The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories (28 page)

Gertrude replied that Chicago was good enough for her. She’d never been out of it and didn’t think she ever should. Her husband’s business was there.

“Of course, of course. Can’t jump up and leave a business.”

There followed a smooth surface of talk about Chicago, New York, their differences and their recent spectacular changes.

It was, Irene thought, unbelievable and astonishing that four people could sit so unruffled, so ostensibly friendly, while they were in reality seething with anger, mortification, shame. But no, on second thought she was forced to amend her opinion. John Bellew, most certainly, was as undisturbed within as without. So, perhaps, was Gertrude Martin. At least she hadn’t the mortification and shame that Clare Kendry must be feeling, or, in such full measure, the rage and rebellion that she, Irene, was repressing.

“More tea, ’Rene?” Clare offered.

“Thanks, no. And I must be going. I’m leaving tomorrow, you know, and I’ve still got packing to do.”

She stood up. So did Gertrude, and Clare, and John Bellew.

“How do you like the Drayton, Mrs. Redfield?” the latter asked.

“The Drayton? Oh, very much. Very much indeed,” Irene answered, her scornful eyes on Clare’s unrevealing face.

“Nice place, all right. Stayed there a time or two myself,” the man informed her.

“Yes, it is nice,” Irene agreed. “Almost as good as our best New York places.” She had withdrawn her look from Clare and was searching in her bag for some nonexistent something. Her understanding was rapidly increasing, as were her pity and her contempt. Clare was so daring, so lovely, and so “having.”

They gave their hands to Clare with appropriate murmurs. “So good to have seen you.” … “I do hope I’ll see you again soon.”

“Good-bye,” Clare returned. “It was good of you to come, ’Rene dear. And you too, Gertrude.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Bellew.” … “So glad to have met you.” It was Gertrude who had said that. Irene couldn’t, she absolutely couldn’t bring herself to utter the polite fiction or anything approaching it.

He accompanied them out into the hall, summoned the elevator.

“Good-bye,” they said again, stepping in.

Plunging downward, they were silent.

They made their way through the lobby without speaking.

But as soon as they had reached the street Gertrude, in the manner of one unable to keep bottled up for another minute that which for the last hour she had had to retain, burst out: “My God! What an awful chance! She must be plumb crazy.”

“Yes, it certainly seems risky,” Irene admitted.

“Risky! I should say it was. Risky! My God! What a word! And the mess she’s liable to get herself into!”

“Still, I imagine she’s pretty safe. They don’t live here, you know. And there’s a child. That’s a certain security.”

“It’s an awful chance, just the same,” Gertrude insisted. “I’d never in the world have married Fred without him knowing. You can’t tell what will turn up.”

“Yes, I do agree that it’s safer to tell. But then Bellew wouldn’t have married her. And, after all, that’s what she wanted.”

Gertrude shook her head. “I wouldn’t be in her shoes for all the money she’s getting out of it, when he finds out. Not with him feeling the way he does. Gee! Wasn’t it awful? For a minute I was so mad I could have slapped him.”

It had been, Irene acknowledged, a distinctly trying experience, as well as a very unpleasant one. “I was more than a little angry myself.”

“And imagine her not telling us about him feeling that way! Anything might have happened. We might have said something.”

That, Irene pointed out, was exactly like Clare Kendry. Taking a chance, and not at all considering anyone else’s feelings.

Gertrude said: “Maybe she thought we’d think it a good joke. And I guess you did. The way you laughed. My land! I was scared to death he might catch on.”

“Well, it was rather a joke,” Irene told her, “on him and us and maybe on her.”

“All the same, it’s an awful chance. I’d hate to be her.”

“She seems satisfied enough. She’s got what she wanted, and the other day she told me it was worth it.”

But about that Gertrude was skeptical. “She’ll find out different,” was her verdict. “She’ll find out different all right.”

Rain had begun to fall, a few scattered large drops.

The end-of-the-day crowds were scurrying in the directions of streetcars and elevated roads.

Irene said: “You’re going south? I’m sorry. I’ve got an errand. If you don’t mind, I’ll just say good-bye here. It has been nice seeing you, Gertrude. Say hello to Fred for me, and to your mother if she remembers me. Good-bye.”

She had wanted to be free of the other woman, to be alone; for she was still sore and angry.

What right, she kept demanding of herself, had Clare Kendry to expose her, or even Gertrude Martin, to such humiliation, such downright insult?

And all the while, on the rushing ride out to her father’s house, Irene Redfield was trying to understand the look on Clare’s face as she had said good-bye. Partly mocking, it had seemed, and partly menacing. And something else for which she could find no name. For an instant a recrudescence of that sensation of fear which she had had while looking into Clare’s eyes that afternoon touched her. A slight shiver ran over her.

“It’s nothing,” she told herself. “Just somebody walking over my grave, as the children say.” She tried a tiny laugh and was annoyed to find that it was close to tears.

What a state she had allowed that horrible Bellew to get her into!

And late that night, even, long after the last guest had gone and the old house was quiet, she stood at her window frowning out into the dark rain and puzzling again over that look on Clare’s incredibly beautiful face. She couldn’t, however, come to any conclusion about its meaning, try as she might. It was unfathomable, utterly beyond any experience or comprehension of hers.

She turned away from the window at last, with a still deeper frown. Why, after all, worry about Clare Kendry? She was well able to take care of herself, had always been able. And there were, for Irene, other things, more personal and more important to worry about.

Besides, her reason told her, she had only herself to blame for her disagreeable afternoon and its attendant fears and questions. She ought never to have gone.

