Lion House,The (17 page)

I was so sure of myself, so sure I'd be strong and firm and sensible
—all those honorable, high-flown things people flatter themselves into believing they
are,
promising themselves they
will
be, and then ruin deliberately, on the lowest levels.

I waited till we'd passed the town, had lost sight of Jo and Jeff in the car behind us, and were riding through the wooded spots that came along this other, long way home.

When will you stop?
I wondered.
When will you stop the way you used to and pull over to the side?
And the thought of his stopping became the biggest thing in the world.

I can't go back,
I pleaded silently.
I can't go on with the evening and the small talk. Turn your head. Look at me. Put your hand out and touch me. Let me see what your mouth does, and your eyes. Give me something. Give me anything.

The car slowed down, nosed into the trees, and ground to a standstill.

I stopped thinking. It was all the body again, as it had always been before: a deep sigh because I couldn't breathe; an indrawing of muscles; the kind of thing that happens at the moment of Ordeal: a dependence on tightening:
if I pull myself together, if all the parts of me are closed and hard
—it will hurt less: the fall in the plane, the smash of the bullet, the dentist's drill.

"What are you going to do?" I asked, in a voice that wasn't my own.

"Do?" He turned; but his full face was even more impassive than its profile. "I'm not going to do anything."

"Oh."

And that should have ended it; that should have kept me sitting there, on my side, till he backed out and started for home again; just sitting there, not moving over. But I did move over.

I put my hand on him; and then I felt him coming out to meet me: the simplest shape, and yet the form of grandeur: the Obelisk; the Bird in Space; the flowerless stem; candles on an altar; the pipes of the organ in St. Patrick's at Eastertime.

Hands have no pride, no dignity. Once I touched a Breughel at the Metropolitan, and I'll never forget the astonishment and dismay in the voice of the guard as he came up behind me and said: Madame!
What are you doing?

Or the dream, so many years ago, before the children: recurrent, insistent, frightening, but vaguely understood: each child of sleep brought forth in birth; fortunate, blessed, safe against its own desire
—without hands!

I willed for him to have me then: not the half-way, mid-way, other-ways of all our secret, wrong-way lovings; but this time, and for the first time, everything. I willed it, not saying a word, as you will the weather, the spins of roulette wheels, and the ends of wars:
if I care enough, if I want enough, then the Someone or the Something must let it be so.

He turned the key, snapped off the lights, and suddenly I was smothering in his arms. "Come on!" he said. "Come on!"

What am I?
I wondered irrelevantly, remembering an old game of Impressions.
Who is the person I have in mind? What shape is she? What time of day? What season? What music? What period of art?
The music was a horn-blare; and the art an abstraction: patterned circles pierced by sharp protrusions; red, blue, yellow; blatant as a cry.
What time of day? What time of night? What season of the year? The title of what book is she? The settings of what play...?

He was over me then, arms braced against the top of the seat behind me, stabbing without mind and direction. And as I tried to guide him he said
Oh, Jesus
—and it was over before it began.

"I'm sorry," I kept telling him. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
—though it didn't make sense: he should have been saying it to me!

"I've got a big day on Monday," he said, hands on the wheel and the motor purring. "I have to see some guy the firm is wooing. What's the best place for dinner?"

"Nedick's,"
I answered wearily.

When we got back to the party I passed Jo quickly, barely able to wave. I went straight through to the John and washed. A few people rattled on the knob, but I stood there, letting the water run. And I discovered then that somewhere in the car I had lost my watch...

It ended there. And even though it was Frannie's I copied it that last night in her house, folded it in half, and put it into my bag; because somehow
—it was mine too.

Then I dragged the valises out and headed downtown.

It wasn't his,
I kept thinking as I drove.
She was telling me the truth. It wasn't his. It never could have been. He wasn't up to
—even that...

It was after my first day at Clarke that I came home to find a letter from Frannie in my box. Bewildered by the plethora of duties I had discovered to be mine, her Air Mail envelope showing bluely through the metal pigeon hole carried the uplift of an oasis, of a
deus ex machina
lowered from the skies to snatch me from utter devastation. I opened it right there in the vestibule, unable to wait till I got upstairs.

