Tapestry Page 10

  He put the letter in his pocket and kept on walking. Clearly, he saw her seated at the little art deco desk in her sitting room, writing in her even backhand on the pale gray notepaper. Something had struck her deeply, very, very painfully, to cause such an emotional—for her—appeal. It might have been a book or a play, or maybe just the quiet of the house without him in it.

  The pity of it! He knew that he himself was in an extraordinarily emotional state; surely he had had enough reason these last few days. Yet the pity was not to be denied.

  And he walked on. Down a broad avenue, he came upon a statue of the late unlamented Kaiser, corpulent and arrogant, on a proud horse. The horse was a nobler creature than his master, who, centered on self, had sent millions to their deaths and paved the way for the sickness that was eating away at his country.

  Paul sat down on a stone bench to read his wife’s letter once more. Her arms reached out, asking for peace. Had he too, like the man on the horse, been centered only on self? Wanting and wanting …

  So he sat, while it grew darker and a foggy chill crept under his coat. He thought of Joachim and Elisabeth, with their baby, in their home. He thought of Ilse’s warm body and warm voice telling him: You must find someone, you must find love.

  Find love! How easy it was to say! She didn’t know. Her situation was not at all like his own.

  And he thought again of Marian. The letter, the summons and appeal, weighed like a solid thing in his pocket. Let’s not spoil our lives. Poor, willing soul …

  What was he thinking of? Like any responsible adult, he must go back and take up where he had left off. Anyway, where else had he to go but home?

  The Monday night theater audience, in formal dress, paraded up and down the aisles and greeted and clustered in the lobby during the intermission of All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Conversations were animated and opinions strong; Eugene O’Neill could be counted on to provide material for strong opinions.

  It was Ben and Leah’s anniversary and Marian had suggested taking them to the theater. “What else can we give them?” she had asked, remarking that they seemed to have or to be acquiring everything.

  Paul had not been sure whether Marian’s remark had meant disapproval or had been merely a statement of fact. Leah’s little coterie of friends and customers, two groups that frequently overlapped, had gathered around her in the lobby. She attracted attention; her dress was very plain black silk, cut to display white shoulders and her marvelous breasts; its simplicity emphasized the magnificence of her diamond-and-ruby earrings, Ben’s most recent and most sumptuous gift. They blazed as she tossed her head. She wore no other jewels. Clever of her, Paul thought.

  People came up to speak to Marian for other reasons, because they knew her or had probably always known her. They were all active in the same charities; Marian’s name was on the important committees, and she was respected for it. She liked to say, had indeed with some disdain said that very night as they were getting dressed, that people who were sure of themselves didn’t need to be fashion plates, didn’t need to keep displaying new clothes.

  Old family, old clothes, Paul reflected with a sudden flash of amusement. Just like Alfie’s Emily. Not that Marian didn’t look well enough in a dress two seasons old.

  He caught her eye, and she pulled him aside. “Look! Look over there! Isn’t that—do I imagine it, or isn’t that the maid you had when—no, I guess it was just before we were married—”

  “What?” he said dumbly.

  “Over there! The tall, red-haired woman going down the aisle. I swear it looks like her. The maid your parents had.”

  “I don’t remember,” he said,

  “Well, I do. She was very striking.”

  A red-haired woman was moving down to the front of the theater. Paul craned his neck to see, but she was obscured and he wasn’t able to see her face. Why would she be here in this place? Why wouldn’t she be here? This was the sort of play she would like.

  The curtain rose; figures moved on the stage and voices spoke words, but he neither saw nor heard them. He was totally unsettled. And he had really been settling himself quite well all this last month, ever since he had returned from Europe with another new and strong resolve to straighten his thinking, start fresh, wipe the slate, let the past die.

  With a feeling almost near to resentment he had erased Ilse’s admonition about the need to love. Well, Ilse was an ocean away, and almost surely he would never see her again; the brief idyll—for it had indeed been an idyll—would fade, if it had not already faded. He felt no guilt about it, for no one had been harmed. He had come home to his wife, to welcome and to work.

  Consciously, he had straightened his shoulders, as if to put himself in command of himself, as if he were back in the army, responsible and committed. No more starry dreams! No more looking backward toward what might have been … toward Anna. Finished. Hopeless. Accept it. And so he had done, and the month had gone very well; Marian was happy to have him home, friends had been calling, things were going smoothly at the office; his resolve was holding fast.

  And now here he was, rigid in his seat, straining toward the footlights in the hope that a stray beam might reveal the red-haired woman! What would he do, what would he say, if she should turn out to be Anna? His hammering heart was apparently unaware of all his resolve. It kept on hammering until the play was over, and the red-haired woman disappeared in the crowd.

  “How did you like it?” Marian asked when the play was over.

  “Good. Yes, very fine.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t. Too sociological. All this underdog business. One gets tired of hearing it.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, since an answer was expected.

  “Well, that’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Let’s take them for a drink,” she whispered. “After all, it’s their anniversary.”

