Presence: Stories Read online

  Alice dawdled at the pantry door. She would not leave in too much of a hurry. She had a right, she felt, to have been invited tonight; certainly she would have been if Stowe had been at home. Besides she was hungry, having neglected her lunch today, and the few morsels she did eat would hardly matter to the dinner that was to be served. And if there were to be any men here, they would certainly be—as they always were—interested in her views, as so many of her brother’s guests had told him after they had met her.

  She reached the back door and turned back to her sister-in-law. “Good night,” she said. The first tremors of her hurt quavered the words and stiffened Cleota, who barely glanced at her to return the farewell. Alice grasped the doorknob. She felt the question rising to her mouth and tried to escape before it came out, but it was too late. She heard herself asking, “Who are you having?”

  The ladle in Cleota’s hand struck the stove and slid along the floor. “I can’t have this, Alice. You know exactly what I am talking about, so there is nothing more to say about it.”

  The old lady shook her head, just once, turned the knob and went out, softly closing the door behind her.

  Cleota picked up the ladle and stood there shaking. Once again the house was no longer hers. The indignity of the visit made her clench her teeth; Alice knew perfectly well that if her phone was out, then theirs was too, since they were on the same line. She had come simply, purely, to demonstrate that she had the freedom of the premises, to show once again that whatever else he may have become and whomever he might have married, Stowey was her baby brother first.

  Cleota, who did not believe in a definite god, looked toward the ceiling despite herself, with a longing for an ear that would hear, and whispered, “Why doesn’t she die?” Alice was seventy-three, after all, and was nothing any longer but a smell, a pair of watery eyes, and, above all, a coiled power secreted in that house down the road which Stowe had bought for her when her husband had died. She felt now, as she often did, that the old woman lived on only to laugh secretly at her. She knew how unreasonable this idea was; the woman survived falls on the ice, broken hips, and cold and pneumonia last winter because she wanted to live for her own sake, but this stubborn refusal to succumb was somehow obscene to Cleota, quite as though the woman had something illicit in her unabashed craving for a life that would never end.

  Cleota went to the Fiji mask and turned it as it had been before, as though this would cancel out Alice’s having moved it. She touched the hard brown wood, and her finger rested on a rough spot under the lower lip. This had always felt like a wart and made the image seem alive, and the touching of the spot recalled her father’s hands on it when he gave it to her. As foolish a man as he had been, he had known how to disappear from the lives of those he could not help. She felt a rising pride in her father now; with his own bizarre dignity he had assembled his lunatic expeditions, read the wrong books, learned outmoded anthropological theories, sailed to the unmeaningful islands, spent years studying tribes that had been categorized many times before, and had succeeded only in cluttering the homes of his children with the bric-a-brac of the South Seas. Now, however, now that he could never return, she sensed in his career a certain hidden purpose, which she felt he must have secretly followed. It had been his will to declare himself even in his inanity, and to keep on declaring himself until the idiotic end, his ankle caught in a rope and his bald head in the water, discovered hanging over the side of his sloop off San Francisco harbor. How strange it was that this fool had slowly taken on—for many besides herself—an air of respect! And it was not wrong that this should be, she thought. He had had a passion, and that, she felt now, was everything.

  Returning to her stove, she saw that she was separated from herself as her father had not been from himself. The gaunt image of Stowey appeared before her, enraging her mind; why could she not have him! They were like two planets circling each other, held in their orbits by an invisible force that forbade their juncture, the force coming out of those two watery eyes, those clawed white fingers, that put-on stupidity, that selfish arrogance which sat in the house down the road, grinning and enthroned. A burst of wind against the house reminded her that guests would be here. She turned her mind to the food and sought once more the soft suspension of all desire. One of the parakeets flew up from the floor and perched on her wrist. She stopped working and moved it to her lips and kissed its glistening head, and as always it bowed and plucked at her flesh with its talons.

