Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci Page 12

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Linda repeated. “Lots of things, Daisy.” She smiled, with her lips closed.

  Daisy chewed bread glumly.

  She began to realize that Linda’s huge eyes kept, without seeming to keep, a sharp watch on the street. Before her sandwich had been eaten, the girl saw something out there and got up smoothly. “There’s Rod,” she said, “so I think I’ll have to go, Daisy. I’m sorry.”

  “Who is Rod?” Daisy leaned back.

  “Oh, that’s a boy that’s driving me.”

  “But why didn’t you ask him to come in?”

  “Oh no, he had to get gas in the car.”

  “But isn’t he hungry?”

  “Oh, no,” said Linda, with that faint little smile.

  “I see,” said Daisy, coolly. “I suppose the two of you have already eaten?”

  “Well, we did stop …”

  Daisy felt furious. She was not one who fed people easily. The preparation of food was a nuisance to her. It didn’t matter, now, that the sandwich was not well prepared nor particularly tasty. The girl should have been straightforward about this.

  “It was nice to see you,” Linda was saying, “and thanks for everything. But I guess I had better be going.”

  “Good of you to come,” said Daisy in a somewhat sarcastic tone.

  But Linda either did not notice or chose not to notice any sarcasm. She took herself away with the same grave, passive, and infuriating air of having done all that was necessary, and a little more, to have shown her body, her face, her eyes, her hair, her ankles, in this place. As if this ought to have been quite good enough for Daisy.

  When the door closed behind her, Daisy stood still and set her excellent mind to wondering which of them was at fault. Why had the visit been so meaningless, so devoid of any contact? Was the girl to blame? Or was Daisy a failure at being a grandmother?

  In about a minute she turned on her heel and rushed to scoop the dishes into the sink so she could get back to her book in good conscience. Face it, she thought. That girl bores me almost to tears. What a little twerp she is, really. There is nothing there that interests me, whatsoever. I suppose she’ll get married, to some junior twerp. And God help them! I can’t. And I can’t care.

  Linda wafted her slim hips across the lobby and through the patio.

  “Waiting long?” she asked Rod sweetly.

  “That’s O.K.,” he said, indifferently. They both knew he would have waited quite a while longer. Linda slipped into the seat and he left rubber on the pavement in a show-off getaway.

  “How’s your grandmother?” he asked in a minute.

  “O.K.,” said Linda. Then she added, “She doesn’t like me much.”

  “Why not?” He betrayed surprise.

  Linda smiled her little mysterious smile.

  “Could be,” the boy said sagely in a moment, “she’s getting old, you know, and you probably make her jealous. Of course, she wouldn’t realize …”

  “Could be,” Linda murmured. She rearranged her ankles. She was young and she knew it. It hadn’t yet occurred to Linda that she would not always be young. She took full credit for it.

  4. Young Dan Rogan told his grandmother, after she’d smacked him on one fresh cheek, that he’d had to stop to eat at eleven o’clock. He’d gotten up at the crack of dawn and he had been starving.

  “Oh, well,” Tess said, “all I want is a bowl of soup. There’s pie, though. Maybe you can eat a piece of that?”

  Dan thought he could.

  Family messages were delivered while she heated soup and he milled about. “Hey, Gramma, what are you doing in this flea-trap?” he inquired. “The family’s having a fit.”

  “I’m not worrying about the décor,” said Tess. “I like to be alone, sometimes.”

  “Uncle George says he’s fixed it so you’re going around the world, hm? In June?”

  “Starting in June,” she said dryly. “If I go.”

  “The family is sure not going to let you go alone. I’m supposed to tell you. Who are you taking?” She shrugged and he said teasingly, “Take me?”

  “Nothing doing,” said Tess promptly. “You’ll go, another time. Another way.”

  “Well, gads.” The boy grinned. “But who will you take, then? Mom would go but she’s so darn busy.”

  “The whole family, up and down, is too darn busy and thank God for that,” Tess said briskly. “I may find some unbusy female. Here’s your pie, and now give me an expurgated version of what goes on at school.”

  He sat down and told her about his courses, about his athletic endeavors. But his heart wasn’t in this. He watched her. (And ate pie.)

