Murder by Reflection (10 page)

At that moment he heard her voice speaking to him.

“The candles are in my eyes. Won't you stand out here so that I can see you? You have made the whole thing come true. You've suddenly precipitated into a living whole all we have collected around.”

He stepped out. He had begun to rise before she spoke. He was quite giddy with conflict. His shyness and his defiance of it had made him drink more than usual. His neck throbbed in its close-wound stock. He felt suffocated. At one moment he seemed to have no body, the dress seemed a hard enamel shell completely hollow within; at another he felt that he had swollen until every vein would burst. But he would go through with it. He had decided to dress the part and he could play it, or the dress would play it for him. He bowed to her, his hand to his breast. But as he bent over it he saw it again, his human, contemporary hand. The almost sudine smell of the narcissi caught his breath again. He raised his eyes. She was looking at him—old, tired, hungry. The suit was not made for kneeling, but with a clumsy effort he was on his knees, though they would scarcely bend in their constriction.

“Get up,” she breathed heavily. “You don't have to plead. You know that; I'm satisfied at last. I am content, content to see. You must, you will keep up the appearance—that's all, that's everything. I've recreated you—your spiritual mother. I've brought you to birth in this womb of the period to which you belong. Now stand—you must realize. You're alive at last. Every evening you may, you will so come to life and at last really live. You can have no other life. And I'll live by looking at you.”

He rose with what was literally a staggering effort to his feet. She spoke with such conviction that his weak physical nature, which was indeed the softened wax already molded by the cast she had pressed him into, obeyed again its matrix. He looked down. There was a slight bloom of dust on his knee; automatically he flicked it off with his handkerchief.

“It's tiring,” he heard her say. “Thank you again for being so kind. Don't wait for me. Don't stay dressed if it's uncomfortable.”

“Thank you,” he said, and left her. In his room he undressed rapidly, but carefully put away the suit before he tumbled into bed and slept.

Chapter VII

He woke late. Yet she did not appear at breakfast. After breakfast he went for a long hike, taking his lunch with him. On entering the house he went quietly upstairs to his room and lay some time in a hot bath. The little dressing bell sounded while he was still slowly drying himself in a mood of physical ease. He came into his room and saw his figure in the glass. “She shall have full satisfaction,” he thought. “I will go just as far as I resolved.” This was still his defense. He had been premature; nothing really need be decided as yet, and certainly nothing must be decided simply because of a sudden mood. He took out the costume and methodically donned it.

“My livery,” he commented. “Soon I'll find that I'd be lost without it, ‘not know my place,' as they used to say of ill-trained servants.”

But she had won, won so well that he was once again a willing captive, his “habit” had already begun to grow on him and become at least the possibility of a second nature. Indeed, as he dressed he was actually looking for any loophole through which the present might still get at him and, if not pull him back, at least give him a pull that might throw him again off the balance he was determined to adopt. He found it. As he dressed he kept noticing his hand again, that dark-skinned, twist-sinewed, hard-working hand. Indeed, it stuck out, denying all the effort that the rest of his figure might make.

“The hand makes and unmakes,” he reflected. “It's worse than Lady Macbeth's case. My whole hand is the damned spot, both of them, old, rusted ground-grapples, holding me fast so that I can't really get away.” He stood there a moment looking at himself, not resentfully but with a certain helplessness. And always his eyes ended up at those “ends” which hung down.

“The Devil,” he thought of the old saying, “can change everything but his feet.” He looked at his feet, well shaped, shod and poised in their Regency pumps. “I can change everything but my hands, and they ring a knell which calls me back to the here and now. However much this fancy dress may try to magic-carpet me out of the time I'm caught in, these grasping hands will pull me back.”

Suddenly he snatched at a small drawer. In it lay a small sandalwood box. He remembered what was inside: a memory of when, as a gawky boy, still a boy but with the big feet and hands of manhood already sprouted, he had gone in New York to dancing classes given by an old, stiff, black-alpaca-gowned lady who taught girls and boys “proper ladylike dancing.” The boys had to wear black suits and don white gloves to dance with the young ladies. Yes, the gloves lay there, fine kid gloves, smooth and white as china.

