This Is Not for You (14 page)

“I know she would,” I said. “Are you going to want to go to midnight mass?”

“Will you go?”

“For you.”

“No, then,” you said. “Let’s stay with the others.”

At dinner you asked Andrew if he’d mind going back to your room with you for a few minutes. You had treated each other as friends for weeks, but you had both been careful not ever to be alone together. Andrew would have liked a quick gesture of approval from Monk, but he could not risk it. He agreed at once.

When you had gone, we all went to our rooms to begin collecting presents to put under the tree. I was wrapping a last-minute present for Andrew, a book on dragons I had found, when Monk came into the room. She sat down on your bed and watched me for a moment without speaking.

“I’ve never known anything about Christmas before,” she said finally “In my family Christmas is just hell. Andy says it’s the same way in his family, too. Do you know how lucky you are?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Or do you get mixed up about it the way I do? Most of the time I’m just enjoying myself, but sometimes it’s so nice it makes me feel sad because this isn’t my family and because I could never learn how to live like this. Does it feel to you really your family?”

“In a way,” I said, “but part of it is having all of you here. When Frank and Ann are home, when Mother’s here, it’s not as easy.”

“No, but still it wouldn’t be like my family. And I didn’t mean that. Have you ever wished Doris and Frank really were your parents?”

“No,” I said. “You see, there is Mother still. If they were all my real family, it would be different, but I’m not sure it would be better.”

“Doris thinks it would. She told me she’d often wished you were her daughter.”

“Doris is very motherly,” I said. “She’d like to adopt you and Andy and Esther, too.”

“I wish she could.”

“Are you a bit homesick?”

“Just for something I never had, and, if you’ve never had it, how can you make it? Andy doesn’t know any more about this kind of living than I do.”

“I suppose not.”

“He’s been the only son just the way I’ve been the only daughter, spoiled and fought over and forced to be something he’s not until he doesn’t really know who he is or what he wants.”

It was not exactly the image I would have made of Andrew, but I recognized him in it. Monk could not afford to be as uncritical as I was. She was obviously contemplating what kind of a husband he would make.

As if she’d read my thoughts, she said, “I sometimes wish I could be a friend of Andrew’s the way you are, but it never works that way for me.”

“It’s regressive,” I said, without looking up from my wrapping.

“Well, yes, but it’s a regressive season. Isn’t Esther’s tree terrible?”

“No. It’s wonderful. I love it.”

“Should Andy have gone off with her?”

“Oh, Monk, you’re not worried about that, are you? I sometimes think you may really be in love with him.”

“I am,” she said bleakly, “but don’t tell him!”

“You’d be the obvious one to break the news.”

“I can’t. He’d lose interest in a minute, Kate. That’s the way men are. As long as they don’t know, as long as they’re uncertain, they’re marvelous, but the minute they’re sure, they’re all bastards.”

“And you call me a cynic!”

“But it’s true.”

“Then you aren’t in love with him,” I said primly.

“ ‘I love him not because he’s rich and handsome, Nelly,’ ” she said in a comically theatrical tone, “ ‘but because he’s more myself than I am.’ ”

“And would you lose interest?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I can’t imagine it. He is beautiful, isn’t he? I mean, even his teeth.”

“Even his teeth,” I agreed. “Now, that’s enough. Go get your presents.”

We went to bed well after midnight, Doris cautioning us all to sleep late in the morning because these years were a brief respite between being children and having children which we should enjoy. She stood with Frank, her hand cupped round his elbow, an odd, masculine gesture, more personal for that, because it is the kind only years can teach and permit. They saw us upstairs as if they were going to fill stockings for us all before they went to bed; we countered with dignified behavior, prompted by an uncertain amount of brandy, which is always sobering to the young.

“How are you?” I asked, when we got to our room. “I don’t seem to see much of you, seeing you all the time.”

“Fine,” you said. “You were right about Doris. I should get to know her. I’m still pretty hopeless with Frank.”

“You’re fine with everyone. You’ve made a beautiful tree.”