  After a while he said, “Say, Gramma, you’ve always leveled with me …”

  She grinned at him.

  “Well, I’ve got something to ask you.” He fumbled with the fork.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, we’re getting a lot of stuff— What I wanted— I guess you believe in God, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do, Dan,” Tess said. Below the window where they sat, a treetop billowed. In the yard next door, more trees rose up and above the fresh ranks of green above green the sky was sea blue.

  The boy had his strong feet hooked around the chair legs. His torso was tense. He wanted something of her. Tess looked out at the green and the blue.

  “I just wanted to ask you …” he said. “I know you do, but … how can you?”

  “Don’t you, then?” she asked, mildly.

  “Well, Gramma, I mean with science and all … I mean, religion is pretty sad stuff, I mean, to me. I don’t want to offend you …”

  “You don’t offend me,” she assured him. “Now, you want me to answer. How can I believe in God? I suppose you’ve been hearing about corn kings and the psychological necessities of primitive peoples …?”

  She glanced at him. The boy caught his lower lip in his teeth and puffed out the rest of his mouth.

  “Even so,” his grandmother went on, “I suppose you do believe that you exist.”

  The boy nodded warily. He took a tighter grip on the chair legs with his toes.

  “So that, when you say you don’t believe in God (or whatever it is that’s behind this existence) what you mean is this: you don’t believe in my conception of this God.”

  “That’s right.” The boy was a little ruddier.

  Tess sipped coffee and put the cup down. She focused her blue eyes away. “What do you know about my conception of God, though?” Her air was that of one who mused aloud. “Do you think it is the one we got in Sunday school, aged seven?” The boy blinked. “Thousands of years,” Tess went on, “people have pondered and written. Can we assume they must have all been ignorantly superstitious? What do you suppose, in their own terms, they were trying to say? Granting that they may have been intelligent, although, of course, less hep than you and me …” She turned her eyes, smiling.

  He put his head down. “Well, I don’t know too much …”

  “Look the other way,” his grandmother said. “Whatever conception of the universe and existence you are learning now, it’s tentative, isn’t it? In fact, it’s sure to be wrong.”

  He bucked in the chair.

  “Don’t you suppose the next few thousand years will see some revisions made?” she mused. “You don’t think the answers are known this year, this month?”

  “Well, of course …” he sputtered.

  “All right,” said Tess. “Best I can do. If you look both ways, someplace in the middle you may be able to understand how it is possible for me to believe in God. And that’s what you wanted to know.” She took up her cup and twinkled at him.

  “But what …? Then, what is it? I mean, what is He?”

  “That’s another question,” she said. “Not today, Dan. My notion would have to be in my terms, see? They may be peculiar. Finish the pie? There’s a piece left.”

  “I’m full,” Dan said, rather hostilely. Then he was silent.

  “I
t’s two o’clock,” she reminded him in a moment. “Should you get going?”

  “I guess.” He rose and she with him. He dragged his feet. “Look, Gramma, if I go home between terms I want to stop by.”

  “Better let me know,” Tess said cheerfully, “so I’ll plan to be here.”

  “O.K.”

  “Glad I’ve seen you. Good luck.”

  He kissed her cheek farewell. He said recklessly, “Maybe I’ll try and take a course next year. There’s one on Comparative Religions … I mean I … I wish I knew. I don’t understand it,” he blurted. “I mean, I used to just swallow everything …”

  His grandmother said, “But now, you’d rather not swallow without chewing?” She patted him.

  “You mow me down, you know,” he said directly, accusingly. “But you aren’t building anything up.”

  “Not today.” She was unperturbed. But she hesitated. She said, “You’re in science. Science looks at what is, doesn’t it? And takes it on the chin when what-is turns out unexpectedly?”

  “Well, sure,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” said his grandmother. “Now, you’ve got to go.”

  “O.K.,” he said darkly, “but I’ll be seeing you …”

  “Scoot, now,” she said lovingly.

  “I’m scooting.” He cocked his head. No words came. He grinned suddenly. He kissed her again, impulsively, and then he left her.

