The Bird’s Nest (35 page)

“Dinner was very nice, Aunt Morgen.”

“I
know
it was very nice, I made it and it was very very very damned nice and if Í hadn't told you what it was you could honest to God have sat there all through dinner moving your fork and putting it in your mouth and maybe if it's my lucky day just happening to notice that for the past month we've been using new dishes. I keep telling myself it isn't
possible,
not after all this time.” Morgen put out her cigarette with care, and said, “I don't want to sound like the kind of person who says I've got a right to your affection just because I've spent a lot of time taking care of you as though you were my own child. I'd have to be pretty damn silly to think that people had
rights
to other people's love; in my life I've earned more love and got less than anyone I know. But I could have sworn,” she said, making her tone light, and smiling a little, “I could have sworn
you
wouldn't let me go off alone to an old ladies' home.”

She was watching Aunt Morgen carefully, looking at the big earnest ugly face and the false little smile and the mouth still a little open, and she thought, people shouldn't ever look closely at one another, they're not like pictures. There was not any sure way to know, from the eyes of her aunt or the mouth of her aunt or the hair or the eyebrows or the lines in the face of her aunt, whether the expression stated by her aunt's face was a faithful delineation of fear or anxiety or expectancy; it might be a kind of ecstasy, or it might be wholly false, and not at all the expression corresponding to Aunt Morgen's thoughts. There was too much there to be defined clearly; the jeweled prince was beautiful, General Owen was tired, but Aunt Morgen's face was a portrait too heavily shaded, with too much detail. And that is because, she thought, in a picture all the unnecessary misleading parts of the face have been eliminated, all the extra lines are gone and the painter has only left in the useful things; painting Aunt Morgen's face and calling it
Agony,
she thought, one would probably have to eliminate the greater part of the nose, which detracted sensibly from the composition of the whole, and surely avoid the sense of bestial, inarticulate pain introduced by the eyebrows, which were overheavy; a general thinning of the design . . .

“I think I'm being patient,” Aunt Morgen said, and her voice was cold.

“Aunt Morgen,” she said slowly, “you know what I was thinking, today in the museum?”

“No,” Aunt Morgen said, “
what
were you thinking, today in the museum?”

“I was thinking what it must feel like to be a prisoner going to die; you stand there looking at the sun and the sky and the grass and the trees, and because it's the last time you're going to see them they're wonderful, full of colors you never noticed before, and bright and beautiful and terribly hard to leave behind. And then, suppose you're reprieved, and you get up the next morning and you're not dead; could you look again at the sun and the trees and the sky and think they're the same old sun and sky and trees, nothing special at all, just the same old things you've seen every day? Not changed at all, just because you don't have to give them up?”

“Well?” said Aunt Morgen when she stopped.

“That's what I was thinking today in the museum.”

“Were you now?” said Aunt Morgen, rising heavily. “Well, if you don't mind,” she said, taking up the coffee cups, “I'll save it. Think about it some other time, when I'm not so worried about my own affairs. My own
tawdry
affairs,” she said, and slammed the new cups into the sink with a crash.

 • • •

“She has still a great deal to learn,” said the doctor soothingly, and quite as though he and Aunt Morgen were walking all alone; “she has a long path to retrace. We must not make too many demands upon her.”

“Goddamn unfeeling heartless icicle,” said Aunt Morgen roundly. “I mean
you,
” she said over her shoulder to her niece.

“I have the constant impression,” the doctor went on, “that she is . . . how shall I say it? . . . as a vessel emptied, if she can forgive me such a graceless comparison. Although she seems to be, my dear Morgen, in undisputed possession of the citadel, too many of its defenses are down, too much has been lost in victory.” He stopped, and for a minute they walked on, unperceiving, and then realized, and turned to him as he gestured at them eloquently with his rolled umbrella. “Such a pleasant evening for a walk,” he said, “you must not stomp along, Morgen. Let us put it this way, then. Much of what was
emotion
has been lost; the facts are there, the memory clear, but the feeling for these things is suspended. Take, for instance, some person toward whom she has displayed, in these troubled times, mixed reactions.” He thought, started to speak, stopped, and thought again. “Doctor Ryan,” he said at last, with satisfaction. “At different times, she has felt differently toward Doctor Ryan; under one influence she very likely hated him violently, and under another influence she may even have valued him enormously. Now, suppose her to remember perfectly the circumstances under which she at one time admired, and at another time detested, Doctor Ryan; the circumstances recalled, which emotion, presuming them equally strong, which emotion might be expected to remain with her?”