  He would gladly have gone home, but evidently Ben and Leah welcomed further celebration, so they went instead to the St. Regis, where a handsome young crowd was dancing to society music. Paul played the host. Leah’s new ruby earrings glittered at his shoulder as they danced.

  “By the way,” she asked, “has Alfie asked you yet to talk to Meg?”

  “No, what about?”

  “He’s going to. About Donal. He and Emily are fairly out of their wits.”

  “What do they want of me, for Pete’s sake?”

  “Obviously, they don’t like the man, and since Meg worships you—”

  “Oh,” Paul said, embarrassed.

  “Well, she does and you know it. They think she’ll listen to you. They’re going to ask you to just drop in casually on Meg in Boston. You do go there fairly often, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but I don’t like subterfuges. And I don’t know anything factual about the man except what he did for Dan.”

  When the music stopped, they rejoined Marian and Ben at the table.

  Marian was curious. “You look like conspirators. What’s the secret?”

  “Nothing really. Or rather, yes, we’ve been talking about Meg and Donal Powers,” Leah answered.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t—” Ben began, and stopped, looking uncomfortable.

  “For goodness’ sake, we’re family!” Leah said. “We can talk. Besides, I’ll bet anything Paul suspects.”

  “Suspects what?” asked Marian. “Something about Mr. Powers?”

  “All right, he’s a bootlegger,” Ben admitted. “That’s what all the excitement’s about.”

  “Oh, my!” said Marian. “He seemed such a gentleman!”

  “He is a gentleman,” Ben said. “He’s honorable. He pays his bills and he keeps his word, which is more than can be said for a lot of people in high places. Right, Paul?”

  “Well, yes, in a way,” Paul said. Of course, it was far more complicated than that. And he thought of Meg’s pathetic letter.

  “You did suspect something, Paul, didn’t you?” Leah asked.

  “Well, I was somewhat puz
zled about him. Where his influence came from. I daresay it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out if I’d put my mind to it, which I didn’t,” Paul said.

  Suddenly, Ben became agitated. He leaned across the table, whispering, although the music had started again and no one could possibly have overheard. “Remember, I never told you anything. Have I got your word, all of you?”

  Leah admonished him. “Of course you have. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not responsible,” Ben argued. “I keep the man’s accounts and work on his investments. I’m his accountant and his lawyer, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know, though,” Leah worried. “You are aiding him to break the law, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a stupid law and won’t last. Everybody knows that. And I’m not aiding him, I just told you. No need to worry.” Ben patted her hand. “Just keep quiet, that’s all. I shouldn’t have told you. That was wrong of me in the first place.” He seemed to have reassured himself, as he sat back and lit a cigarette. “Donal’s no criminal, for heaven’s sake! Meg won’t come to any harm with him. She’s probably having more fun than she ever had in her whole life.” And, as no one made any comment to that, he added, “Besides, this whole business is stupid. The man hasn’t asked her to marry him and I don’t think he even wants to get married. Let’s dance again, Marian.”

  Leah drew her chair closer to Paul’s. “Let’s talk. I’m awfully fond of little Meg. Why do I call her ‘little’ when she’s as tall as I am?”

  “Why did we all used to think of you as ‘little Leah’?” And he gave an oblique glance toward her marvelous breasts, which stretched the thin black silk and gave off a warm perfume, vaguely Oriental.

  “I really am afraid she’s in love with the man.”

  “She is,” Paul said. “She wrote to me.”

  “Oh, damn! Love! This is her first experience, and she’s probably scared stiff that she’ll never have another. Oh,” she said, indignantly, almost contemptuously, “to bring a child up like that! In a vacuum. Keeping her out there in those woods like a pioneer woman, shy as a rabbit or—what do you call those little animals, the fat things she loves that come to eat grass?”

  Paul had to laugh. “Woodchucks.”

  “Yes, and the one with the long nose that hangs upside down?”

  “An opossum,” he said, still laughing.

  “Well, it was all wrong of them. They’re odd people, Alfie and Emily. They don’t belong anywhere, don’t let themselves belong. In the country, a few of the more liberal gentiles tolerate Alfie because of Emily, while in the city, Alfie does business with Jews, but he keeps away from the Jewish community. The two of them are really in the middle of nothing, and that’s what they’ve done to Meg.”

  It was a clever observation. Leah, seeing things clearly and unembellished, seldom shrank from telling exactly what she saw.

  “We don’t really know Meg, do we?” Paul reflected. “Draw the curtain away and maybe there’s a gypsy inside, for all we know. Although I doubt it,” he added.

  What fools men and women were for pairing off as foolishly as they did, when any onlooker could tell that the pairing wouldn’t work! How blindly they stumbled! But, if he were asked, he supposed he would have to talk to Meg. Would he, after all, want any daughter or sister of his to marry a man who stood outside the law, even though the law was an absurdity?

  On the other hand, people always wanted to pull lovers apart when they found them “unsuitable.” And he thought again of poor Meg’s despairing letter. Donal, her parents said, was unsuitable for her. But Anna, Paul thought, had also been “unsuitable” for him! Who, then, was to know, to judge, to look into the future, or into the human heart?

