.” Alice did not raise her head.

“Well,” Hattie made the inevitable remark through the inevitable yawn, “I think I’ll be going off to bed.”

And a few minutes later they were both in bed, propped up by four pillows. Hattie with the newspaper and Alice with her detective story. They were silent for a while, then Hattie adjusted her pillows and lay down. “Good night, Alice.”

“Good night.”

Soon Alice pulled out the light, and there was absolute silence in the room except for the soft ticking of the clock and the occasional
purr of an automobile. The clock on the mantel whirred and began to strike ten.

Alice lay open-eyed. All day her tears had been restrained, and now she began to cry. But they were not the childish tears of the morning, she felt. She wiped her nose on the top of the sheet.

She raised herself on one elbow. The darkish braid of hair outlined Hattie’s neck and shoulder against the white bedclothes. She felt very strong, strong enough to murder Hattie with her own hands. But the idea of murder passed from her mind as swiftly as it had entered. Her revenge had to be something that would last, that would hurt, something that Hattie must endure and that she herself could enjoy.

Then it came to her, and she was out of bed, walking boldly to the sewing-table, as Hattie had done twenty-four hours before . . . and she was standing by the bed, bending over Hattie, peering at her placid, sleeping face through her tears and her short-sighted eyes. Two quick strokes of the scissors would cut through the braid, right near the head. But Alice lowered the scissors just a little, to where the braid was tighter. She squeezed the scissors with both hands, made them chew on the braid, as Hattie slowly awakened with the touch of cold metal on her neck.
Whack
, and it was done.

“What is it? . . . What—?” Hattie said.

The braid was off, lying like a dark grey snake on the bedcover.

“Alice!” Hattie said, and groped at her neck, felt the stiff ends of the braid’s stump. “Alice!”

Alice stood a few feet away, staring at Hattie who was sitting up in bed, and suddenly Alice was overcome with mirth. She tittered, and at the same time tears started in her eyes. “You did it to me!” she said. “You cut my cardigan!”

Alice’s instant of self-defence was unnecessary, because Hattie was absolutely crumpled and stunned. She started to get out of bed, as if to go to the mirror, but sat back again, moaning and weeping, feeling of the horrid thing at the end of her hair. Then she lay down again, still moaning into her pillow. Alice stayed up, and sat finally in the easy chair. She was full of energy, not sleepy at all. But toward dawn, when Hattie slept, Alice crept between the covers.

Hattie did not speak to her in the morning, and did not look at her. Hattie put the braid away in a drawer. Then she tied a scarf around her head to go down to breakfast, and in the dining-room, Hattie took another table from the one at which Alice and she usually sat. Alice saw Hattie speaking to Mrs. Holland after breakfast.

A few minutes later, Mrs. Holland came over to Alice, who was reading in a corner of the lounge.

“I think,” Mrs. Holland said gently, “that you and your friend might be happier if you had separate rooms for a while, don’t you?”

This took Alice by surprise, though at the same time she had been expecting something worse. Her prepared statement about the spilt ink, the missing Tennyson and the ruined angora subsided in her, and she said quite briskly, “I do indeed, Mrs. Holland. I’m agreeable to anything Hattie wishes.”

Alice offered to move out, but it was Hattie who did. She moved to a smaller room three doors down on the same floor.

That night, Alice could not sleep. It was not that she thought about Hattie particularly, or that she felt in the least sorry for what she had done—she decidedly didn’t—but that things, the room, the darkness, even the clock’s ticking, were so different because she
was alone. A couple of times during the night, she heard a footstep outside the door, and thought it might be Hattie coming back, but it was only people visiting the w.c. at the end of the hail. It occurred to Alice that she could knock on Hattie’s door and apologize but, she asked herself, why should she?

In the morning, Alice could tell from Hattie’s appearance that she hadn’t slept either. Again, they did not speak or look at each other all day, and during the gin rummy and tea at four-thirty, they managed to take different tables. Alice slept very badly that night also, and blamed it on the lamb stew at dinner, which she was having trouble digesting. Hattie would have the same trouble, perhaps, as Hattie’s digestion was if anything worse.