My last-minute lachrymosity, she wrote, had of course disturbed her
—to the point of passing up three-fourths of the Weinricks' farewell banquet; but on second thought, tears had their therapeutic advantage and the fact that mine were so close to the surface would surely save me several grand on an analyst's couch. I really should try it, she advised; it would be a shame to waste the chance for such economy.

The kids were fine, she went on; and the roaches had not, to date, made their initial attack. But it was always that way: they were slobs about plane schedules and were never ready to advance till a week or so after a tenant's arrival.

She had already been to the book shop in Hamilton where she had picked up several English authors ("I mean their novels," she hastened to add.) The jacket blurb on one of the Angela Thirkells extolled this lady story teller to the heavens, ending with:
She is, beyond a doubt, another Trollope...
"Of all people!" Frannie supplemented. "But then, one can never be sure about the British!"

After three more pages of similar fare she finished less lightly: Marc had received a call from his office and was flying home the following day. "He says it won't be for long," she wrote, "but I can think of happier plights than solitary maroonment on an island of Romance for even a few star-lit nights. The place is crawling with honeymooners, and even my thirteen-year-old baby sitter informs me she's pregnant (not that one expects virgins at two shillings an hour...). He'll be there by the time you get this, so call him and nag him into a fast return." Signed.

Cheerio!
"Rawther Perturbed"

* * *

On the Saturday of the Wingo Bazaar I woke up feeling low. (I'd dropped in on some town friends named Herman the night before and had drunk myself into a phony display of
joie de vivre
in sheer defense against their sympathy. Meaning well, they had made a big deal of wracking their brains for the name of every bachelor, divorce, and widower in New York.) I did drive out to Wingo, though: anything would be better, I felt, than hanging around brooding all day.

"Hi, Jo!" came voices from every direction as I inched my way through the crush on the playground.

"Marvelous this year!" said an especially enthusiastic Volunteer Mother, collaring me. "We'll make piles! Probably get a new bus out of it!"

I was amazed to find how quickly my loyalties had faded; how little I cared if Wingo transported its small fry in a new bus
—or an old garbage truck. But I nodded and smiled gaily.

Then: "Hello," said a deep, gentle voice; and I turned to face Bill Brecker behind me. Untall, unbeautiful, there was a kind of strength in the close-cropped curling brown hair and the large, flat, sprawling features; a kind of power, yet a kind of kindness. We talked for a few minutes and then he asked, "Are you going to be busy after this? There's a staff dinner dance at the hospital and I didn't want to go alone. But if you're
—"

"I'd love to," I said. "It's just that I made this tentative date with somebody and I'm not quite sure if
—"

"When will you be sure?"

"Later," I lied. "He's here, so I'll find out, and
—" Refusals like that are odd: unbased and strangely automatic. I thought of all the other things I'd gotten out of in my life: good things, nice things, attractive—yet, somehow, not attractive
enough,
and so
—turned down, without real reason, without my ever clearly knowing why.

"Okay," Bill said. "I'll check with you before I leave."

It was somewhere around the hot dog booth that I heard the unmistakable roar of Peggy Potter Fredericks. Peggy, a well-known labor lawyer, had sent her children to Wingo many years back, but, as with all things, had embraced the place as one of her numerous Causes. Actually, I had first run into her during my Washington era, where, having left her soft-spoken Sutton Place husband at home, she was whirl-windingly busy outshouting staunch males in a government investigation.

In view of Marc's profession I had once asked Frannie if she knew her. "Peggy Fredericks?" Frannie had said without expression. "Oh, sure. She's that dame with the built-in megaphone."

Catching sight of me now, she waved a happy hand full of hot dog and flagged me down like a train. "JO BRADFORD! Haven't seen you for ages! Good you camel Hear you're LEAVING! Come on over!"

Timorously I edged in closer. "Hi, Peg," I said, my own voice a mere squeak by comparison. Round, blue-haired, and five-feet-one, there was something about Peg's cannon-ball delivery that knocked you senseless.

"WHERE'S the gorgeous HUSBAND?" she demanded. Several spectators averted their eyes and moved off.