The next morning, the day of her departure for New York, had brought a letter, which, at first glance, she had instinctively known came from Clare Kendry, though she couldn’t remember ever having had a letter from her before. Ripping it open and looking at the signature, she saw that she had been right in her guess. She wouldn’t, she told herself, read it. She hadn’t the time. And, besides, she had no wish to be reminded of the afternoon before. As it was, she felt none too fresh for her journey; she had had a wretched night. And all because of Clare’s innate lack of consideration for the feelings of others.

But she did read it. After father and friends had waved goodbye, and she was being hurled eastward, she became possessed of an uncontrollable curiosity to see what Clare had said about yesterday. For what, she asked, as she took it out of her bag and opened it, could she, what could anyone, say about a thing like that?

Clare Kendry had said:

And there was a postscript which said:

But the letter hadn’t conciliated Irene. Her indignation was not lessened by Clare’s flattering reference to her wiseness. As if, she thought wrathfully, anything could take away the humiliation, or any part of it, of what she had gone through yesterday afternoon for Clare Kendry.

With an unusual methodicalness she tore the offending letter into tiny ragged squares that fluttered down and made a small heap in her black crepe de chine lap. The destruction completed, she gathered them up, rose, and moved to the train’s end. Standing there, she dropped them over the railing and watched them scatter, on tracks, on cinders, on forlorn grass, in rills of dirty water.

And that, she told herself, was that. The chances were one in a million that she would ever again lay eyes on Clare Kendry. If, however, that millionth chance should turn up, she had only to turn away her eyes, to refuse her recognition.

She dropped Clare out of her mind and turned her thoughts to her own affairs. To home, to the boys, to Brian. Brian, who in the morning would be waiting for her in the great clamorous station. She hoped that he had been comfortable and not too lonely without her and the boys. Not so lonely that that old, queer, unhappy restlessness had begun again within him; that craving for some place strange and different, which at the beginning of her marriage she had had to make such strenuous efforts to repress, and which yet faintly alarmed her, though it now sprang up at gradually lessening intervals.

Such were Irene Redfield’s memories as she sat there in her room, a flood of October sunlight streaming in upon her, holding that second letter of Clare Kendry’s.

Laying it aside, she regarded with an astonishment that had in it a mild degree of amusement the violence of the feelings which it stirred in her.

It wasn’t the great measure of anger that surprised and slightly amused her. That, she was certain, was justified and reasonable, as was the fact that it could hold, still strong and unabated, across the stretch of two years’ time entirely removed from any sight or sound of John Bellew or of Clare. That even at this
remote date the memory of the man’s words and manner had power to set her hands to trembling and to send the blood pounding against her temples did not seem to her extraordinary. But that she should retain that dim sense of fear, of panic, was surprising, silly.

That Clare should have written, should, even all things considered, have expressed a desire to see her again, did not so much amaze her. To count as nothing the annoyances, the bitterness, or the suffering of others, that was Clare.

Well—Irene’s shoulders went up—one thing was sure: that she needn’t, and didn’t intend to, lay herself open to any repetition of a humiliation as galling and outrageous as that which, for Clare Kendry’s sake, she had borne “that time in Chicago.” Once was enough.

If, at the time of choosing, Clare hadn’t precisely reckoned the cost, she had, nevertheless, no right to expect others to help make up the reckoning. The trouble with Clare was not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.

Irene Redfield found it hard to sympathize with this new tenderness, this avowed yearning of Clare’s for “my own people.”

The letter which she had just put out of her hand was, to her taste, a bit too lavish in its wordiness, a shade too unreserved in the manner of its expression. It roused again that old suspicion that Clare was acting, not consciously, perhaps—that is, not too consciously—but, none the less, acting. Nor was Irene inclined to excuse what she termed Clare’s downright selfishness.

And mingled with her disbelief and resentment was another feeling, a question. Why hadn’t she spoken that day? Why, in the face of Bellew’s ignorant hate and aversion, had she concealed her own origin? Why had she allowed him to make his assertions and express his misconceptions undisputed? Why, simply because of Clare Kendry, who had exposed her to such torment, had she failed to take up the defense of the race to which she belonged?

Irene asked these questions, felt them. They were, however, merely rhetorical, as she herself was well aware. She knew their answers, every one, and it was the same for them all. How sardonic! She
couldn’t betray Clare, couldn’t even run the risk of appearing to defend a people that were being maligned, for fear that that defense might in some infinitesimal degree lead the way to final discovery of her secret. She had toward Clare Kendry a duty. She was bound to her by those very ties of race which, for all her repudiation of them, Clare had been unable to completely sever.

And it wasn’t, as Irene knew, that Clare cared at all about the race or what was to become of it. She didn’t. Or that she had for any of its members great, or even real, affection, though she professed undying gratitude for the small kindnesses which the Westover family had shown her when she was a child. Irene doubted the genuineness of it, seeing herself only as a means to an end where Clare was concerned. Nor could it be said that she had even the slight artistic or sociological interest in the race that some members of other races displayed. She hadn’t. No, Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.

“Not another damned thing!” Irene declared aloud as she drew a fragile stocking over a pale beige-colored foot.

“Aha! Swearing again, are you, madam? Caught you in the act that time.”

Brian Redfield had come into the room in that noiseless way which, in spite, of the years of their life together, still had the power to disconcert her. He stood looking down on her with that amused smile of his, which was just the faintest bit supercilious and yet was somehow very becoming to him.

Hastily Irene pulled on the other stocking and slipped her feet into the slippers beside her chair.

“And what brought on this particular outburst of profanity? That is, if an indulgent but perturbed husband may inquire. The mother of sons, too! The times, alas, the times!”