He slipped one on, remembering how tight they had been. He worked it on; the feel of the grip of the smooth, chalked inner skin on his fingers recalled his shyness when, in his first evening suit, he had put these on before asking for a dance. Now he saw his present dress, beside which that evening suit was as sloppy as a street-boy's jerkin. The other glove was now on. He felt the slide of one kid-coated hand on the other. He nipped to the buttons at the wrist, tucking the ends under the wrist-ruffles. Yes, his hands had vanished. The last protuberances of the present had been smoothed away, as smooth as a drift of snow over old twigs. He turned and with a rippling step swung down the wide, smooth treads of the great staircase, to dinner.

If she noticed, she was too cautious to remark. As he sat, he felt his new, smooth hand, without pluck or rasp, move over the close folds of his white silk vest. He raised his hand to the light, level with the candles. Their light gleamed on fingers and hand-back as smooth, featureless, and glossed as dead-white marble. The very pose of the concealed hand was controlled and fixed by the transforming skin that held it. He flexed the fingers slightly and found that they would take only a sculpturesque position.

“Not a period of the clenched fist,” he smiled to himself, “but of the easy, open, untense gesture, openly untense because held with skilled stitching, buttoning, and lacing in an attitude of openness. After all, ruggedness is often only erosion; the diamond is the hardest of all, and yet it is the smoothest, and so open that you can see every aspect of it.”

He touched his face with those fingers, which were now no longer his specific wrinkle-fingerprinted identities, but just part of a universal style, any sophisticated hand. Yes, that was so, for already the finger that touched his face was the smooth, urbane member, sveltely swallowed up by the costume. It was his face which to that touch was rough, his face which, last night, had been smooth to his rough fingers—yes, he must shave before dinner. His fingers strayed to his lip; even that felt rough. As he took them away he saw that even the nails hardly showed through the kidskin tips, only a hint, as a sculptor, not wanting to be quite untrue to nature, but feeling that nails were animal, only hinted at them, as he carved the final curve of the finger ends. His eye lengthened its focus, saw the flowers. They were hyacinths today, a classical flower which though they had that almost ammoniac scent had their almost artificial waxen-white ringlets of blossom. Then he saw beyond, through the flowers and the candlelight, his mother's face. She was regarding him with a gratified smile and as he watched, blew him a kiss.

“In return for yours,” she said.

He remembered what he had been doing—lost in himself, that gesture of the fingers to the mouth; of course, to her watching, it was a signal of surrender, a blown kiss.

“Well, I have surrendered,” he thought, drawing himself up and feeling the cunningly fitted captivity all over him at every muscle-move. And this time he raised his glass to her, holding its fluted stem with thumb and finger, then put it down and deliberately blew her a kiss.

She felt that she had carried another position. He was all but encircled. But she was a wary enough strategist to know that it is just at that point that the foe, driven in, but not yet prepared to face the fact of unconditional surrender, may make a desperate sortie. Her ancestral experience was not misadvising her.

He stuck to his costuming. He pretended to himself that he was still acting his part, but he knew almost to the threshold of consciousness that his part was acting, making, creating him. There was very often a sudden jar as he passed from one part to the other, from his day life to his evening life. But week by week, the original man, or weakling, was losing out to the new edition of a female Frankenstein's invention—not a mechanical monster, not merely a tailor's dummy, but a living mask created out of his body, his dreams, and her will and her dreams.

A strange composite growth it was, most nearly related to those “split personalities”—such as the famous “Sally Beauchamp”—which, rising out of some level of consciousness which the original personality was too weak to employ or repress, finally become the person who owns the body. Still he would ask himself at those moments of jar, between what were becoming too separate states of consciousness, “How long will it be necessary to keep this up?”

