Evergreen (23 page)

“Poppycock!” Joseph snorted. “It either looks like a person or it doesn’t.”

“As a matter of fact,” Maury declared, “this does look a good deal like Ma.”

“What!” Anna cried suddenly. “With that pointed nose and a long neck like a goose?”

“It has your spirit,” Maury argued. “I’m surprised at you, Ma. You’re the one who knows all about art in this family and you can’t understand what we mean?”

“Oh, don’t brother me with the thing!” Anna cried in an unnatural voice.

Iris felt sudden pity for her mother. She didn’t know why, and she hoped Maury wouldn’t answer back.

Her father remonstrated, “I don’t know why you’re getting so worked up, Anna. I know you hate to be reminded of the Werners, but—”

Anna stared at him. “Nothing of the sort. Are you still harping on the fact that I worked for them and I’m supposed to be ashamed of it? Don’t talk like a fool. I’ve never been ashamed of working with my two hands.”

Joseph looked at her steadily.

“What is it, then? Why are you so angry?”

“I’m not angry. I don’t like it. Do I have to like it? I didn’t ask for it, but here it is, causing dissension in the house. It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd!”

Joseph threw up his hands. “All right! Nobody’s asking
you to like it. I’ll take it to the office. It’s not as bad as all that. You won’t have to look at it, then.”

“It will look really handsome hanging between the map of Manhattan and your certificate from the Board of Realtors. Just what you need!”

Now that’s odd, Iris thought. Papa switching sides like that. First he doesn’t like it, next he offers to hang it in his office.

Joseph sighed. “All right. Do what you want with the thing. It’s really not important, is it?”

“That’s just what I meant all along,” Anna said. “It’s not important.”

Iris was brushing her teeth that night when her mother came into the bathroom.

“Iris, tell me, what did Mr. Werner say?”

“I did tell you.”

“Was that all he said?”

“Well, after I said you weren’t home, he asked me whether I was the girl with the big eyes. He said he remembered meeting me with you on Fifth Avenue.”

“Anything else?”

“I guess not. Oh, he said something more about my eyes. He said he hadn’t forgotten me. That my face was half eyes. I thought that was kind of a silly thing to say, wasn’t it?”

“Very silly,” Anna agreed.

Something different has happened, Iris thought when she was alone. But I’m glad they’re not quarreling. She lay awake, listening for sounds of anger from her parents’ room, but there were none. Not like that night which she could still remember, although it had been four to five years ago, after they had met Mr. Werner and his mother and Papa had been so terribly upset.

So much had changed since then. They’d been rich and now they were poor. She knew; she heard the whispering about bills and knew they didn’t want to talk in front of her and Maury. She’d heard them say it was a shame to worry the children.

Yes, there was trouble enough now, and so she was glad things were quiet tonight. Not that her parents quarreled very often. Some of the girls at school talked about their fathers and mothers fighting all the time. One of the girl’s parents were even getting divorced, which must be awful. It scared you to think about a thing like that.

She had a fleeting thought before falling asleep: she wished that Mr. Werner would stay away, wouldn’t call up again.

The picture disappeared. Iris saw a flat parcel, wrapped in brown paper, at the back of the top shelf in the hall closet, and guessed that was probably it.

A few days later a letter lay on the desk in the living room with an envelope beside it, a letter left open as if Mama had wanted it to be read. So Iris did. It was very short.

“Dear Mr. Werner,” she read. “My husband and I thank you for the picture. We were sorry to learn that your father died. Sincerely, Anna Friedman.”

What a queer, curt note! Written on cheap white paper in a sloppy scrawl, with a blot on the page! Not at all like the pretty notes Mama wrote to her friends with black ink on crocus-yellow paper, in her pointed European script like the marks of birds’ feet.

Queer!

It had taken almost a week for her to feel normal again. My God, Anna thought, he must have gone out of his mind to call our house. And to talk to Iris! That night at the dinner table when the child had told of the call, it was a wonder she hadn’t gone faint with the shock.