  Morgan Lake heard the feet banging down the stairs. Dan Rogan saluted him with a swing of his hand but speeded by. He sped through the patio and at the arch collided with Nona Henry who had been to the drugstore, seeking aspirin, and had found the store closed. Her purse flew open, contents spilled.

  “Oh, oh!” said the boy in blue. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I wasn’t looking. Here, I’ll get it.”

  Nona said, “That’s all right.” She crouched but he was already on his haunches, his hands scrambling to find her things and ram them back into her bag. Their eyes met, on this low level, where they both crouched. The boy’s eyes were not quite seeing her. He said, with an air of exhilaration, “Um, boy! My grandmother! You know what she just did to me? She made a sandwich outa me! She put ten thousand years behind and ten thousand years in front, and she squashed me, flatter’n a fly!”

  Nona began to rise slowly, and he came up on springs, helping her with one young hand. “Flatter’n a fly!” he chortled. “Sorry, again. So long, ma’am,” and he was gone.

  Nona walked dazedly to the building and inside.

  “Who was that boy?” she asked Morgan Lake. “Somebody’s grandchild …”

  “We had four of them in, today,” he told her. (She was looking rather pretty, with that air of bewilderment. Her eyes, smudged by fatigue, were lovely, and she was, altogether, an attractive little lady. Morgan Lake admired her.) “This is the Day of the Grandchildren. Or so I call it to myself,” he explained.

  Nona smiled at him. He was so reserved and detached ordinarily. She felt complimented that he was telling her this private fancy. “But who was the last one, the one who just left?” she insisted. “Whose grandson was he?”

  “The one in blue? Mrs. Rogan’s.”

  “I see.” She almost went on to confide in him. But the little incident was too complex. She went around the corner and up in the elevator. How strange an encounter!

  “Flatter’n a fly,” she heard the boy saying so gaily! What could Tess Rogan have said to that boy? Nona was violently curious. Was the whole family odd? she wondered. Did they all speak a language she could not understand?

  Chapter 12

  The New Year was in. The tree came down. Everything at Sans Souci went back to normal with a grateful sag.

  School was in, and Winnie Lake back in that routine.

  Avery Patrick turned up, badly hung over, and growled at Morgan Lake about the painters.

  The painters finished 109. Ida Milbank was moved in there. Ida was visibly losing her grip on reality. Mindy Shane, the housekeeper here (and Kelly’s mother), took charge of the moving. (Kelly did the work.) Ida Milbank made no protest and had no suggestions, either. Afterwards, she kept going to the door of III and trying the key of 109 therein. She would come back to the desk, confused. Morgan would guide her to her new abode. Once inside, she did not seem to know the difference. She took to leaving her folding bed down in the middle of the floor à la Agnes Vaughn. She put things on it. Lily, the younger of the two maids who worked under Mindy Shane, discovered and reported that Ida had taken to sleeping on the sofa. There was no law against it; nothing could be done.

  Agnes Vaughn, as Morgan Lake had predicted, dismissed from her repertoire the notion that 109 was haunted by the ghost of a suicide. Agnes Vaughn, however, did keep on trying to figure out which widow was Mrs. Quinn. Fuel for Agnes’ imagination was in low supply this season.

  For Nona Henry, life was steadier. She had got through the holidays. She seemed to have established a routine. It was a pale copy, for one, of the old routine for two. The marketing. The three meals a day. The cleaning of one’s clothing.

  She had established a certain amount of social contact. There was Daisy Robinson, with whom Nona went to the Pasadena Playhouse one evening. The play had been a modern comedy at which Daisy scoffed. But Nona Henry knew more about theatre backstage, about the technical side of it, than Mrs. Robinson. For Val had once been an assistant stage manager and Nona had known, in her time, many young hopefuls. Daisy had seemed a trifle surprised, and even a little miffed, at this practical knowledge. They had parted, sine die. They had, however, since gone to an Art movie house together. Amiably enough.

  Pressed by Daisy’s enthusiasms, Nona had even tried to read a few serious books.

  Then there were the Gadabouts. Nona played bridge with them on occasion. She had lunch with them, in assorted places. She kept a little distance from them, rather cleverly, according to her own need and not their mercies.

