Ex-wifePart 16
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Part 16
He rubbed his finger across my cheek, and I knew that if I winced or screamed it would please him. So I did not wince or scream.
“You are very pretty,” he said. “I like your type. It is near enough the type of superior Russian women, whom I used to watch, from far off, when I was a boy . . . and with whom of late years one can have dealings.”
He sat in gloating reverie, and I wondered, if I did scream, whether the elevator boy would hear me. But Stepan probably paid the elevator boy well.
He spoke again. “A pretty woman, but a fool, to set herself up against the strength of a man who knows what he wants. I will tell you a story, so that you will know you are a fool, and we shall understand each other better.”
I said nothing.
“In Russia, in the village where I was born, there was a pogrom, when I was six years old. My father drove my mother and myself to a hut in the forest, for safety, and went back to look after his affairs. He came, by night, to bring us food, until for three days it snowed, and he could not come.”
He paused, and smiled at me with wet red lips.
I thought, “He is telling me this story to frighten me. He’s inventing it. It’s going to be frightening, but I must remember he’s just inventing it.”
“For three days we had no food, and it was silent in the forest, and I cried with hunger and fear. On the third evening we heard a scratching at the door—”
His eyes had a strange green light in them. He sat, heavy and savage and amused—
“My mother said, ‘who is there?’
“There was no answer—but we heard something sigh.
“‘It will be a messenger from your father, Stepan,’ my mother said. But she got the revolver he had left with her.
“There was another scratching at the door. She opened it—and a black wolf leapt at her. I lay on the floor. My mother fired the revolver into his open jaws, and he dropped, writhed a moment, and was dead. She barricaded the door, while I lay screaming.
“‘Never cry again, never scream, Stepan, my son,’ she said. ‘The wolf is only food from the forest.’ She got a carving knife from the dresser, and cut the dead wolf’s throat and said ‘Drink, my son. His blood will make you strong.’”
He flung back his head, and laughed deep in his throat.
“I remember how warm and good the blood tasted. . . . Does the story amuse you,—little girl who thinks she is ‘hard-boiled?’” He ran his huge hand through my hair.
I thought, “He is insane, and I am going insane . . . his green eyes are like a wolf’s,” and I broke. I said; “Can’t I go home now . . . please let me go home now, and I will come back, if you want me to . . . but let me go now . . .”
He laughed again, “So polite the independent little girl grows . . . but you can’t go home quite yet . . . I will tell you more stories.”
I covered my face from the sight of those shining eyes. He snarled and tore my hands away.
He slept, panting a little, panting like a wolf. Slowly, inch by inch, I moved away from him; got up, and found I could not stand. It was cold. I wrapped the velvet robe around me, sat down on a chair beside a table; remembered he had left brandy on the table, and groped for it. There was no sound in the room but that faint sound of panting. The brandy steadied me, and I dressed, thinking, “If I had a knife . . . to slide across his throat as he sleeps, so soundly—”
Dressed, I crept to the door in the dark, closed it as softly as possible, and rang for a sleepy, insolently grinning elevator boy.
It was only two blocks home. I wanted to walk; the cold air made me sane. On the first street-corner, a policeman was yawning.
“Isn’t it late for a young lady like yourself to be walking about?” he said.
“I’ve been seeing a sick friend, officer . . . and I’m only walking two blocks home.”
“I’ll put you on your doorstep then, if you’d like,” he said, and talked cheerfully, about the cold, and his wife who did not like his new hours of work. And I was grateful for the sound of his comfortable Irish voice.
Next morning, making up my face, I thought: “It was a nightmare. It couldn’t have happened. I must have dreamed it.” But there was a blue bruise on my throat where Stepan had gripped it, and my hands were shaking, still.
Lucia came in, looking very fresh. “Pat, my child, if I take an extra day off to go to Portland and see the family for the week-end, would you go as far as Boston with me? You haven’t seen your aged parent for months, have you?”
“Let’s take the five o’clock tonight,” I said.
X
Between rows of syringa bushes that, notwithstanding weight of recent snow, and starkness of bare twigs, were faintly redolent of blossom scent from all the Springtimes of my childhood, a stone pathway led to the door.
I was less real to myself than the recollection of a plump little child who had run up that pathway; less real than the memory of a girl who had walked ever so sedately to conceal the fast beat of her heart, beside a man named Roger.
Father opened the door himself—yes, of course, it was eleven and the housekeeper and maid would be in bed. I kissed him, holding my breath to conceal the scent of my last cigarette in the cab.
“You are looking well, my dear.”
“So are you, father. How do you feel?” He was looking appallingly fragile and tired. We talked for a little, courteously, about Lytton-Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians,” and of how modern biographies were written with the dramatic pace of first rate novels. Then he told me that Nellie, the housekeeper, had said she would sit up to see me, and I climbed the curved stairway. It had a balustrade that had been fun to slide down, before I was fifteen and grew dignified when I heard someone say I was going to be pretty.
