The Unpossessed (29 page)

“I can't help it if I live at home,” said Lydia humbly.

“What are you doing here,” Al said sternly (Graham Hatcher blanched); “why aren't you storming our nation's Capitol where men are men and women hungry?” (Graham Hatcher revived.) “Aha Mr. Middleton,” he vented an operatic gesture and smiled effusively at Miss Bee Powell, “I am not—” “What, you're not?” said Al; “then I suppose you are a Duke.” “N-no,” said Mr. Hatcher renewing his smile. “Well then, a commissar,” said Al impatiently; “everybody here is something if it's only a God damn fool, we've all got titles of some kind, haven't we, Miss Powell darling?” The Negro had French manners or else some pullman porter blood, Al reflected (suddenly anxious about that fool son of his, why the devil wasn't he here?); he accepted his drink in exchange for his money, bowed, saw that his presence was no longer required, thanked them for something and vanished backwards leaving his smile like the cheshire cat's in the air behind him. “Makes mah southern blood boil,” said Al. (His eyes roved the ballroom looking for Emmett.) “Well, he don't mine,” said Miss Powell wittily; and gave him a Junior League flash from the incredible violet eyes. “One more look like that,” Al said firmly, “and I'll forget that I'm just an impotent old man and ask you to meet me behind the potted palms.” “What, sell my beautiful white body,” said Miss Powell rolling her eyes. “Remembah our stahving boys,” said Al wearily; (it was two weeks surely since he'd seen his boy); “I wonder where in hell my son is. . . .”

“There ought to be a special machine,” said Bruno returning from the telephone and pulling his suspenders over his collarless dress-shirt, “for filtering Comrade Blake's enthusiasms. . . . That was your classmate and peer, Emmett—young Firman, who apparently sleeps with both eyes open and has gone into the detective business. . . .” He stood before them lost in thought for a moment, looking at his watch and not perceiving it; started as though it suddenly came to life and exclaimed: “My God! it's half-past ten! Climb onto the Remington again, Emmett, and help me remove the Fisherisms from my speech”; he swayed and rolled his eyes like a Harlem blues-singer; “for Fisher isn't kosher an-y mo-o-ore.” Emmett, who loved being Bruno's amanuensis, and more than ever now because it was something Elizabeth couldn't do for him, asked no questions; he snapped up the lid of the typewriter and sat with his fingers at the keys, a righteous example to Elizabeth, his eyes upturned to Bruno.

But Elizabeth—sitting in her party slip with Bruno's smoking-jacket pulled about her shoulders—burst into gleeful laughter. “I thought Fisher and Jeffrey
owned
the revolution!” (What the devil right had she—wearing Bruno's clothes—to sit in as though she were a man on their last-minute conference!)

“That was last week,” Bruno told her. “The latest bulletin—according to young Firman who has crashed communist newspaper headquarters, the only true organ of the holy church. . . . God knows what honest mischief that kid's up to! Well, anyway, he ran into somebody who knew somebody who slept with somebody else who states that Fisher is nothing more than an ex-camp-follower, a hanger-on. It seems that the ‘fellow-travellers' are a little band of disgruntled off-shoots who didn't get elected commissar . . . oh, I don't know; the whole thing begins to look like playing mud-pies. . . .” That look that passed between them (filling Emmett with the pain of being left out)! They laughed the same laugh, Bruno and Elizabeth, raised the same eyebrow; broke off short on the identical note.

From the first he had seen how those two fitted together or almost fitted together, like the jagged halves of a coin torn apart and facing one another. Elizabeth could finish Bruno's sentences; Bruno could cap Elizabeth's; sometimes it was not even necessary to finish a sentence in words. They laughed uproariously at jokes he couldn't see; they grew suddenly silent as though they knew, as though they shared, some secret thing between them; and they resembled each other like a large and a small branch growing from the same tree.

It seemed to rouse them now, that identical laugh, to some high pitch of mutual glee and understanding. For Elizabeth jumped up with Bruno's smoking-jacket flying (Emmett tried not to see her shoulders shining bare under the straps of her party slip), seized Bruno as her partner, and the two of them went whirling round the table, singing in the same falsetto: “For Fish-er is-n't kosher any mo-o-ore.” Round and round laughing they flew as though they had forgotten Emmett, forgotten everything but themselves, as though they would never stop. . . .