Three more days and nights passed, and the ravages of Hattie’s and Alice’s sleepless nights became apparent on their faces. Mrs. Holland noticed, and offered Alice some sedatives, which Alice politely declined. She had her pride, she wasn’t going to show anyone she was disturbed by Hattie’s absence, and besides, she thought it was weak and self-indulgent to yield to sleeping-pills—though perhaps Hattie would.

On the fifth day, at three in the afternoon, Hattie knocked on Alice’s door. Her head was still swathed in a scarf, one of three that Hattie possessed, and this was one Alice had given her last Christmas. “Alice, I want to say I’m sorry, if
you’re
sorry,” Hattie said, her lips twisting and pursing as she fought to keep back the tears.

This was or should have been a moment of triumph for Alice. It was, mainly, she felt, though something—she was not sure what—tarnished it a little, made it not quite pure victory. “I am sorry about your braid, if you’re sorry about my cardigan,” Alice replied.

“I am,” said Hattie.

“And about the ink stain on my tablecloth and—where is my volume of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems?”

“I have not got it,” Hattie said, still tremulous with tears.

“You haven’t
got
it?”

“No,” Hattie declared positively.

And in a flash, Alice knew what had really happened: Hattie had at some point, in some place, destroyed it, so it was in a way true now that she hadn’t “got” it. Alice knew, too, that she must not stick over this, that she ought to forgive and forget it, though neither emotionally nor intellectually did she come to this decision: she simply knew and behaved accordingly, saying, “Very well, Hattie. You may move back, if you wish.”

Hattie then moved back, though at the card game at four-thirty, they still sat at separate tables.

Hattie, having swallowed the biggest lump of pride she had ever swallowed in knocking on Alice’s door and saying she was sorry, slept very much better back in the old arrangement, but suffered a lurking sense of unfairness. After all, a book of poems and a cardigan could be replaced, but could her hair? Alice had got back at her all right, and then some. The score was not quite even.

After a few days, Hattie and Alice were back to normal, saying little to each other, but outwardly being congenial, taking meals and playing cards at the same table. Mrs. Holland seemed pleased.

It crossed Alice’s mind to buy Hattie some expensive hair tonic she saw in a Madison Avenue window one day while on an outing with Mrs. Holland and the group. But Alice didn’t. Neither did she buy a “special treatment” for hair which she saw advertised in the
back of a magazine, guaranteed to make hair grow thicker and faster, but Alice read every word of the advertisement.

Meanwhile, Hattie struggled in silence with her stump of braid, brushed her hair faithfully as usual, but only when Alice was having her bath or was out of the room, so Alice would not see it. Nothing in Alice’s possession now seemed important enough for Hattie’s vengeance. But Christmas was coming soon. Hattie determined to wait patiently and see what Alice got then.

MRS. AFTON, AMONG THY GREEN BRAES

For Dr. Felix Bauer, staring out the window of his groundfloor office on Lexington Avenue, the afternoon was a sluggish stream that had lost its current, or which might have been flowing either backwards or forwards. Traffic had thickened, but in the molten sunlight cars only inched behind red lights, their chromium twinkling as if with white heat. Dr. Bauer’s office was air-conditioned, actually pleasantly cool, but something, his logic or his blood, told him it was hot and it depressed him.

He glanced at his wristwatch. Miss Vavrica, who was scheduled for three-thirty, was once more funking her appointment. He could see her now, wide-eyed in a movie theater probably, hypnotizing herself so as not to think of what she should be doing. There were things he could be doing in the empty minutes before his four-fifteen patient, but he kept staring out the window. What was it about New York, he wondered, for all its speed and ambition, that deprived him of his initiative? He worked hard, he always had, but in America it was
with a consciousness of working hard. It was not like Vienna or Paris, where he had worked and lived, relaxed with his wife and friends in the evenings, then found energy for more work, more reading, until the small hours of the morning.

