In Search of Love and Beauty (28 page)

It was Mary who insisted that they start dinner, even though Tim hadn't arrived. She said she was starving and
could eat a horse: “I'm not waiting another minute. Now then, where's Evie?”

“Yes, where is she?” said the grandmother. “She hasn't even said hello to Granny yet.”

“I'll get her,” Marietta said. As she went upstairs, Mark turned and kicked inside her. She was glad to have him do that, it was like having him share her indignation at his father's absence.

She knocked on Evie's door, but Evie cried out: “No! No! I'm not through yet!” Marietta didn't even wonder what it was she wasn't through with. Evie had strange solitary habits: sometimes she rolled bandages—who knew for what dead army—or she copied out recipes from some moldering cook-book. As far as Marietta could judge, her occupations were silent and harmless, but Tim had hinted how sometimes, after telephone calls, she had to be brought back in the middle of the night in her nightdress, having been found pounding on the doors of young carpenters living in the village.

When Marietta went in, she found Evie sitting on her bed with her legs drawn up, knitting furiously at a long gray shape. “Just let me finish this,” she begged.

“They're calling for dinner, and look, you're not even dressed yet . . . I'll help you,” Marietta said. She always wanted to help Evie who, tall and big-boned, looked as capable as her mother and sister but was far from being so.

But as soon as Marietta opened the dresser to try to find Evie's clothes—it was as tangled in there as a bird's nest—Evie cried out, “Don't touch!” She swung herself off the bed and dived into the open drawer and pulled out what she needed. She began to dress; it was a slow, laborious process. In putting on her stockings, Evie lifted each of her heavy legs in turn as if they belonged to someone else; she even muttered like a nurse at a difficult patient. When she got to putting on her wine-colored long dress, her head and arms got stuck and she struggled from in there till Marietta came to her rescue.
Marietta also helped her do herself up at the back and for this Evie was so deeply, touchingly grateful that Marietta felt ashamed of letting her fingers shrink from touching Evie's thick, cold flesh.

“Tim's not back yet,” Marietta said, expecting more sympathy from Evie than the others.

“He's probably in the barn, making a fuss over Periwinkle. You know how crazy he is about that horse.” When they were children, there had been horses in the stable, but it was years since it had been converted into a garage. Marietta realized that Evie was beginning to go into her bad period again. Although lucid and reasonable for long intervals, she tended to slip every now and again out of present reality; they took no notice until this process was speeded up and then they knew that it was time for her to go back in the hospital. She knew it herself and packed up her suitcase and carried it downstairs, waiting to be taken there.

“He'll be here soon, don't fret,” Evie said, sensing Marietta's unease. Suddenly—perhaps to comfort her—she kissed Marietta: but at the touch of her sister-in-law's lips, Marietta let out a cry and her hands flew to protect her womb. Evie drew back and smiled sheepishly, apologetically. Marietta too began to apologize—“I guess I'm nervous, Evie, being this much pregnant and Tim not showing up”—but she was more than nervous, she was trembling with fright and wanted to run away and protect herself and her baby and not have to go down and sit with the women in the dining room and go through that Thanksgiving meal.

Of course she did it finally, the same way Evie got herself together and went downstairs to her appointed place at the oval table. There was something in that house that made everyone go through with their duty. It may have been the rigidity of their routine that held them all up as in an iron framework. Even their conversation had a routine—as when they commented on the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, and the
pumpkin pie. It was a tradition with them that these items were prepared by the grandmother at home, and every year they commented on how good they were and how Granny had done it again. And every year, while carving the turkey-Mary was always the one to do that, even when Tim was there—Mary asked Evie: “Are you going to kick me to bits again tonight?”

“Oh, I'm sorry, it's all Granny's fault,” chuckled the grandmother, who was the cause of Mary having to share with Evie. This too was one of their traditions: Mary would never have given up her room for anyone except her grandmother—and for her only on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and again in the summer when Granny came to visit for a week, bringing two bottles of cranberry jelly made from her own berries growing in her yard.

Marietta drove on to Mark's house, past the unpromising approach—the service station, the lumber yard, the home-produce store, the realty office—and turned inside the gate, past Jeff's stone cottage; and then she saw the house on its hill, and her first thought was,
What's he want with a house this size?
And her second thought:
Well, since he's got it, he can take Mother's furniture.

The doors were open, and she walked in, through the hallway, through those lofty oval rooms. She was as amazed as when she had peered through the windows of Tim's house: for just as the new owners of that had attempted to pickle its ambience, so Mark too had reverted in style to his father's family. His paternal grandmother would have been pleased to see the care and respect he had lavished on the pieces he had inherited from her; and to supplement them, he had selected only those—drink table, gentleman's secretary, lyre-back armchair—that exactly matched them in period and style. But although everything there was at least 150 years old, it had all been so polished and refurbished—gleaming
mahogany and rosewood with gilt bronze mountings—that it might as well have been entirely new. The floors too had been stripped and restored to their pristine pinewood planks; the walls and ceilings with their cornices and moldings were painted stark white; the carvings on the wooden mantels had also been carefully restored and repainted in white, and within them the huge fireplaces gaped, swept and empty.

Marietta shivered—literally with cold, for the heating was on too low to penetrate those high rooms. Besides, they were cold and damp with new paint, and entirely unlived-in. Yet there were people in the house—she could hear footsteps upstairs and the voices of two men. Both were unmistakable to her: Mark's somewhat high-pitched voice, and Kent's boyish growl. Her first instinct was to leave without making her presence known; but instead she went resolutely to the foot of the stairs and called Mark in a loud, brave voice.

She recognized the silence that immediately fell upstairs as one of consternation. But she kept right on standing there, and after a while she called again. Mark appeared from out of one of the upstairs rooms; he came running down the stairs, simulating pleased surprise. Kent kept very still in the upper room as if he weren't there; but both of them were very much aware that he was.