“If she doesn't go and dress,” cried Emmett pettishly, “we'll all be hitting the b-b-bathroom at the same time again.” They stopped short like two children rebuked by their elder, their arms dropped, their song died instantly.

“Tell the bottle-baby,” said Elizabeth, drawing the jacket soberly about her shoulders, “to mind his business—don't I live here too?”

“Don't mind me, children,” said Bruno wearily (a little gray, thought Emmett, as though the dance had worn him out); “I don't count, I'm not a man, I'm just an interpreter . . .” but he sat down, to Emmett's relief, and picked up the red pencil again. “The boy is right, Betsey; when in a madhouse do as the mad-men do: take yourself very seriously. All right, Emmett: take out that line, fifth from the bottom, about fellow-travellers. . . .”

But she had spoiled, again, his peace. She was always doing that, stepping in to make her presence felt, disturbing the harmony which (he had known since that one remarkable night with Bruno, before her boat arrived) could exist between himself and Bruno. “Won't be bad, will it, kid,” (so Bruno had apologized for her appearance) “to have a woman in our house?” But it was bad; it was terrible; it was agony.

She was the first woman beside his mother with whom he had lived intimately in the same few rooms, whose half-clad person he had seen, lounging, fussing over things, as women did in the privacy of their home. Even more than he hated her standing as a barrier between himself and Bruno, he hated her persistent feminine presence. There was no escaping her, or some suggestion of her; the bathroom bore her scent; in the living-room her drawing materials lay scattered possessively day and night, occasionally too some article of her clothing; from where he slept he could now and then hear her sigh or move or laugh; her voice was the first thing he heard in the morning. Once Bruno had left the apartment, leaving Emmett alone with Elizabeth; she had stayed quietly in her room—her indifference to him was patent—but even so the whole place was so pervaded by her that after twenty minutes of restlessly trying to forget her presence, he had found it necessary to leave the house (slamming the door behind him) and paid his only visit to his parents. . . .

“as intellectuals,” Bruno was dictating; Emmett fell with more content into the rhythm of the keys and Bruno's voice, “it's time to take our stand; it is our belief that this Magazine, providing . . .”

“
Bruno!
” Her voice was shrill—they jumped, all three of them; even Elizabeth, Emmett observed, as though her own voice were a shock to her.

“What is it, Betsey?” “I c-c-can't work with her in the room,” Emmett burst out, almost against his will. “What
is
it, Betsey,” Bruno said.

“Nothing,” she said, laughing. “Only tell the bottle-baby to pass the whiskey my way.”

“She's been drinking since three o'clock this afternoon,” said Emmett, loathing himself.

“Since ten o'clock in the morning three weeks ago,” Elizabeth corrected without a glance in his direction.

Bruno reached patiently for the bottle at Emmett's elbow. “Sure that's all you wanted, Elizabeth?”

“What more could anybody want?”

“Good ole whiskey,” said Bruno and Elizabeth in the same breath, the same tone, the same inflection. And laughed; withdrawing from each other as the whiskey bottle passed between them as though by sulky mutual consent.

It was this deadly similarity, he thought, that hurt him most. He remembered having thought once, clearly, that if Bruno ever married, he would kill himself. But this was worse; Elizabeth was closer than a wife. With a wife, Emmett vaguely felt, there would be at some point in the day a climax from which Bruno and a wife would then retreat, becoming their separate selves again. This thing had no crisis; there was no union, hence no separation; they bent along together closely parallel, following each other's devious routes—and how then could it ever end?

They were most, he thought, like a brother and sister; yet not being brother and sister brought them closer still. The mystery of their belonging to each other in the same
family
—that was it. He was a child who had grown from the beginning feeling no sense of belonging to his father or his mother; surprised, he had discovered as early as his nursery days, that both seemed strange to him and strange to one another. He had spent his lonely childhood dreaming of a brother or a sister, someone to whom he could, most intimately, belong: belong mutually, on equal terms. No one came; and he had tried, in various chronologic stages, to establish a relationship with Merle. But she treated him alternately with indifference and with the detailed passion of a woman for her lover, and both things froze him out, left him passionately indifferent too, or passionately jealous. . . .

