The Aunt's Story (32 page)

‘Let us go somewhere else,' she said because it was exhausting.

The Hôtel du Midi was now a set piece of fire. Theodora Goodman and Katina Pavlou went round to the back, pressing
close to the wall of the
confiserie
. They sat on a bench in the
jardin exotique
, where a slight dew had fallen, in spite of events. Katina Pavlou took Theodora Goodman's hand.

‘I shall go away,' Katina Pavlou said, touching the bones in Theodora's hand. ‘I shall go to my own country. Now I know. I shall go.'

‘But how?' Theodora asked, remembering the revolving doors of many-starred hotels.

‘Why, but I am at liberty,' said Katina Pavlou. ‘Aren't I?'

Theodora considered the phases of the fire.

‘Why, yes, I suppose,' Theodora smiled.

‘I shall take some money and some food,' Katina Pavlou said. ‘Tomorrow you shall come with me to the station, Miss Goodman, and I shall buy the ticket.'

It was easy as this. Already Katina Pavlou sat in the train, eating the chocolate and the petits pains. The mountains flowed.

‘Yes, my dear Katina,' Theodora sighed.

Already, from her corner, Katina Pavlou watched the slow smoke rise from white houses and sleepily finger the dawn. She sat upright, to arrive, to recover the lost reality of childhood. Her eyes were strained by sleeplessness.

‘Yes, Katina,' Theodora said.

There was no reason to suppose that this was not the sequence of events. Theodora contemplated the fire eating the feeble fretwork of a gable, turning it to fierce lace.

Then the crowd began to call. The roof would fall, called the crowd. It was time, time, time. The voice thickened.

‘
Ahhhh
,' cried the crowd in a last desperate spasm of consummation.

Theodora was glad that she did not see the faces flame.

‘I shall not look any more,' Katina Pavlou said.

There was blood on her face. It had dried. It glittered, rather like new paint, or a murder on the stage.

‘And what shall you do, Miss Goodman?' Katina Pavlou shivered.

‘I? I shall go now,' Theodora said. ‘I shall go too.'

She touched the smooth, cold skin of a leaf of aloe.

‘Where?' Katina Pavlou asked.

‘I have not thought yet,' Theodora said.

The forms of the
jardin exotique
remained stiff and still, though on one edge, where they had pressed against the side of the Hôtel du Midi, they were black and withered. Their zinc had run into a fresh hatefulness.

‘But I shall go,' Theodora said, indifferent to any pricking pressure, any dictatorship of the
jardin exotique

Katina Pavlou yawned. Her face was rounding into sleep.

‘I may even return to Abyssinia,' Theodora said.

After the metal hieroglyphs she felt an immeasurable longing to read the expression on the flat yellow face of stone. If the biscuit houses still existed.

‘You will go
where?
' Katina Pavlou asked.

‘Come, Katina, you are almost asleep,' Theodora Goodman said. ‘We must join the others. Listen. They are calling us.'

A
LL
through the middle of America there was a trumpeting of corn. Its full, yellow, tremendous notes pressed close to the swelling sky. There were whole acres of time in which the yellow corn blared as if for a judgement. It had taken up and swallowed all other themes, whether belting iron, or subtler, insinuating steel, or the frail human reed. Inside the movement of corn the train complained. The train complained of the frustration of distance, that resists, that resists. Distance trumpeted with corn.

Theodora Goodman sat beside the window in the train. Her hands were open. She had been carrying a weight, and now she was exhausted, slack, from receiving full measure, a measure of corn. Against her head the white mat gave her face a longer, paler, yellow shape. Like a corn cob. But in spite of outer appearances, Theodora Goodman suggested that she had retreated into her own distance and did not intend to come out.

This distressed the man in the laundered shirt, who wished to tell about his home, his mother, his cocktail cabinet, the vacation he had taken in Bermuda, and how he had sold papers as a boy. He sat in a corner, opposite Theodora Goodman, and felt and looked nervous, and fingered his mentholed chin, and rustled cellophane.

Or he talked, and heard his own voice made small.

Because all this time the corn song destroyed the frailer human reed. It destroyed the tons of pork the man's firm had canned. It dumped the man's cans beside the railroad track. It consumed the man's plans for better pork. The well-laundered, closely-shaven man scratched his slack white muscles through his beautiful, hygienic shirt, and could not understand. He could not understand why, beside the strong yellow notes of corn, his voice should fall short. He chewed popcorn, chewing for confidence, the white and pappy stuff that is a decadence of corn.

Theodora heard the difference between doing and being. The corn could not help itself. It was. But the man scrabbled on the
surface of life, working himself into a lather of importance under his laundered shirt. She heard the man's words, which were as significant and sad as the desperate hum of telephone wires, that tell of mortgages, and pie, and phosphates, and love, and movie contracts, and indigestion, and real estate, and loneliness. The man said that the population of Chicago had risen from 2,701,705 in 1920 to 3,376,438 in 1930. The population was being raised all the time. But in Chicago also, Theodora had seen the nun who danced along the sidewalk, unconsciously, for joy, and the unnaturally natural face of the dancing nun had sung some song she had just remembered. The nun's feet touched grass. So that Theodora smiled now. And the man in the perfect shirt was encouraged. He leaned forward to tell the populations of Kansas City, St Louis, Buffalo, and Detroit.