  There was Harriet Gregory, with whom Nona was able to establish a chatting relationship. Harriet felt free to sit down beside Nona in the patio and talk. Nona would listen—just so much, so long. It was understood, between them, that this was about all.

  Nona Henry had begun to believe that she had routed the devil. She was pulling together. By careful rationing and spacing she eked out moments of companionship to make the lonely hours go by.

  Her letters to Dodie were easier to write. If, in her mind, a cold lump of conviction had settled, she thought it was well hidden. (Oh, they had robbed her! Yes, they had! But she understood and she forgave and it was all down the drain and life went on. Nona would never raise the issue.)

  A letter came, the second week in January, that shook her.

  DEAR MOTHER:

  I’m sorry but I have to write you on my own. Si doesn’t know I’m writing this so don’t, please don’t, mention it in your next letter. Maybe you don’t realize how you make Si feel. So this is between you and me, Mother. Si is being hurt. Do you realize you never mention him? You never send a message. You write as if he didn’t exist. He can’t help feeling hurt, Mother. I know it’s about those bonds. He knows it, too. He’s not stupid, Mother.

  Dodie’s handwriting began to loosen and get larger.

  Dad and Si and I talked about those bonds a long, long time ago, before Dad ever went to the hospital. And Dad said that we could have them. He did. He also said, and this is what we never told you, we didn’t want to hurt you—but Dad did say he knew you wouldn’t understand at all. Dad said that you didn’t really know a thing about investments or finance. He said you’d take the ultraconservative attitude. He said you were the blue-chip type. You wouldn’t see that money has to be risked to make money. So he said he’d do this quietly, keep it between the three of us, and try to explain to you when best he could.

  Now, Mother, please believe us. Si needed it right at the time Dad was taken ill. And please remember—please do—you never told me that Dad was as ill as he really was. We thought he’d get better and explain all
this to you in his own way. His own time. And we only did what Dad agreed to.

  But Si says, and I’m afraid he is right, that you are angry—maybe with both of us. I am just as much to blame as Si, remember! But he thinks you are especially mad at him. He has been paying interest on the loan into the estate. Maybe you don’t know that. He has and he will and you haven’t really lost anything, and Dad wanted it this way. Dad thought it was wise.

  It was Dad who went behind your back, not Si and me.

  Just hope you’ll …

  Nona put the letter down with a terrible pang. She didn’t believe it. But she understood, of course. She would have to bear all that she could so clearly see, and bear it alone.

  She did not answer the letter. (Dodie had expressly asked her not to answer.) This was best, for how could the matter ever be cleared up? Innocent, loving little Dodie had been taken in. But Dodie had to live with her husband. Nona could not, would not, come between them. Would not make trouble. Would ignore what trouble there was between herself and Si, until it faded away. She would have to encompass the whole situation within her own mature understanding. There was nothing else that she could do. Dodie was being fooled. For Nona knew … she was absolutely certain about Val, and nothing could shake that knowledge and that certainty. It was not important, she told herself. She, Nona, could bear it.

  She brought herself, at last, to write Dodie another noncommittal letter, and added at the end, with a sad nobility, Regards to Si.

  The second week in January, Robert Fitzgibbon returned.

  Nona had been on a casual but not intimate basis with Georgia Oliver and Mrs. Fitz. Now she was invited to Ursula’s apartment expressly to meet her wonderful son. Nona demurred. She sensed the unwritten law, that one ought to withdraw. But she was coaxed. And so she went.

  He was charming. Nona supposed he must be a year or two older than she. He had not run to fat. His body was still lean enough. His hair was thinning but not yet turning except just above the ears. His features were still boyish, the snub nose, the firm high cheekbones; and that the skin was beaten by time only made that boyish aspect the more appealing. He was glib and gay. He teased his mother, who bridled and adored it. He even teased Georgia a little bit. He was a sophisticate, or so Nona felt. In some way he roused and appealed to something very old in her—something that she and Val had had, and if they had not lost it, yet it had been glossed over, or buried under the pressures and responsibilities of their long years in the small city, as respectable bourgeois husband and wife.