“but the time has come,” Bruno dictated, “when it is no longer possible to hesitate. . . .”

Between Elizabeth and Merle there had been no other women in his life. He didn't really hate Elizabeth, he thought (glancing briefly at her, avoiding contact with her slender shoulders); he played at hating her; it suited his dignity best to fly into a rage when she spilled her scented powder over their common bathroom; because he could find no unembarrassing relation with her it became necessary to assume hostility—and since that day of her arrival they had not spoken two words directly to each other, preferring to use the medium of Bruno. No, he didn't actually hate her. He hated her only because she spoiled the only place that might have been a home to him. Again, as in his childhood, he was a third person, living in a place where two should be. . . .

“are we, as intellectuals,” dictated Bruno, “to remain in the middle, on the fence, or are we . . .”

He pictured his mother suddenly (wondering if she were missing him), coldly playing hostess at the party; asked himself what gown she might be wearing.

But what man was a failure, thought Arturo strongly (the whiskey was good; the crowd was excellent) who had even one symphony to his credit? It might go unpublished; it might be played only at parties where no one listened to it; but it was music, it was eternal, it added to the sum total of beautiful music, to the unheard vibrating stream of perpetual music that surrounded the world, that would one day subdue the world to all its concerted rhythm. The memory of his Symphony of the Seasons flared up in his heart. He rose, lifted his baton to the Boys. “The Symphony,” he said imperiously—he always referred to the Symphony of the Seasons briefly as The. The Boys rose respectfully and took their places. Arturo's nostrils expanded with love and pride. He gave a little nod to the Boys, tapped with his baton on the music stand, and started in on the Allegro, Spring, the first movement of his latest Rearrangement of The Symphony.

“Beethoven, isn't it?” said a Miss Hobson raising her brows at a Mr. Terrill whom she hoped to marry. “Ah I never can tell right off,” said Mr. Terrill (playing safe) but beginning to wave uneasily with the music.

“Ah what difference does it make, Mr. Flinders,” said Merle stretching her arms in voluptuous generosity, “socialism, communism, true democracy—it's surely the fraternal
spirit
that counts, these petty distinctions, what
difference
can they make?”

“No difference at all,” said Margaret Flinders, laying a restraining hand on Miles' arm, “especially at a party.” As papier-mâché as Miles had said perhaps, thought Margaret with amusement, but much more beautiful and much more touching; a glacier that tried to melt, a toy doll that wanted a heart that would beat instead of just eyes that closed—but she was seeing people so differently these days, Margaret was! either as they really were (she secretly believed) or, as Miles insisted, through rose-colored spectacles. The little Doctor bent to kiss her hand; and Margaret, standing proudly in her last year's best, surveyed the gathering with pleasure. Their own friends of course would not have come; but Miles, bursting with plans and latent indignation, had insisted on regarding this party as a meeting (so he explained his presence to his conscience) and arriving scarcely half an hour late. She enjoyed his stiff reluctant gallantry, his utterly unconscious grace as he coldly greeted Mrs. Middleton. His tuxedo he had left righteously at home, bedded forever in moth-balls; but his bearing, his ascetically rigid jaw, left him, she thought, as well-dressed as any there. “So anxious,” Mrs. Middleton was fluttering them toward the ballroom, toward the music lightly starting, “to have you meet Mr. Graham Hatcher, I thought a Negro, I thought the perfect party ought to have
one
Negro,” she strained delicately for their understanding; “if you would seek him out, perhaps?” she smiled like a gracious sorority sister, initiating Margaret in the facts of life.

“I'm sure,” said Margaret, blandly smiling, “that we'll have no difficulty; since he's the only Negro present.” The ice was broken; the little Doctor chuckled; and taking Miles' arm Margaret led him toward the ballroom.

“Dear,” she whispered irresistibly (for she felt very merry, very handsome, very much of a wife leaning upon her husband's arm and making her entrance at a party), “could you manage to look less like a tortured saint, do you think?” “Could you manage to lend me your rose-colored spectacles, do
you
think,” he answered; and consented to be led.