The image of Mrs. Afton, small, rather stout but still pretty with a rare, radiant prettiness of middle age—scented, he remembered, with a gardenia cologne—superimposed itself upon the European evenings. Mrs. Afton was a very pleasant woman from the American south. She bore out what he had often heard about the American south, that it preserved a tradition of living in which there was time for meals and visits and conversation and, simply, for doing nothing. He had detected it in a few of Mrs. Afton’s phrases that might not have been necessary but were gratifying to hear, in her quiet good manners—and good manners usually annoyed him—which anxiety had not caused her to forget for an instant. Mrs. Afton reflected a way of life which, like an alchemy, made the world into quite another and more beautiful one when he was in her presence. He did not often find such pleasant people among his patients, but then Mrs. Afton had come to him last Monday in regard to her husband, not herself.

His four-fifteen patient, earnest Mr. Schriever, who earned every penny of the money he paid for his forty-five minute sessions and was aware of it every second, came and went without making a bubble on the afternoon’s surface. Alone again, Dr. Bauer passed a strong, neat hand over his brows, impatiently smoothed them, and made a final note about Mr. Schriever. The young man had talked off the top of his head again, hesitating, then rushing, and no question had been able to steer him into more promising paths. It was such people as Mr. Schriever that one had to believe one could finally help.
The first barrier was always tension, it seemed to Dr. Bauer, not the almost objective tension of war or of poverty that he had found in Europe, but the American kind of tension that was different in each individual and which each seemed to clasp the faster to himself when he came to a psychoanalyst to have it dissected out. Mrs. Afton, he recalled, had none of that tension. It was regrettable that a woman born for happiness, reared for it, should be bound to a man who had renounced it. And it was regrettable he could do nothing for her. Today, he had decided, he must tell her he could not help her.

At precisely five, Dr. Bauer’s foot found the buzzer under the blue carpet, and pressed it twice. He glanced at the door, then got up and opened it.

Mrs. Afton came in immediately, her step quick and buoyant for all her plumpness, her carefully waved, light brown head held high. It struck him she was the only creature able to move under its own power that afternoon.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Bauer.” She loosened the blue chiffon scarf that did not match but blended with his carpet, and settled herself in the leather armchair. “It’s so divinely cool here! I shall dread leaving today.”

“Yes,” he smiled. “Air-conditioning spoils one.” Bent over his desk, he read through the notes he had jotted down on Monday:

Thomas Bainbridge Afton, 55. Gen. health good. Irritable. Anxiety about physical strength and training. In recent months, severe diet and exercise program. Room of hotel suite fitted with gym. equip. Exercises strenuously. Schizoid, sadist-masochist indics. Refuses treatment.

Specifically, Mrs. Afton had come to ask him how her husband might be persuaded, if not to stop his regimen, at least to temper it.

Dr. Bauer smiled at her uneasily across his desk. He should, he supposed, dismiss her now, explain once more that he could not possibly treat someone through someone else. Mrs. Afton had pleaded with him to let her come for a second interview. And she was obviously so much more hopeful now, he found it hard to begin. “How are things today?” he asked as he always did.

“Very well.” She hesitated. “I think I’ve told you almost everything there is to tell. Unless you’ve something to ask me.” Then, as if realizing her intensity, she leaned back in her chair, blinked her blue eyes and smiled, and the smile seemed to say what she had actually said on Monday, “I know it’s funny, a husband who flexes his arms in front of a mirror like a twelve-year-old boy admiring his muscles, but you can understand that when he trembles from exhaustion afterwards, I fear for his life.”

With the same kind of smile and a nod of understanding, he supposed, if he should begin, “Since your husband refuses to come personally for treatment . . .” she would let herself be dismissed, leave his office with her burden of anxiety still within her. Mrs. Afton did not spill all her troubles out at once as most middle-aged women of her type did, and she was too proud to admit embarrassing facts as, for instance, that her husband had ever struck her. Dr. Bauer felt sure that he had.