Fortunately, Marietta had come for a definite purpose and had a lot to say. She told him that she wanted to sell Louise's apartment and have her move into her own. Mark agreed, and they discussed practical details. At the same time, he walked her around his house—the downstairs rooms only—and identified for her the pieces he had newly bought and those that had belonged to his paternal grandmother. But of course she knew these latter better than he did. In the dining room she recognized the portraits of the senator, the judge, and the abolitionist; also on the sideboard the silver-handled carving set which Mary had wielded on the Thanksgiving turkey.

Marietta looked around: “Well, I guess you can have Mother's dining-room furniture now. At least it'll fit in here.”

“Oh, but can't you see—it's the wrong period!” Mark exclaimed, truly shocked. When she walked out and stood at the bottom of the staircase, he followed her rather quickly. He said, “Grandma's furniture is really only right for Leo's house. In size, in period, that's the only place it would fit.”

“I'd rather give it away,” Marietta said. She looked up: “What's upstairs?”

“Just some bedrooms.” When she walked the first step up, he preceded her and stood facing her on the second, so that she could walk no farther. It was an impasse, and both were silent, wondering how to get around it. And upstairs, Kent too was very, very silent.

It was Marietta who spoke first—not in calculation but spontaneously, and what she said now was as unexpected to herself as to him: “Aren't you ever going to get married, darling?” she asked—for the very first time in all their life, so that he couldn't help looking astonished. That made her laugh: “You're thirty-four, you might have thought of it by now.”

“Yes, and I can just see
you
with a daughter-in-law,” he came back quickly.

She laughed again though shakily: “That's true, I'd hate her—but it's better than having you turn into one of those jaunty old boys pretending they're not lonely.”

Mark thought,
She means old queens; she knows perfectly well.
Standing on the stairs, he one step above her, they looked into each other's eyes that seemed to hold no secrets, they were both so light and clear: but both mother and son had secret thoughts at that very moment. He thought,
Is she going to ask me now?
And she thought,
Is he going to tell me now?

But it was she who didn't want it. She walked up one step so that she stood beside him. She leaned against him and began to cry, and he stood quite still and let her do that.

From out of his shoulder, she said, “I love you so terribly.”

“Well, of course,” he said. “Naturally. I expect you to.”

Kent had got tired of keeping still, and he deliberately began to move around so that his footsteps echoed through the house; but the two of them kept right on standing on the stairs and pretended they didn't hear him.

When Louise called Leo to tell him that she was planning to celebrate Regi's birthday at the Academy, he was not enthusiastic. “Can't you keep her at home?” he said. “Our poor Regi,” Louise urged—but he had never wanted to know about Regi's condition. He hated sickness, and sick women were worse than anything. “Too bad,” he said. It was the end of the conversation. He put down the phone—he was in his den—and lay back on his leather couch. He pressed his call bell, and when the person on duty answered, he sent for Stephanie. While waiting for her, he lay on his couch and thought about her, with his arms folded behind his head. He didn't even have to try to forget Louise and Regi, there was simply no room for them in his thoughts.

Stephanie, meanwhile, was still trying to decide whether to go off with Jeff. When he talked about how they would travel across the country—he had done this more than half a dozen times, she only once—Stephanie got all excited and wanted to go; but afterward, when she and Natasha got back to the Academy, she had second thoughts. She said how could she leave when her work with Leo wasn't finished yet? when she hadn't yet found herself? or—as they put it at the Academy—hadn't yet reached her Point?

As always, Stephanie was tireless in discussing herself and her possibilities. Of course, so was everyone else at the Academy, but with Stephanie it was different from most of the others because she considered herself still very open to
possibilities. While they were reaching into themselves to get at their own failures, she was doing so with a view to choosing among a variety of options. Up till now, these options had mainly been concerned with what sort of a person she could choose to be—but now there was a very definite, practical one: whether to stay with Leo or go off with Jeff.

During the workshops, in which she continued enthusiastically to participate, she disguised her options in the usual psychospiritual terms. But it was just as well that Leo was too damn bored with workshops—as he quite openly said—to attend them, or he would have caught on very quickly what the alternatives were that Stephanie was considering. As it was, she managed to fool him into believing that she was entirely fulfilled in her role as his favorite disciple. Or perhaps he just let himself be fooled because he needed her so. He kept her as close to him as he could and even stopped her from attending workshops, shocking her by saying, “What do you want with all that garbage?” It became difficult for her to get out of the Academy without telling lies; but as she was always cheerfully prepared to do this, and always had quite a number of them ready, she did manage to see Jeff whenever she wanted to. It was uncertain whether Leo believed her when she said she had to go into town to get a new supply of sanitary tampons—“How refreshing!” he would say. “No one else around here seems to need them anymore”—or to go to the post office, or whatever she made up when she went to Mark's house. When she got back, he was always on the steps waiting for her, looking at the big Mickey Mouse wristwatch that one of his students had playfully presented to him.

Once, when he called for her and was told she wasn't there, he sent for Natasha instead. As always, she entered the den with trepidation, and she positively jumped when he barked at her: “Where is she? . . . Gone to Mark's house, I expect, to be with that boy Jeff. You needn't lie to me.” He shot a glance at her from under his eyebrows which stuck out
like promontories over his glassy eyes. “That's what she's left you behind for, isn't it—to tell me lies; as if I'd believe them for a second. As if you could even tell them. But don't go and pride yourself on your truthfulness: it's a purely negative quality in you—nothing but an inability to lie.” But next moment he sank back on his couch, tired of analyzing Natasha, tired of the whole exercise—not only with Natasha but with everyone, it was all not worth it anymore. Something quite other engaged him now.