“Monk thinks it’s awful,” you said, amused. “Then she’s never really looked at Christmas trees to see how awful they traditionally are. Doris likes it, though, doesn’t she?”

“And Frank and Andy and I.”

“Do you think she’s going to marry Andy?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“But what would happen if they ever stepped out of the silverware ad and started trying to live together?”

“What happens to a lot of people, I suppose.”

“That’s a terrible thought.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said.

“Probably I’m jealous,” you said.

“Of whom?”

“Both of them. If I were a man, what a Christmas I’d make this for you!”

“What a ghastly idea!”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t make such a bad man, do you think?”

You were standing in your bra and pants by this time, but your hair was still done up in a large soft shape at the back of your finely shaped head.

“You make a beautiful woman. I’d settle for that.”

“You would?”

“I mean,” I said quickly, “you should.”

You got into your pajamas and went off to wash, leaving your father’s watch carefully on the bedside table, your clothes scattered about the room. I picked them up and put them away Then I turned off the overhead light and opened the window, loving the smell of earth and trees even at this time of year in the crescent.

“What are you looking at?” you asked.

“Nothing really. I was smelling.” You came and stood beside me. “You smell lovely, too.”

“Doris has marvelous soaps. It’s cold.”

“Hmm. Get into bed.”

I followed you to your bed, covered you as if you were a child, then sat with you for a moment. You took my hand tentatively and put it to your mouth.

“Merry Christmas, Kate.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said. “You do make it fine for me. Sleep well.”

I lay awake for a while, wondering if Mother, left to herself, would go to midnight service. She was vague in her letters about what her plans were for Christmas, but then she was always vague. She did refer to people and places by their names, but there was never an identifying phrase, a reminder. Doris and I had to guess or not bother to guess. She fades, I thought. Or dreamed. I woke, expecting and missing the uncertain sweetness of her voice, the wry, shy morning moment which began any of our days together.

“I miss Mother today,” I said to Doris.

“So do I,” Doris admitted. “It always seems odd if I’m not introducing myself to her on Christmas morning of all mornings.”

“Introducing yourself?” Andrew asked.

“Mother never seems to know anyone very certainly in the morning,” Doris explained. “It’s not that she’s senile. She’s always been that way. Once you’ve established yourself with her again, it’s fine, but it always has to be done.”

“How unnerving!” Andrew said.

I would have said
no
if Doris hadn’t said
yes
so promptly. The ritual of being reestablished had always been reassuring to me, as if Mother considered again and accepted again the responsibility I was to her. For Doris, her natural child, to be considered again and again must have seemed an unnecessary strain. I didn’t say these things, either. If Doris ever presented a view of Mother, that view took precedence over mine, for I had neither the length of experience nor the blood claim to speak with her authority.

After Mother had been brought, with reservations, into the breakfast conversation, Frank reminded us of their absent children, then of the absent families of all our guests. It was a graceful substitute for a real blessing and probably more accurately expressed the feelings of everyone at the table who, not able to depend on God to love those well whom they loved badly carried the burden with some sense of responsibility.

Christmas morning without the very young and the very old, without God Himself, is simpler. From under our nearly pagan tree, we took the gifts, not quite one at a time, and measured again the degree of perception there is in giving. It was one of Andrew’s extraordinary talents. I have never had a present from him that didn’t serve the image I hope I hold up to the world: a book I would like to be thought of as reading, a blouse neither so tailored as it fit my private taste and public shoulders nor so feminine as to embarrass me, a sketch either a little subtler or a little bolder than I would risk buying for myself. Your gifts were your own. You always gave yourself away to anyone you trusted or wanted to trust, not always in the work you were seriously doing however. I have gross enamel cuff links with my initials on them from your brief enthusiasm for learning to make them. I have a mosaic ashtray—the very first thing you tried—which is a ridged and fractured attempt at a candle and book, I think, and perhaps my name is on that, too, though it would be hard to prove in the inaccurate cuttings and smeared plaster. I would not have been surprised by a pen wiper or pot holder, though I don’t remember those particular kindergarten items on any of the many Christmases we exchanged presents. Monk had a flare for the outrageous and useful, but did she know that giving you a cook book was outrageous? The card on my lounging pajamas said, “to encourage you to entertain more at home.” When Frank opened his shaving mirror, he asked if he wasn’t too old to look that closely at himself.