A wonder, too, that Joseph had taken it so easily. That argument over Mrs. Werner’s funeral—she would never forget his jealous rage. For that was what it had been, although he would never have admitted it was. This time he had merely asked a few questions and then accepted, or
seemed to accept, her explanation that the gift was a gracious gesture from Paul Werner
and his sister
.

But Joseph was changed from what he had been five years ago. He had lost the firmness with which he had ruled the house when things were going so well. Sad to see. He reminded her in a way of the wistful, poor young man she had first known.

She was thinking all this one afternoon on her way home from neighborhood errands, thinking too that the apartment was growing shabby, and how it didn’t take long for misfortune to make itself visible when, half a block away from home, someone called her name. Turning, she saw Paul Werner standing there, tipping his hat.

“I got your note,” he said.

She could hardly speak. For an instant her heart seemed to pause and then it began to shake in her chest. “Why are you doing this?” she cried. “Why did you send that picture? And now you’ve come here and if anyone sees you—”

“Don’t be frightened, Anna! I telephoned openly and left my name. There’s no subterfuge, no reason for anyone to be suspicious.”

As she walked he kept pace with her. She had turned down the side street toward the river, away from the apartment house. Iris would be coming home from school any minute and Iris had watched her so warily the other night—

“Please go!” she pleaded. “Please go, Paul!”

But he persisted. “Your letter was so unlike you, Anna! I surely didn’t mean to offend when I sent the Mallard. It was simply that I hadn’t seen it in years—Father had stuck it away somewhere—and when I came upon it I was thunderstruck by the resemblance. And I wanted you to have it.”

They reached Riverside Drive. Cars streamed by, glittering in the lemon-colored light. The air wavered, its radiance trembling before Anna’s dizzy eyes. She stood there beside the river of cars, clutching a bag of groceries, frozen as if the curb were a precipice and the avenue an abyss.

Paul took a strong hold of her arm. “We have to talk. Cross over. Well find a bench under the trees.”

Her legs moved. This could not possibly be happening! One minute walking home from the market on a bright, windy afternoon of early spring; the next minute sitting on a bench with this man whom she had thought never to see again! How could it be happening?

“Anna, I had to come,” he said. “You’ve never been out of my mind. Never. Can you understand that?”

She was afraid to look at him. “I can,” she whispered.

“I think of you sometimes in the middle of a conference, or when I’m driving the car or reading a newspaper—suddenly, there you are. I wake up and remember you, even when I had been dreaming of something entirely apart from you. But—there you are. And when I saw that painting, the memory of you became so vivid that I had to do something about it.”

Her breath had begun to calm. She turned her face to his. “It’s a beautiful thing and I felt so—
so stirred
. But it’s crazy of you to be here, all the same. Don’t you know it is, Paul?”

“Anna, I had to. That’s all there is to be said.”

He took her hand, his fingers twining in hers. In spite of the thickness of glove leather she could feel the force, the heat, the life of his flesh.

“Don’t,” she murmured.

But neither of them withdrew and the entwined hands lay on the bench between them. The world went by: children rolling on their skates and bicycles; dogs pulling at their leashes; young women pushing baby carriages. All of these were oblivious to the man and woman on the bench.

After a while Paul said, “Tell me how you are.”

She felt a great weight, she felt entranced. “No, I find it hard to talk. You tell me.”

“Well,” he began obediently, “I’ve just come back from Europe for the firm. From Germany. Things are going bad there and they’re going to get worse with this Hitler fellow.
I’ve been trying to rescue some investments for our clients before it’s too late.”

There were chords in his voice that Anna would have recognized if she had heard them among strangers on the other side of the world. From her room at the top of that house the music of his voice had carried up the stair well while she had lain in her bed, listening for it—

Now, because he saw that she was unable to speak, he tried to find something more to say. “Other than that—well, I’ve been collecting art and I go to a sculpture class. I’m not very good at it, but it’s a challenge. And I’ve kept up with Father’s charities. He was a great benefactor, an efficient manager, and it’s hard to fill his shoes. But I’m trying.”

She heard a smile in his voice and turned back from where she had been gazing at the river. Those large, hooded eyes under heavy, rounded lids—brilliant eyes, like dark jewels—his mother had had the same, as well as the high arched nose. And Iris had them.