These moments, of course, were in the evening when the time to change was drawing near. At night he went straight to bed and woke the next morning without conflict. And always to those dusk doubts he would reply, “A little longer. I must be sure, quite sure that I have done everything quite rationally, yielding to her irrational whim. Then when I decide to break the issue will be clear.” The shift between the conscious and the subconscious is, however, not a steady flow. We change, but not by unbroken development. There are tides which appear as sudden reactions even to courses which we have long accepted. Then, if someone is directing us, he or she will strike at a certain moment, cutting off the channel through which the backwash enters and disturbs the established flow.

Once or twice she had seen him, when they were sitting about waiting for the dressing bell, fingering his day clothes and fidgeting.

Then one day he broke out, “I'll go on doing it. But isn't it rather spiderish to want to watch me in sheeny, tight-woven gossamer while you gloat at my helplessness, my very eyes turned in upon myself?” Then, becoming excited with his own words, “I'm drowning in a mirror: self-murdered by my own reflection! What a subtle suicide—to be swallowed by oneself! If I may not say what I am, at least let me call you Echo!”

He had let his protest turn into a play on words. They both laughed a little at the weak classical jest.

But she knew there was trouble to be met and she was quick and ready under her smile.

“You know, the real trouble is in the changing,” she remarked judicially, as though they were discussing someone else's indigestion. “You're happy; you have never been happier than now when you're free to fit and be in your right age. It is the constant relapsing into the sordid things of today that makes you uncertain. This house, its style and fashion we know is the sensible, rational” (she did not say “elegant”) “age. Why not stay in it? Then you won't have the disturbance of returning.”

“But how can I?”

Her reply was carefully prepared: “I know you are spending too much time in the house with me. I do want you to be out more.” He listened. “This is riding country.” (She had almost said “not walking.”) “It's safer and healthier.”

He had been fond of riding, but till now she had shown no wish to give him a horse.

“I'd love to,” he said.

“Good. And for that you can have riding clothes which are so sensible that even the riding clothes of today haven't degenerated much from them. And you'll be all day in your right style—there won't be any break.”

She was right.

“Does she,” he wondered, “know me better than I know myself?” “Or,” he questioned himself, as they drove up to the big city to the historically informed costume-tailor, “is she recreating me? When the whole of my life and person, every moment and every square inch, has been varnished over so that nothing of the old-modern can show, then I'll be like Achilles if he had been dipped all over; there'll not be a spot where the dart of today can enter.”

Somehow likening himself to an invulnerable hero made him feel more willing to hand himself over, a body to be dressed. Certainly her alliance with the clothes-artist was now so firm that they talked openly before him of the arrangements they had already made. Colored plates of costumes when everyone rode were ready to hand. The two directors chose and he did not cavil at a charmingly severe design. In a week it was brought alive in actual materials, in another week it was delivered. She had already bought for him a chestnut mare which, with its new harness, looked so handsome that he felt half his uneasiness about the new day dress, melt away. Such a mount needed to be ridden in style.

His last hesitation was overcome by another gift, of another companion. The day the suit arrived, there came to the house someone to look after his clothes. He was to have a valet. The staff till then had been two colored male servants who waited at table and a complement of females. They dressed the part in their quiet liveries. But Joe, the new valet, was not merely period background; he was more of a tutor in style, so enthusiastic was he that Arnoldo should always be perfectly turned out. There was something about the mixture of friendly impudence and willing servility in his manner, the feeling that it was all a huge joke and yet somehow a piece of acting wherein one must not laugh in the presence of the audience, that created the precise atmosphere of pretense—and yet of effective three-dimensional pretense—needed to carry out the strange charade.

After a couple of rides Arnoldo felt quite at home in his period day-clothes. A new large mirror had appeared at the end of the corridor leading from his room to the stair-head. When he asked Irene about it, she said that the end of the passage was dark and the mirror made it lighter. Anyone coming down the corridor had a full-length view of himself for thirty feet or more. It was a clever move: he found it impossible not to watch himself as he came out dressed, no longer an evening figure, a kind of wraith visible only at dusk, but in the broad daylight, dressed for outdoor exercise. The house was epitomized and linked with the open air by the white-and-fawn figure that strode toward him, the figure of a hunting squire, a figure and character inside which he could safely forget that he had ever had any other appearance, any other standards.