In the Absence of Angels (11 page)

Even when people saw her from the front, saw the domed childish forehead, the eyes, large with a painful attention, the peaked fledgling mouth always open as if waiting for someone to push into it the blessed worm of enlightenment — even then they were not sure. Feature by feature the face was a pretty one. It was only as people waited covertly for reflection to shadow the eyes, for a self to assemble and animate the face, that the doubt stole over them. The creeping realization began to form only as, shrinking, they became aware of the presence of that same straining of a blocked sense which they felt in the presence of the deaf who leaned to listen, the blind who stretched to feel. But when they heard the light, singsong rote of the voice, the sentence that petered into a laugh, the laugh that was like a pitch-pipe whose single note was query — then they were sure.

Then it was that, at a tea where Mrs. Reese Reynolds Whyte poured, or at a meeting of which she was inevitably chairman, one or the other of the women would purr in the ear of her neighbor: “You’ve seen that youngest daughter of Gratia Whyte’s …is she quite ...?” and the other would answer: “All right …you mean? ...” covering the words with a disclaiming shrug.

“Borderline?” This, avidly, from the inquirer.

“Well …you know Gratia ...” might come the discreet answer. “She can face up to anything. …Look at how they drag the father with them …lectures, everywhere!”

It was through the means of Hyacinth Hall that Mrs. Whyte had faced up to Letitia. The Whytes belonged to those quiet rich who managed to imply, by their abstention from show, their endorsement of the proper, noncontroversial causes, such as Poetry and Peace, that wealth could be noble and remain fruitfully in the hands of its rightful inheritors. Summer and winter, their homes had a serene dowdiness possible only to those who could afford to be contemptuous of fashion. Their limousines were the heaviest, but dark, their servants and appurtenances of the most durable best, and none of these was changed too often. Mrs. Whyte had not only “attended” but graduated from one of the severer colleges long before it became commonplace for debutantes to do so, and from the list of benefactions which offered opportunities for conspicuous waste in an altruistic form, she had long since dropped the sponsorship of day nurseries and fallen women, leaving this to the less intellectual members of Society. It was in the poetry leagues and the English-speaking unions that she could be found, and in those spontaneous, pacifist groups of women which were most fervid and vocal just before a war, were as swiftly transmuted into “Bundles for Something” during the war’s course, and were once again transformed by victory into Leagues for a Proper Peace. It was related of her, and justly, that she had downed in debate (at a benefit) a Justice of the Supreme Court (retired). Her three daughters before Letitia, had been sent, not to Miss Hewitt’s Classes, or various “Halls” in America or Lausanne, but to Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and in one case, Oxford, after which, their doughy faces veiled by Venus-nets of trust funds, they had achieved marriage, and settled down to inheriting their mother’s committeeships.

Therefore, when Hyacinth Hall, in straits after the death of its founder, had circulated an appeal to “its friends” to rally and save it, it had not been likely that Mrs. Whyte would appear in that category, since the school was superannuated, of a type she deplored, and located beyond the Eastern seaboard, in a part of America in whose pretenses she did not acquiesce. As for Letitia, she had long since been taught at home by elderly women whose need made them tactful, whose chief function was to maintain the tacit assumption that she was being taught at all.

On the very day, however, that Mrs. Whyte received the letter from the Hall in her morning mail, the housekeeper had appeared in her sitting-room, red-faced, almost in tears, with the tale that Miss Letitia was bothering the houseman again.

After the housekeeper had been reassured, halted just short of a bosomy, sisterly commiseration Mrs. Whyte could not have tolerated either as a woman or as an employer, Letitia’s mother sat over her dilemma for a long time, contemplating the pitiful mauraudings of her innocent. Then, with one of those masterly inspirations which had made her such a jewel among committeewomen, she had riffled hastily through her correspondence for the letter from the Hall. The school, she recalled, was situated in fox-hunting country; its girls spent a good part of their time in riding clothes. And Letitia could ride, had even appeared unobtrusively, years ago, at one or two shows, in the children’s class. She had proved unequal to jumping, or anything fancy; she required a gentle mount, but she loved horses, and she could ride. Her sole other talent, that for “art work,” would certainly find a place in the rudimentary classes of such a school, or else one of those special arrangements, of which she had already had so many in her life, could always be made. And what better place for protection, for segregation without emphasis, than a girl’s school, especially one where, its highest aim being to equip its young ladies with all the attractions and accoutrements of the belle, the value of protection was understood better than any other?