I left father sitting, reading William de Morgan’s “Alice-for-Short,” which intrigued him because it was a novel written by a man nearly seventy—and he had always planned to write a novel when the profession of medicine left him leisure. Father was past seventy, now.
I remembered while washing and freshening myself before I went to see the housekeeper, hearing that I had been because of my sex the greatest disappointment of my father’s life. And I considered, dispassionately the fact that he was not as aware of me, as a person; as he was aware of either of the women who had been his wives, women whose portraits hung in the long livingroom. I could not be as real to him as either of those women.
He grew up, finished medical college in a year when the man giving the Commencement address to the young doctors (address on “The Necessity of Keeping a Sense of Proportion”), illustrated it with the awful example of certain physicians who were going mad, contemporaneously, about things called “germs.”
Two or three years after, father and other impecunious young doctors in Boston pooled their small funds to import from Philadelphia one of these “madmen” who believed in germs, and had him lecture to them.
A man lives through so much and no more. Father had lived through years when Darwin and Huxley were gods of his young generation; through a grand passion for a wife who died young; through a felicitous second marriage with my mother, who was to him, probably, like a delightful young daughter. He lived to be a successful physician. He lived to grow old and tired—too tired to keep up his practice, except among charity patients who would have had most difficulty in finding a successor to him. It was unreasonable to expect him to have interest or understanding left for a daughter who had grown up in a generation which discarded the ideal of “service to humanity” for the working philosophy of, “let us enjoy ourselves by the way for the end may prove disappointing.”
He was polite to me; was sorry for the catastrophe of my marriage, sorry with the detachment of a man whose seventy crowded years have left him with no sense of importance in anything, save the problem, growing immediate, of—“and after death?” That was a problem that absorbed him the more intensely now, because his life had been too occupied to consider it.
In my childhood, a younger, more vigorous man that he had been, used to say to mother, that exquisitely dressed gay young figure that vanished before I was twelve, “Take the child to church—religion’s a great solace to women, and they need it in this world.”
That was a sentence vaguely remembered, with the sound of mother’s deprecating laughter, the odour of Eau de Violette, and light that came through stained glass windows so beautifully it made up for the heaviness of the preacher’s voice.
Nowadays, father urged me courteously to come home to live; and I knew that my presence in a household, slow-moving as his old footsteps, would be disturbing. I knew that he knew that, but felt it his duty to urge me. And I could not live at home any more; for I was not, even yet, sufficiently tired, or sufficiently old to live solely by remembrance.
I knocked on the housekeeper’s door.
Her name was Nellie. She came to us as cook thirty-eight years ago, the year father and mother were married. She came out of the Canadian backwoods, via three years in a German family, and four years in a French one, wherein she accumulated the technique of making complicated sauces and an impatience with alien (meaning non-Canadian-Irish) viewpoints.
They said she was a handsome rosy-cheeked slim girl, but she had weighed a hundred and eighty since I could remember. Four or five years after her advent, a housemaid, also named Nellie was brought in to help her. The two became known as Big Nellie and Little Nellie. They never got on. Mother said that they would get used to each other, but they did not—not in thirty-four years.
Little Nellie decided to retire (as father had written me some months before) and go to live with a cousin in Braintree. Four days after her retirement, she began dropping in for tea with Big Nellie, though there had never been an hour’s civility wasted between them. She confided that Braintree, a country town near Boston, was dull, and that the pastor of the church was not like “our own Father at home.” After a week, Big Nellie spoke to my father.
“Doctor,” she said, “I think you should ask the poor thing to come back. She looks very bad, and I’m sure she’s not getting enough food.” He did ask her back. She came forthwith; and, within six hours of her return, was quarrelling with Big Nellie as to whether or not she wiped dishes thoroughly.
Big Nellie’s public vocabulary, the one she used to father and guests, was most proper. Her private speech, used occasionally with me, since I postdated her arrival in the family by so many years, was more picturesque.
I knocked on her door. After an instant of being touchingly pleased to see me, she summed up the departure and return of Little Nellie.
“You know,” she said, “that devil I’m cursed with went away, but she came back.”
She was in bed, a huge brass bed she begged from mother thirty years or so ago, when brass beds went out of fashion. She had commanded supper, just “something light and tasty,” brought up to her by Little Nellie. In her large lap was a tray containing half a duckling, a pint or so of her own applesauce (made with cinnamon and lemon peel) a generous amount of oyster stuffing (tour de force of hers, stuffing duckling with oysters, and making the result delectable). On the tray, besides, were a quarter loaf of nut bread, two bottles of her home-brewed beer, and a large slice of apple pie.
She began by saying that her rheumatism was bad, and “the doctor” thought she should diet; but after all she had to keep her strength up to look after him. Then she told me I was thin, and should come home and have some proper cooking for a while. Afterwards, shyly, she asked about Peter, and “whether he’d got over his foolishness, and showed any signs of coming home to his own pretty wife, like a Christian.”
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