  • • •

  To Cleota it was faintly ill-mannered to ask biographical data of a guest. What people did for a living, whether they were married or divorced, had mistresses or lovers, had been to jail or Princeton or in one of the wars—the ordinary pegs on which to drape the growing tapestry of an evening’s conversation did not exist for her mind. Until she was sixteen she had not met, or at least had not had to cope with, anyone whose background and attitudes were different from her own. Her uncles, aunts, and cousins had all been of a piece and of a place, even if they had gone all over the world to live, and it was—or seemed—quite the same for the other girls who attended her schools. Her life had taken her, at Stowe’s side, into many countries, the palazzos of financiers, the hovels of artists, the Harlems of the world, the apartments of nouveaux riches and university trustees, and the furnished rooms of doped musicians, but rich or poor, famous or infamous, genius or dilettante, they were all greeted and listened to with her same blind stare, her inattention to details, her total absence of discrimination. She seemed not to realize that people ordinarily judged others; not that she liked everyone equally, but so long as they were in some way amusing, or sincere, or something at least definite, she was happy to have them in her house. What did arouse her was to be put upon—or ever to be told what to think or to feel. It was simply an absurdity that anyone should impose on anyone else. Beyond this prohibition, which her manner made it unnecessary to enforce very often, she was not troubled by people. Unexpectedly, however, she did not disapprove of moralists. It was simply that moralizing for them was, or must surely be, somehow necessary, just as some people hated the outdoors and others never ate peppery food. There were things, of course, of which she disapproved, and she often appeared to verge on moral indignation, as toward people being denied passports by the government or being kept out of restaurants because they were colored. But it soon became clear she was not speaking of any moral situation; it was simply that her sense of her own person had been inflamed by the idea of some blind, general will being imposed upon an individual. And then it was not indignation she felt so much as bewilderment, an incomprehension similar to her father’s when he traveled around the world three different times at his own expense to present petitions to the League of Nations protesting the oppression of various tribes, one of which had come close to eating him, and failed to get any response.

  Lucretia had called this morning and among other things had said that John Trudeau had stopped by the night before on his way to New York, and when the two women had decided to have dinner together Trudeau was inevitably included, along with another guest of Lucretia’s, a Madame something who was also visiting her. Cleota had known Trudeau and especially his wife Betty until last year, when he quit his job teaching at Pemmerton School in Hanock, a few miles from her house, and went to live in Baltimore. She had been less impressed with him than with his wife, a tall young beauty, yet sensible. Some six years ago their wedding party had spilled over into the Rummel house, and Cleota still connected Trudeau with that evening, when with Betty at his side he seemed a promising, deeply serious fellow who she hoped would become the poet he had set his heart on being. There had seemed to be a touching faith between them, like hers in Stowe when young. They had had four children and lived poorly in an unremodeled farmhouse near the school, and Cleota had often dropped in there in the hope she could draw them out of a deepening seclusion, which gave her the feeling that they were perhaps ashamed of their poverty. She ha
d made sure to invite them whenever there was anything going at her house, and they had come more often than not, but toward the end of their years here she could not help seeing that they were cool to each other and that Trudeau had gotten gray quite suddenly, and she could not tell why their failure had left her feeling an angry frustration, especially when they had never been close friends.

  So she was not entirely surprised to see Trudeau tonight with a girl who was not his wife, but that it should be a girl like this! He was still a handsome man in a conventional way, tall, white-haired at the temples, a rather long face with a Byronic nose, but, she thought now, somewhat on the weak side overall. She saw now that she had met his face on many a sailing boat long ago, the perpetual sportsmen who remained Princeton boys forever. How had she misjudged him so? Yet he still had something serious, some suffering in his eyes, which she fancied looked at her now with a tinge of nervous shame, whose cause she quickly concluded was the physical appearance of this girl who obviously was his mistress.