Therefore, on the list of the influential few who had rallied to the support of the Hall, none had rallied harder than Mrs. Whyte. And at the end of that summer six years before, the newspaper of the little Hudson River town where the Whytes had their bracketed gothic summer place, had reported: “Mr. and Mrs. Reese Reynolds Whyte and their daughter, Miss Letitia Reynolds Whyte, have left for an extended motor tour of the South, their destination Hyacinth Hall, the well-known finishing school, where Miss Whyte will enroll as an art student. Accompanying them is their house guest, Dame Alice Mellish, recently honored by His Majesty, the King of England, for her studies in Anglo-American semantics.”

It had been a queer entourage which had descended upon the school in those last deciduous days of summer. The few teachers and students already there, waiting out the close, inert days before the beginning of the term, were energized and impressed by the visitors, whose confident eccentricity had as surely betokened superiority. Flanked by Mrs. Whyte, a type instantly recognizable and acceptable, and by Dame Alice, whose skirts were uneven to the point of vagary, but whose title had preceded her through the school like an odor, had come Letitia, not so instantly recognizable, but soon to be. And wheeled out, in dark finale, from the capacious back of the car, had come the chair bearing Mr. Whyte, a beautifully groomed old man in lawyer’s black and a stiff collar, his very clean hands nerveless on his knees, the fixed upward twist of one side of his mouth lending him a demeanor of unchangeable pleasure. He did not talk, and apparently could not, but his lack, appearing at the end of life rather than at the beginning, was an honorable one which needed not to be hidden, and he was wheeled in and out of every conversation. From time to time, the chauffeur who attended him leaned over and removed or replaced the silky black beaver hat on the silver head at the proper intervals, and this, seeming to be done according to some prescribed rhythm of etiquette, not only lent the old man a verisimilitude of activity, but created, also, an atmosphere of the most recherché good taste. And when Mrs. Whyte, pointing her arches carefully before her, trailing the confused and conquered Miss Rosanna behind her, had clacked down the marble steps of the main building, she had sailed right up to the wheel chair, which had not attempted the steps, as to a reviewing stand, and with nods and becks and the most wreathed of smiles, had apparently recounted the whole transaction to the unchangeable benevolence of Father.

The Whytes did not stay the night at the school. They departed that same evening, leaving behind them a legend, that had faded, and Letitia, who had stayed the same.

So it was that Letitia, entering her hot, still room on this particular day, entered the only permanent room in the dormitory, a room from which she yearned, each expectant June, to be delivered, and to which she was, each disappointed June, remanded. Most of the other rooms had a littered, bird-of-passage look which suggested that the girl in each was only sojourning on her way to wider fields which Letitia, while she craved them, could not have described. Letitia’s room, however, had the same supervised neatness as her person, and with its pictures of her family hanging on the wall in circular silver frames, its chiming clock near the bed, and its large calendar with the block numbers marked off crosswise, looked as if it had long ago made its concessions to forever. During one or two of the early years, the accident of a friendly girl neighbor next door had permitted the unlocking of the connecting door between the rooms, as was done everywhere else in the school, but with the coming of Willa Mae, all this had changed, and little by little, Letitia’s almost tolerated, almost earned place in the humming, cozy undercurrents of the dormitory, had slipped away.

“Honestly, Mum,” Willa had reported at home, “it would give you the creeps! Really it would!” And at the very next Parents’ Day, Mrs. Fordyce, not having trusted herself among the delicacies of correspondence, had actually broached the subject, gaspingly, to Miss Rosanna, but had found her, under her cloud of faltering reassurances, unexpectedly immovable. For the special arrangement for Letitia was large.