“Who
cares
about Ryan?” Morgen demanded. “For twenty-odd years I've been—”

“If you please,” said the doctor, holding up his umbrella, but falling into step again with Aunt Morgen, “allow me to continue. You will recall that there was—I believe I may say this with entire safety from contradiction, even from
you,
Morgen—no area so far explored in which there was not dissension. Almost, if I may be permitted the term, open warfare. Absolute diametric opposition,” said the doctor, walking rhythmically, “on every point. Thus,” he continued, holding up his umbrella again at Aunt Morgen, who had raised her arm to gesture, “emotion has been, so to speak, cancelled out. No resolution has taken place, no compromise has been reached, no workable truce declared in that warfare. And
our
responsibility, Morgen,” he went on, raising his voice slightly, “
our
responsibility is, clearly, to people this vacant landscape—fill this empty vessel, I think I said before—and, with our own deep emotional reserves, enable the child to rebuild. We have a sobering duty. She will owe to us her opinions, her discriminations, her reflections; we are able, as few others have ever been, to re-create, entire, a human being, in the most proper and reasonable mold, to select what is finest and most elevating from our own experience and bestow!”

Morgen said disagreeably, “You can be her mommy, and I'll be her daddy, and what I am going to bestow on her is a good swift—”

“We always quarrel,” the doctor said ruefully. “We strongly resemble an old married pair, I think. The wicked enchanter marries the dragon, after all, and they live happily ever after.”

Aunt Morgen laughed. “You and your empty vessels,” she said, suddenly good-humored again. “Hollering down a rain barrel,
I
call it. Well, come on,” she said to her niece, catching her niece's hand and holding it, “we'll start all over again like friends. You like the hair?” she asked the doctor across her niece.

“Unwomanly,” said the doctor, “but not unbecoming, I think.”

“I suppose I'll get used to it,” said Morgen. She turned, taking precedence going up the narrow walk to the front door, and said, stopping and turning, “Now, remember, for heaven's sake,
don't
ask Vergil to sing.”

“Morgen!” said Mrs. Arrow with delight, as she opened the front door for them, “and it's Doctor Wright, too, isn't it? So dark, with no moon, but of course I
did
know you were coming, didn't I? So how could it be anyone else? And how are
you,
my dear?”

“A lovely night, lovely,” said Mr. Arrow, with his back to the door, and standing with both arms out ready to receive the coats his wife took away from their guests and handed to him; he held his arms wide and even their three light coats seemed heavy for him, with Doctor Wright's hat and umbrella neatly on top; he seemed wondering, suddenly, where to put all of this, and he turned vaguely around and around until Mrs. Arrow led him to the closet, and took everything away from him, lifting carefully from the bottom, and then Mr. Arrow stood the doctor's umbrella in the umbrella stand and hung the doctor's hat on a peg and then carefully put the coats one by one onto hangers.

While Mr. and Mrs. Arrow were giving the coats back and forth, and making small anxious gestures at one another, in extreme concern lest the tail of Doctor Wright's coat should touch the floor or Aunt Morgen's scarf mingle commonly among the Arrow mufflers, Aunt Morgen, as senior guest, who had known Ruth and Vergil Arrow since they were all children together and had been free with their house for long years, led the way into the Arrows' living room, followed by her niece and the doctor. “Well,” said Aunt Morgen, touched with a faint embarrassment because these people were her friends and Doctor Wright had not been here before, “here we are.” She sat down without looking, as one who knows absolutely that in a room belonging to the Arrows the furniture does not permit itself to be moved from one place to another; “sit here, kiddo, beside me,” she said, and bit her lip. “In case you should feel called upon to repeat your remarks on Vergil's singing,” she said, and grinned at her niece.