“You’re staring at me, Anna!”

“Am I? I didn’t mean to.”

“I don’t mind if you do. Look at me some more.”

Flushing, she looked back at the river. Her heart began to race again; she could hardly breathe.

“Perhaps you want to know more about me? I—we have no children. Never will have. Marian had an operation a couple of years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Anna responded automatically.

“So am I. So is she. But we shan’t adopt. And she keeps busy with her charities, too. She’s very generous with her strength and time, not just with money.” He stopped again, then said, “So that’s my life. Now will you tell me about yours?”

She drew a deep breath and began. “An ordinary life. Like women everywhere. Keeping the house and children. Coping with bad times.”

“Have they hit you very badly?”

“We’ve lost almost everything,” Anna said simply.

“Do you need money? Can I help you?”

She shook her head. “No, no, we manage. And anyway, you don’t think I could take it from you, do you?”

And, suddenly overcome by a wave of chill reality, she withdrew her hand, clasping her own two hands together in her lap.

“I suppose you couldn’t,” Paul said bleakly. There was a long silence. Then he cried out, “I should have married you, Anna! Would you have married me?”

“Oh,” she said, “you know I would have, the way I felt then! But what’s the use of talking about it now?”

A little boat sped down the river. A cloud darkened the spring green on the Palisades. Anna saw them through a curtain of tears. How different everything might have been! You take one path and it leads you here and you become this kind of woman; another path leads you there, and you become another kind of woman. The same body but another life, and therefore another woman. She thought she had forgotten—well, almost forgotten—how it might have been. Goodness knew she had tried to forget.

She turned on him almost fiercely. “Why didn’t you marry me? You see, I’m not proud anymore. I don’t want to be proud. So I ask you, why didn’t you?”

Paul’s eyes looked straight into hers and through them. “I was a boy then,” he said at last, “not yet a man. While you already had the spirit of a woman. I didn’t have courage enough to marry someone I—wouldn’t be expected to marry.” His voice grew rough. “Can you understand that and not despise me for it? Can you?”

Something sprang alive in Anna, a singing, a flowering, a tenderness of joy and vindication. “Oh,” she said, “I was so terribly hurt that I wanted to die! And after that, so angry. So bitter and angry.… But I could never ‘despise’ you, never.”

And she thought, Perhaps, after all, I should tell him now? Hasn’t he a right and a duty to know that my daughter belongs to him?

Paul said abruptly, “I haven’t told you everything. There’s something else.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember the time we met on Fifth Avenue a few years ago? I keep thinking of the way you stood with your hand on your little girl’s shoulder. I don’t know why that moved me so, but it did. And the child’s face haunts me. You’ll think I’ve gone mad, but I had—and have had—a revelation that she was mine. My child. And I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.”

It did not surprise Anna that he had come upon the truth. That rare, discerning mind, those far-seeing, through-seeing eyes—not much eluded them! No, it did not surprise her. Her lips parted to speak, but he interrupted.

“It’s true, then, isn’t it?”

“It’s true.”

“I’m not stunned. I’m not shocked. It’s as though I’d always known it.” He lit a cigarette with an effort at calm control; but she saw that his hands were shaking. “And Joseph?” he asked after a moment.

Anna shook her head. “Only I know.”

There was a long, long silence, while the pungent smoke drifted. Paul’s eyes closed and he did not move. After a while he opened his eyes and spoke again. “How you must have suffered, Anna!”

“I was so guilty, I thought I wasn’t fit to live,” she replied, very low. “But then my strength came back, thank God. I suppose human beings can endure much more than they think they can.”

“You’ve had to endure too much! Losing your parents, poverty in a strange country and then this! Why didn’t you tell me, Anna?”

She looked at him ruefully.

“All right, I shouldn’t have asked that. I know you couldn’t have. But will you let me do something for her, at least? I could open a trust account so that she would never be in want.”

“No, no! That’s not possible! You know it’s not! The best thing you can do is to stay away from her. Can’t you see that?”

Paul sighed. “Tell me, please, what she’s like.”

Anna considered how best to sum up a complex, aloof and sensitive little girl.