  All through dinner Cleota could neither look at her directly nor take her eyes from her profile. The girl hardly spoke but stared over the others’ heads in seeming judgment upon the not brilliant conversation, straining her brows, which were penciled nearly into her hair, blinking her enormous brown eyes whose lids were blackened like a ballerina’s in a witches’ dance. She wore a black sweater and a black felt skirt, both tightened over enormous breasts and weighty but well-made thighs, and her shoes were spike-heeled and black too. There was no make-up on her olive skin, not even lipstick. Her arms jangled with bracelets and her name was Eve Saint Bleu. Trudeau, incredibly, called her “Saint” and from time to time tried to draw her into the talk, but she would only turn her morose eyes toward him instead of the walls and windows. At each of his slavish attempts to engage the girl, Cleota would turn quickly to hear what remark would fall from Saint’s full lips, to witness Saint when she might leave off with what to Cleota was an incredibly rude attempt to appear bored and disapproving of everything. Or was she merely as stupid as she looked? After twenty minutes of this silent sparring Cleota refused any further interest in Saint and did what she always did with people in her house—left out whoever did not appeal to her and attended to those who did.

  She had always liked Lucretia, her friend since their schooldays, and Madame . . . “I don’t think I heard your name, Madame,” she said to the woman who sat across the table from her, eating the lamb in large chunks and chewing with a full mouth.

  “Lhevine. Manisette-Lhevine. Ish shpelled with an aish,” the lady said, trying to swallow at the same time.

  Cleota laughed at her attempt and liked this ugly woman who was so small she had to sit on a cushion at the table. She had the face of a man, the skin of a mulatto, with a blob of a nose that seemed to have been deboned, it hung so unsupported and unshaped. Her eyes were black like her kinky hair, which was bobbed high and showed her manly ears, which stuck out from her head. She had a large mouth and well-filled teeth. Her hands were bulb-knuckled and veined, and when she laughed, which she did often, deep creases cut parentheses into her tight cheeks. She had asked permission to remove the jacket of her gray suit, exposing her skinny, muscular arms, which sprouted from a sleeveless blouse like the twisted branches of an old apple tree. Cleota, as though to compensate Madame for the sensuous form of her other guests, kept placing fresh slices of bread and meat before her alone as they talked.

  “I want Madame to do you,” Lucretia said, and only now Cleota recalled her having mentioned on the phone that this woman told fortunes. An oddly suspended smile was hanging on Lucretia’s face as Cleota turned to her. Lucretia sat there as though she were going to brazen out an embarrassing but true confession, for she had always been a severely practical, scientifically minded woman with no patience whatsoever for any kind of mysticism. During the first years of her marriage she had even returned to school for her master’s degree in bacteriology and had worked in laboratories until the children came. She knew exactly how many calories, proteins, and carbohydrates there were in every food, used pressure cookers to preserve the vitamins, kept instruments in her kitchen with which she could predict humidity and weather, and dealt with everyone, including her own children, with a well-scrubbed avoidance of sentimentality and muddle.

  But there she sat, not half as embarrassed as Cleota thought she would surely be at having admitted this intense interest in fortune-telling, and Cleota could not absorb such a violent contradiction of her old friend’s character, and for a moment her mouth went from a smile to a serious expression as she wondered if she were the victim of a joke.

  “She’s wonderful, Cleota,” Lucretia insisted. “I haven’t told her anything about you, but you wait and see what she finds out.”

  Quite suddenly Saint spoke. “I had an aunt who did that.” It was her first remark unprompted by a question from Trudeau, and everyone turned to her, waiting for more. And she momentarily looked so eager to tell them something, her supercilious air gone, that she seemed merely a shy girl who had been intimidated to find herself in Stowe Rummel’s actual house. Trudeau relaxed and smiled for the first time and encouraged her with happier eyes to go on. She opened her lips to speak.

  “Your aunt didn’t do this, dear,” Madame Lhevine cut her off, grinning across the table at her with clear resentment and giving the table one significant pat.