“Oh no,” Monk protested. “I just hope I look like you when I’m your age.”

“For all our sakes, I devoutly hope you don’t,” he answered.

There weren’t many embarrassing moments that Christmas. Robin’s Care packages, set next to Andrew’s amber necklace, troubled everyone else more than they seemed to trouble Monk, who talked about “hands across the water” and offered to bake us all tollhouse cookies when she next had the kitchen in her flat to herself. Andrew tried not to look as if he’d be poisoned by them, and Doris quickly opened another present to distract us all. Andrew and Monk had the majority of Christmas horrors from younger brothers and sisters, amateur scarves, glass-encrusted bottle openers, pictures of horses, a bow-tie that lit up, and a bird whistle. You opened more presents than you wanted to from your mother, a winter wardrobe almost entirely unsuitable for the life you were leading, but Doris admired her taste, and you were glad not to complain, in fact to be elegantly dressed for the final few days of the house party, though the number of young bankers and lawyers and politicians you attracted were a nuisance to you for weeks afterwards.

“Most of them are dull,” Frank admitted to me, “but most responsible people are, and she’s got to find someone who will take care of her.”

“I suppose so,” I said, “but somehow I can’t imagine Esther wife to anyone like that.”

Wife to anyone, I might have said. You were simply no good at the ordinary encounter, the physical and emotional details of a day. You could have kept a man’s principles and hopes in very good order, but not his house and his children. Monk tried to advise you as she did me.

“People don’t always want to be talking about their souls and their visions,” she said to you impatiently “As for the Slade uniform, which year is it that you learn the difference between boys and girls?”

“With clothes on, I’m not sure,” you answered.

“Well, socially that happens to be important.”

More important and sometimes more difficult than Monk would have imagined. I often was not sure through the first pint of beer whether a companion was male or female. That doubt one night made me reticent with a tall Negro for longer than pleased her. Later, when I was certain and friendly, she accused me of prejudice. “Look if you’re a nigger, I’m a—” clootch, squaw, I would have gone on to say, if my nose hadn’t been broken in the middle of the sentence and my two front teeth knocked out shortly after that. Yes, grotesque. That part of my living was. Spoken of at all. I had to speak of this, lie about it, because I was in the hospital for a week with those and other painful but fortunately not serious injuries. I quite unreasonably wanted to keep Frank and Doris from knowing that I had been in any trouble at all. You pointed out to me that, even if I could keep them ignorant for the week I was in the hospital, my face would not heal completely for some weeks after that.

“What am I going to tell them?” I asked. It was difficult to talk.

“A car accident?” you suggested… or perhaps asked.

“Frank would want to check that out, legally,” I said.

“A fall?”

“Does it look like a fall?”

“No,” you admitted.

I couldn’t really see to judge because my eyes were badly swollen. I hadn’t told you what had happened, but I gathered from your silence that it was pretty obvious.

“I’ve already told the police I won’t lay charges. Thank God I’m twenty-one.”

“Couldn’t you just not tell them—I mean, just say you don’t want to talk about it?”

“Maybe, but try to put them off for a little while, E., would you? I haven’t the face to face them with just yet.”

The next day, when I couldn’t see at all, Doris came.

“Don’t blame Esther, darling. She begged me not to come for at least two or three days. She said you didn’t want to see anyone. You can’t see anyone, can you?”

“I didn’t want you to see me,” I said.

“It’s not a pretty sight. Your doctor said you were badly but inexpertly beaten—no permanent damage.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Good as new in a few days.”

“Weeks. Hurt pretty badly?”

“Some. Can you keep Frank out of it?”

“He’s in Scotland this week.”

“Thank God for that.”

“I’ll have to tell him something sooner or later.”