“Perhaps she would be more comfortable over here,” said the doctor; he was poised uncertainly between the sofa, which showed by a deep indentation in one corner that it was dedicated to an Arrow, and a chair whose trim lines bespoke, at first glance, a background not in keeping with the rest of the furniture, until a second, and more critical, observation showed its unmistakable ripeness, the line too long, the curve too full, which had surely brought it favor in Mrs. Arrow's eye; “would you sit by me?” the doctor asked.

“Leave her here,” said Aunt Morgen. “She's all right.”

“Near me, if you please,” said the doctor.

They looked at one another, in a kind of quick wonder, and then Mrs. Arrow came between them, gay, and almost clapping her hands. “I'm so
glad
you came at
last,
” she said. “Morgen, it's been
years!
And the doctor, too, of course.” She turned, admiring everyone. “And I do believe
you've
cut your hair,” she said.

“This afternoon.”

“So nice. And it
looks
nice, too; Vergil?”

“Very pretty indeed. Sit down, doctor, sit down.”

Pressed, the doctor made his decision and reconciled himself to the ill-made chair. He adjusted his well-proportioned limbs with difficulty to the inaccurate composition of the chair, wriggled uncontrollably once and then, never utterly inarticulate, turned politely to Mrs. Arrow. “A charming home,” he said. “So conveniently located.”

Mrs. Arrow, who was about to regret their long walk coming, was caught unprepared, and could only say, “So nice that you came. And Morgen, too.”

“Kiddo,” Morgen said, turning to look over her shoulder, “won't you light somewhere? Makes me nervous, you wandering like that.”

“It's such a lovely night; I'm looking out at the garden.”

Mr. and Mrs. Arrow, who had confidently supposed that all their windows were securely blockaded with the backs of chairs, and small tables holding potted ferns, rose immediately and approached from opposite sides of the room, Mr. Arrow intending to move a chair a little sideways to clear a passage to a window, Mrs. Arrow offering to loop back the curtain; “The roses are not as rich as usual this year,” Mrs. Arrow said apologetically, and Mr. Arrow pointed out that the lilac had not done as expected, “but the hedge,” he said, “the hedge is coming marvelously well. That back privet,” he said, turning, to Morgen, “would amaze you; you wouldn't believe it.”

“Edmund is there,” Mrs. Arrow said softly, “in the back, under the roses.”

“Could I go out for a while? It looks so quiet.”

“That's kind of you.” Mrs. Arrow was touched. “Come along, dear; I'll take you through the back.” She nodded reassuringly at Morgen. “It's perfectly all right,” she said, “we've got that high fence,” and then, turning red, said, “I mean, no one can get
in
or anything,” and went hastily out of the room.

“Put on a sweater, kiddo,” Morgen said.

“Veil that naked head,” said the doctor.

“It's a nice night for the garden,” said Mr. Arrow. “Often spend a few minutes out there myself. Bench, and all.” He sat down again, on the end of the couch near Doctor Wright, and turned to say, with masculine concern, “You given any thought, Doctor, to this new idea about street lighting? Waste of money,
I
call it; when you consider—”

Mrs. Arrow hurried back into the room and over to Morgen. “
Perfectly
happy,” she said. “Quite warm enough, sheltered, quiet, and I thought she was so sweet about Edmund. He was genuinely fond of her, you know.”

“We let her do pretty much as she pleases,” Morgen said solemnly.

“You know, she
looks
better,” Mrs. Arrow said confidentially. “Tell you the truth, Morgen, last time
I
saw her—that must have been nearly a year ago, wasn't it? that day I met you two in the restaurant, and she was laughing so?—well, anyway, I thought
then
she seemed poorly, not at
all
herself. Has she been . . .” Mrs. Arrow paused delicately, and lifted her eyebrows at Doctor Wright inquiringly.

“A nervous fever,” said Aunt Morgen smoothly.

Mrs. Arrow turned and looked openly at Doctor Wright. “I would have thought,” she said, “that Doctor Ryan . . . of course, he's a
younger
man.”