  Saint looked hurt, and Trudeau put a hand on her thigh under the table and said, “Honey . . .” But Madame Lhevine was going on now to Cleota, to whom she looked with softened eyes, as though she shared a secret understanding with her alone. “There’s no need to do you,” she said.

  “Why not?” Cleota blushed.

  “You’re there already.”

  Cleota laughed high. “Where?”

  “Where it all begins,” Madame said, and her persistent calm, absurd to Cleota at first, gave her an authority that now caused all to watch her every movement.

  Cleota’s high, hawking laugh burst from her; it was followed by a sip of red wine and a wondering glance at Lucretia, for it suddenly swept in upon her that to have become so intensely involved with this woman her long-time friend must be in some great personal trouble. But she quickly turned back to Madame Lhevine.

  “I’m not laughing at you, Madame,” she said, busying her hands with sweeping crumbs toward herself. “It’s just that I don’t know where anything begins. Or ends.” She laughed again, blushing. “Or anything at all.”

  Madame Lhevine’s eyes did not stir. “I know that, dear,” she said.

  A blow seemed to have struck Cleota from somewhere; she felt herself pierced by the fanatic but oddly kind eyes of the fortuneteller. A new need for this woman’s attention and even for her care pressed upon Cleota, who suddenly felt herself lonely. She lowered her gaze to the last crumbs, saying, “I suppose it’s just as real as anything else, though.”

  “Neither more nor less,” Madame Lhevine said with the quiet joy of those who believe and are saved.

  Cleota could not sit there any longer. “I’ll get some coffee,” she said and went out into the kitchen.

  Her hand unaccountably shook as she held the kettle under the faucet. Her cheeks were hot. The faces in the living room revolved before her until Lucretia’s expression hung in her mind, the close-set eyes so strangely eager for Cleota to accept Madame Lhevine. All at once it was obvious to her that Lucretia and her husband had broken.

  She stared at the flame, still, quiet. Bud Trussel was home only weekends this year not because he had to be traveling all over the state on business. They were effectually separated.

  This knowledge was like something sliding out of her that she had not known was in her at all. How could she have been so blind to what was so obvious! She felt frightened. Her kitchen itself began to seem strange. What else, she wondered, was lying in her mind, unknown to her? Again she thought of Lucretia’s new, almost lascivious
manner tonight, the same Lucretia who had always sat with one leg entwined about the other, always blushing before she even dared to laugh! And now so . . . immoral. But what had she done or said that was immoral? It was all silly!

  A coldness spread through her body, and she glanced toward the pantry to see if the door had opened. She sensed Alice outside, listened, but it was quiet out there. Still, it was not beneath Stowe’s sister to peek through the windows. She strode to the back door and opened it brusquely, already infuriated. No one was there. The swift wind was wracking the trees, and through their waving branches her eyes caught a distant, unaccustomed light. She stopped moving, tracing the geography of the roads in her mind until she decided it was Joseph’s house, a surprise since he and his wife rarely came up in winter, although he did alone sometimes, to write. Had she known she would have called him tonight.

  Already there was a smile on her face as she returned to the stove, thinking of Joseph confronting Madame Lhevine. “A fortune-what?” he would ask, poker-faced—or some such half-joke that would make her laugh with embarrassment. There was always something on the verge of the inappropriate about what he said, on the verge of . . . of the truth. She went to the phone and held it absently to her ear, waiting for the tone. And still, she thought, visualizing this man, he is also a believer. So many Jews were, she thought for the first time. And his image came strongly to her mind as she stared at the mask beside the phone—he was like her father that way, he had some torturing statement in him that was always seeming to come out but never quite did. Like Stowe too! Now she became aware of the receiver’s silence and put it down in pique, half blaming Alice for having damaged it somehow. When she turned back to the stove Lucretia walked in and stood without speaking in the middle of the kitchen, slumping her long, wide-shouldered body onto one hip. And Cleota saw the willed smile on her shy face.