So they were getting somewhat at last.

In her turn, Theodora tried to remember some population of her own. But she could not. She tried to remember some unusual game that is played after adolescence. Because it was time, she saw, that she contributed to ease the expression on the man's face, that was an expression of expectation, and sympathy, and pain. But she could not. And the man, sitting back, said that, anyway, it would be fine for her folks to have her back home after so much travelling around. It would be safe. The man had read his papers, it seemed. Europe, he said, was a powder magazine, all hell was waiting to be let loose. Then he sat back. He had done his duty. He had composed life into a small, white, placid heap.

Theodora remembered she was in America and going home. She remembered the letter to Fanny in which she had written:

‘Theo is coming home,' announced Fanny Parrott. ‘What is more, she appears to be quite mad.'

Fanny dug at her cup, to sweeten her annoyance with the dregs of sugar. With the tips of her teeth she bit the half-melted
sugar and looked apprehensively at her safe room. A room is safest at breakfast. At Audley the mail arrived in the afternoon, but Fanny had deferred Theodora's letter, waiting for the safer moment of stiff, sweet porridge, and the consoling complacency of bacon fat, when she too was stronger. Though even so.

‘Well?' said Frank, who was fitting bacon, lean, fat, lean, half a kidney, a square of toast, and a little gravy, on to his fork.

Thought was slow and comfortable as breakfast. No one should destroy Frank Parrott. He was stronger than Theodora. He wiped the gravy from his mouth.

‘We are not committed to Theo,' he said. ‘Theo has always led her own life.'

If guilt stirred, and impinged on Frank Parrott's conscience, it quickly congealed. He swallowed down a mouthful of fat meat, and felt personally absolved.

‘But she is
my
sister,' Fanny said.

‘Well?'

‘I have my conscience,' said Fanny.

As if this wistful thing might break.

‘And I cannot bear it if you sit there saying
well
. I would rather you made no comment.'

Because she had begun to enjoy nerves. It was one of the many peculiarities which made her superior to Frank, and which a man accepted. Besides, his financial status and social position justified a wife who had nerves, and could pronounce French, and knew what to say to an Honourable.

But there were moments, too, when Frank Parrott was the Lord, when Fanny watched, and Frank Parrott was thick and red, and Fanny was glad. Fanny watched Frank push away his plate, both to assert his authority and because he was finished. Frank Parrott went and stood against the fire. To roast his rump. He was thick and red. His thick, polished leather legs were stood apart and striped with fire. When he had cleared the phlegm, Frank would speak, but not before. Now he was choosing words, like a fat sheep out of a pen. Fanny watched, her breath just thicker than porridge. There is a time in life when there are pretty long stretches of contempt, broken by the bubbling moments of lust, which are also called love. So Fanny loved Frank. He was the father of her complacency.

‘There is no reason why we should put ourselves out for Theodora,' said Frank. ‘Theo has never put herself out for us.'

‘No, Frank,' said Fanny. ‘It is true.'

She was struck by the sudden loveliness of truth.

‘And Theo will be happier in some good solid boarding house,' said Frank. ‘With a mob of similar old girls.'

‘Yes,' said Fanny. ‘We can take a nice room for her.'

‘Somewhere where she can show her postcards after dinner to the other old girls.'

Warmed by fire, his great acreage could dispose of more than souls, the bodies of sisters-in-law.

‘There is no need,' said Fanny, ‘to be unkind.'

But she smiled. Now she touched the envelope of Theodora's distasteful letter with less care. Fanny loved letters, but the comfortable narrative of wives and mothers, or some harmless appeal by charity, which she would allow to stroke her vanity before tearing up. Not the dark, the mad letters of Theodora. Before Fanny could destroy these, they had torn her.

‘And Theo is not so old,' she corrected. ‘She can't be more than forty-five.'

‘Old enough to have learnt sense,' said Frank.

‘Mother,' said Lou, ‘why is Aunt Theo mad?'

Outside the window the world had not yet thawed. Lou waited for the aching shapes of winter to dissolve into a more familiar fence and tree. Cutting toast, her hands were still miserable from Brahms.

‘What a thing to ask!' said Fanny. ‘As if … It is difficult to say. But it is none of your business.'

Lou would not ask more.

‘It is a manner of speaking,' said her father.

‘No,' said Fanny, raising her voice to the bright confident pitch that parents adopt for the presence of children. ‘Theodora is not so old.'

‘But stringy,' said Frank. ‘The type that does not die.'

‘Oh, Frank!' laughed Fanny.

Her labours to establish respect were wasted.

‘Poor Theo!' she laughed. ‘How cruel!'

Then Fanny took a knife and slashed the butter. She owed
this for something that continued to rankle, under her laughter, unexplained, for Abyssinia perhaps.