Nevertheless, the last four years had come to have a painful weight of their own, had come to be known, in her sharded thoughts, as “the locked-door years.” But now, as she closed the door behind her, excitement twitched at her mouth, gave almost a complexity to the clear glass of her eyes. For a minute she stood in the room like a stranger to it, as if waiting for someone to tell her what to do next. Then she went to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. Behind a pile of tailored slips, all alike, which she moved to one side with patient tidiness, she found what she wanted. With a crow of pleasure, she drew out the sequined cap and held it in her hand. Straightening up, she walked over to the window, hung the cap on the hooked ornament at the end of the window-shade cord, and stood there dazzled, watching it.

Until now, there had been no occasion important enough for it since the fiasco of its first wearing. Early in her first year at the school Letitia had been permitted to attend the initial one of the highly chaperoned dances which occurred there several times a year in co-operation with a nearby military academy. Halfway through the evening, an affrighted young man, flying incontinently from the coat room, and an incredulous wave of gossip, rippling through the dancers, had made it all too apparent that either Mrs. Whyte’s strictures to Miss Rosanna had been too reserved, or Miss Rosanna’s interpretation of them insufficiently literal. Ever since then, on such evenings, Letitia, accompanied by Delia, had been sent to the movies in Minetteville, where they stayed right through the double feature, and often even sat over a sundae at Whalen’s afterwards, although Delia, admitted there in her capacity as duenna, never ate anything, but sat stiffly, referring quietly from time to time to the watch the Whytes had sent her after the first year.

Now, twisting and turning with a purposeful motion of its own, the cap dangled and reversed itself, glittering in the sun. A prism of light, deflected from it, kindled the silver frames of the pictures, where they hung on the wall, disregarded by Letitia’s glance, as their originals hung, neglected, in the dusty galleries of her remembrance. Twice a year she saw her family briefly, but so briefly, so remotely across the hedge to another world, that they had all but receded into symbols of that larger existence into which one was accepted, to which one acceded only after the mystical rite of graduation.

All the signposts, all the clues, had brought Letitia around to this conclusion, and helped by circumstance, to her contrivance for escape. On the door of Papa Davis’ office, a yellowed card, pinned to the aged door frame, said in gothicked lettering: “Walter Wallace Davis. Professor, Emeritus,” and only yesterday, straying in there in answer to his eager, scooping glance, she had stopped to peer closer, almost professionally, at the lettering on the card, and with a delaying finger on the last queer word, had asked its meaning. Papa Davis had risen from his arm chair and bent closer to her over the card, as if he too had had to ponder its meaning. Then, tossing back his head so that she had seen the waggle-tuft of beard on his chin pointing straight out, he had laughed in his neighing voice.

“Graduated!” he had said, smiling at her, nodding like a pendulum. “It means ‘graduated,’ ” he had added, frowning. “Leaving a place forever.” In the silence that fell between them he had kept on speculatively nodding. He had stretched an arm past her, then, to grasp the door, had leaned out to stare fretfully up and down the empty corridor, and stepping back into the room, had softly closed the door and locked it.

Even when he had come closer, very close, she had been unalarmed. Each year the school put on a Roman Festival, and Papa Davis had been present at rehearsals to hear the Latin declamations, and pass on the authenticity of the home-draped togas. If she had seen the girls exploding into silent laughter in a corner, if she had heard one whispering to another “Papa Davis has to feel you to see if you’re Roman!” it had meant to her, perhaps, one more cryptic notion of authority, or perhaps nothing at all. And so, if at first she had watched his overtures with a docility heightened only with curiosity, then later she had received them with eager warmth, even though he was nothing like the young men to whom she had once put out a questing hand. For the force of his words, just said, hung around him like a clue, a means to an end. Then, too, she had heard him say so often in his peevish, solitary voice, that the school was his real, his only home, and this, interpreted as a complaint, had harped on a reality she understood, which made them kin. And finally, gazing up at him from the cracked leather davenport, she had seen that, with his avid lip drawn back over the long yellow teeth, he had looked unintimidating, familiar, like an old, begging horse.

Now she lifted the cap away from the window, twirled it several times over in her fingers, and walked over to the mirror. With a single uncalculated movement she put the cap on her head and looked into the mirror with a pleased smile. Then she walked over to her desk. Strewn over its surface were a number of small white cards, discarded trial copies of that final, faultless one she had put in the school mail-box.