"Pfffft," I answered simply.

Peggy's psychic machinery underwent a sequence of gearshifts, leaving her with a sorrow no less intense than her previous joy. "No!" she groaned. "Jo, don't TELL me! WHEN? WHY? WHAT HAPPENED?"

"End of May," I answered. "Long story... But it's nice," I added, "that you're
surprised..."

She stared at me, incongruously stilled as a storm sky robbed of thunder. Then, suddenly, she brightened. "You know what?" she said. "GORDIE'S here!"

"Gordie?"

"MY BROTHER! GORDIE! He's in from PHILLY!"

"Oh," I said. "Gordon. The one that makes pens? I think you mentioned him last time I saw you."

She had already turned and was scanning the playground. "GORDIE!" she exploded, spotting him somewhere in the crowd. "Come on over here!"

And, emerging magically as Pan from a forest of human trees, Gordon Potter appeared. There is no reason to expect striking resemblances between siblings; but on the other hand, I wasn't quite prepared for such startling dissimilarity. "You called?" he asked, genie-like, bathing us both in a wide, easy grin. His voice played a flute to Peg's bassoon. His hair, close-cropped but still silken, was the no-color of small soft animals; and over green, slanted eyes he wore glasses in dark shell frames. All this, plus his slender height, gave him the look of some unique species of tall, intellectual erlking.

"JO BRADFORD!" Peggy boomed. "My brother, GORDIE!"

Gordon, hands stuffed into the pockets of seersucker trousers, rocked back and forth on the toes of his moccasins and smiled. "Someone told me who you were when you came," he said. "You worked here last year
—and your real name's Elizabeth?"

"Yes," I answered vaguely, unable to take my eyes from his strangely piquant head, fully expecting to find his ears pointed and covered with flat fur.

And then a group of friends surrounded Peggy, and he and I were left, unofficially linked, to go our way.

"You do something with pens," I said later, as we sat on a rock behind the Sixes building, sucking fresh lemons through candy straws.

"I made them. Real good ones. Real special?" He had a way of putting question marks where periods should be.

"How did you get into
that?"
I asked.

He gave it some thought and then shrugged. "Who knows? Woke up one morning five years ago and decided to quit my old job and make pens.
Pens,
a little voice said:
go make pens.
So I went and made them. And now I'm doing
awfully
well! They're remarkable. They don't smear at all, and they hardly
ever
run dry?"

I began to laugh.

"What's funny?"

"I just thought of Frannie," I said. "When Frannie hears I met Peggy Fredericks' brother and he manufactures pens, she'll
—" I doubled up. I could hear her, doing one of her armchair analyses of the symbolic implication of Gordon's unconscious choice of product.

"Who's Frannie?"

"Frannie Browne. This girl I know. You'll have to meet her someday. You'd adore each other. She's sort of like you
—in a way."

"How?"

"Well, green eyes. But something else
—something intangible; kind of a detachment from reality. She isn't always that way, though. There are times when she can chuck all this gaiety and whimsy and stuff and become staggeringly—Machiavellian?" Now
I
was doing it.

"Let's ditch this mob and go see her?"

"Can't. She's in Bermuda."

"Well, that's too far. But let's go anyway?"

"Where?"

"You could drive me into town. I came out with Peg, but I have to get back to Philly tonight. I have a thing on for tomorrow."

He reached out for my lemon rind and stuffed it into the half-eaten skin of his. "Let me throw these into the can," he said, getting up. "I can't ever just drop a thing on the ground. I'm very
—Civic Minded?"

While I waited for him to come back, Bill Brecker walked over. "I take it you now know," he said. "The date for this evening: you have it, or you don't have it"

"I have it," I answered.

"All right," he said. "Maybe some other time. I'll try you
—once more." There was a slight, almost imperceptible stress on the last phrase. He knew I'd sloughed him off; yet, he had no proof, so he was going to give me another chance. But there would be no long-term persuasions, as there would have been with Brad; no endless phonings, no setting himself up for endless rebuffs. With Bill it would be another chance: clearly, decisively:
just one.