The sun was still a manageable ball above the ringing hills as Lou went outside. She walked through this stiff landscape, carrying her cold and awkward hands. She thought about the cardboard aunt, Aunt Theodora Goodman, who was both a kindness and a darkness. Lou touched the sundial, on which the time had remained frozen. She was afraid and sad, because there was some great intolerable pressure from which it is not possible to escape.

Lou looked back over her shoulder, and ran.

 

Sometimes against the full golden theme of corn and the whiter pizzicato of the telephone wires there was a counterpoint of houses. Theodora Goodman sat. The other side of the incessant train she could read the music off. There were the single notes of houses, that gathered into gravely structural phrases. There was a smooth passage of ponds and trees. There was a big bass barn. All the square faces of the wooden houses, as they came, overflowed with solemnity, that was a solemnity of living, a passage of days. Where children played with tins, or a girl waited at a window, or calves lolloped in long grass, it was a frill of flutes twisted round a higher theme, to grace, but only grace, the solemnity of living and of days. There were now the two coiled themes. There was the flowing corn song, and the deliberate accompaniment of houses, which did not impede, however structural, because it was part of the same integrity of purpose and of being.

Now that the man in the laundered shirt slept, Theodora Goodman could search her own purpose, her own contentment. I am going home, she said. It had a lovely abstraction to which she tried to fit the act. She tried the door of a house and went in. There were the stairs, and the cotton quilt on which she threw her jaded hat. She waited for the familiar sounds of furniture. She looked for her own reflection, in mirrors, but more especially in the faces of the people who lived in this house.

The train rocked the track. The man in the laundered shirt stirred. He was having trouble with his groin.

Then, in a gust, Theodora knew that her abstraction also did not fit. She did not fit the houses. Although she had in her practical handbag her destination in writing, she was not sure that paper might not tear. Although she was insured against several acts of violence, there was ultimately no safeguard against the violence of personality. This was less controllable than fire. In the bland corn song, in the theme of days, Theodora Goodman was a discord. Those mouths which attempted her black note rejected it wryly. They glossed over something that had strayed out of some other piece, or slow fire.

The train rocked the track.

Lying on her shelf at night, listening to the dying wind of many sleepers, Theodora was afraid that this movement might end in an intolerable clash of cymbals. So she compelled her stockings. So she unfolded herself from the narrow shelf. Her hat, with its large black gauze rose, more a sop to convention than an attempt at beauty, was easy to manage. It knew her head. She was soon ready.

There were bells in the night, wheels, and a long gush of steam.

Theodora trod down, out of the high, stationary train, on to the little siding.

A Negro with white eyes suggested that this was not the sort of thing that people did.

‘No,' said Theodora. ‘But you will not tell.'

The Negro had a kind face. And he was sleepy.

And presently the train had gone, with all its magnificence of purpose, towards California. She heard in the distance its meek, flannel cough absorbing darkness.

There were several small streets of a small town, in which Theodora walked. The town lay wide open, between darkness and light. Soon the colour would drench back. But for the moment Theodora and the sleeping town were pale. Sitting on a step, her head against a tree, she waited for shapes to gather, or sleep. The drifting silence, and the broken sounds of sleep, and the watery colourlessness of early morning were all one.

Finally bark began to bite. She lifted her cheek from where it had been grained by the friendly tree. Sunflowers had appeared over a fence, though their big suns had not yet begun to flame. They were still bemused by dew. The town was pink, mostly,
of baked mud, an earth pink. A bronze cock on a wall shook his feathers into shape. There were the frame houses too. The old sagging house, for instance, on the step of which Theodora sat. This house was still comfortable with sleep. But the bronze cock flaunted his metal throat and crowed. Somewhere a voice tore itself from a sheet. A thin, dark, perhaps an Indian woman, or a Mexican, lifted her head and looked, rising out of deep darkness Theodora saw. Theodora looked away, thinking that she recognized her own soul in the woman's deep face.

The bronze cock was screaming. Voices came from kitchens, prominent voices, because they were still feeling their way, and cold, because every morning is the first.

Theodora looked up and saw the small white-haired woman, very white, floury white, who looked out of the house against which she was sitting. This woman had the young face of an old bright child. She had the appearance of looking for something at which to complain, but not in anger, for company. Then she saw Theodora Goodman and was so surprised she withdrew.

Recovering from her surprise, she soon came out again. The woman could not resist. She had a lot to tell. She would not ask much, but she would tell. And Theodora was glad of this, as she could not have answered. She did say that she had come by train. But the woman could not pause. She had to tell about her younger daughter Frances, who was multiplying on the coast, and her elder daughter, Myra, at Topeka, who had the hand for cheese cake. Then the woman remembered, and brought Theodora a cup of milk and a piece of sweet, fluffy bread. The bread was not real, but there was a blue shadow round the rim of milk, that she knew from childhood. She sank her mouth in the cool milk, and it became warm from her suddenly hot, protesting mouth.