  Four

  “It’s so romantic,” Meg’s roommate said, “I mean, the way your parents hate him and all that.”

  The girls on the floor had come into the room that Sunday afternoon where Meg was dressing for the arrival of Donal Powers, who had come up from New York.

  “Why don’t they like him?” someone asked.

  Her roommate answered before Meg could. “Because he’s Catholic.”

  “Well, mine wouldn’t like that either,” said the first girl, who had made one of Boston’s most publicized debuts at the Copley Plaza; she lived on Beacon Hill in a house that belonged to her great-grandparents; it had wavy, lavender-tinted windowpanes and was filled with so many old possessions—portraits and Sheraton chairs and Paul Revere bowls—it seemed as though no one had had to buy anything at all for the past few generations. It was the kind of house Meg’s mother would love to live in and might well have lived in if she had married someone other than Meg’s father.

  “He’s awfully good-looking,” her roommate said loyally, not because she was usually that loyal and generous, but because she had just become engaged and was feeling benevolent toward the world.

  Donal had driven up once before in the dead of winter, had stayed overnight in Boston and met Meg there; they had gone to Locke-Ober for dinner and he had driven her back to the college. Naturally, he had attracted attention, and the attention had spilled over onto Meg, who now had a man of her own and could therefore command a respect that she had never received before. For three years at Wellesley, she had been a person in the background, a position to which she had long been accustomed. A good scholar, but not one of the small brilliant vanguard who were going on to become doctors or lawyers; a good swimmer and tennis player, but not remarkably good; she had never been much of anything until Donal came.

  A woman without a man was a shadow. It was his life that reflected on her, and if he was an older man, no college boy, and obviously affluent and worldly in his manner, why then the reflected light was very bright indeed.

  When the girls left, Meg still had an hour to wait. She dressed carefully, lingering before the mirror. She had finally had her first permanent wave; it had been an ordeal, sitting there, attached to the machine with the wires dangling from the ceiling, and she had really been scared, but the result had been worth the ordeal, as Leah had assured her it would be. Her fine hair, instead of being severely drawn back, now dipped and curved about her forehead, and a little stray curl kept coming loose at the temples. The careless effect was becoming and she let it stay.

  She selected a red dress: it would bring good luck, being almost the shade of the one she had been wearing on the day they met. She would never give that one away, no matter how old it got. She remembered, too, the day she had bought it and the feel of the broadcloth, silky as slipper satin. Leah had reached up to adjust the collar.

  “Stand straight, don’t crouch,” she had admonished Meg. “You’re tall, so be tall!”

  Emily had doubted. “That red is terribly conspicuous, don’t you think?”

  And Leah had retorted, “What’s wrong with being conspicuous?”

  For once her father had stood his ground against Emily, who had come home complaining about Leah.

  “Her taste is simply not of the best. It’s too nouveau. After all, where would she have acquired a refined taste, coming from where she did?”

  And Meg had recognized the unconscious anti-Semitism that her mother, being truly unconscious of it, would have refuted with outrage.

  But Alfie admired Leah because, like him, she was self-made. She hadn’t fussed about with college. You had to hand it to her. Independent: lets nothing stand in her way. And so on.

  Yet he denied such independence to his daughter. And he would certainly not have approved as much of Leah if he could have known some of the things Leah talked about with his daughter.

  They had gone to tea one afternoon after the shop had closed. It had been during Meg’s first year away at college, and, so Meg guessed, Leah had probably been thinking, rightly thinking, that there were many things Meg needed to know about. So they had talked, or rather, Leah had talked and Meg had listened. She could recall even now the feel of the afternoon, warm and cheerful and intimate at the small table.

&
nbsp; “When you’re married,” Leah had begun, and Meg had interrupted, “But what if I never am?”

  That was the secret fear of most girls, except for the beauties or the real “personalities.” Never to be chosen, never to be loved! Meg had dreams of standing alone in a vast room, where everyone was talking, paired off and passing her by …

  “What if I never am?”

  Leah had been confident. “Oh, you will be! You must never think that way. And when you are,” she had told Meg, “you must remember always that a man wants a passionate woman. Even if you are dying to fall asleep, you must never say no. Even if you don’t like it, you must pretend you do. That’s the way it is for women. But then, who knows? You may love it and there won’t be any need to pretend.” And she had laughed, so that Meg had known she was one who loved it.

  A certain fear had stirred in her, a sinking in her chest. Leah had looked at her keenly. “I frightened you. I didn’t mean to.” And she had taken hold of Meg’s hand. “You’ll be all right, you know, you’ll be fine.”

  Meg’s fingers stopped now as she fastened the buttons at the back of her neck. How would it be? She had no idea. It was so strange. You read things, not very much, because books couldn’t actually say; they could merely hint, and you had to fill in the rest with imagination. Would it not be awkward? No, of course not; the bodies had been designed to fit together. She felt warm all the way through from thinking about it; a little tremble went through her like a shiver, but warm.

  Donal had never kissed her, only held her hand when they were at the theater, and sometimes in the car while he held the wheel with the other hand. And the way the two palms had clasped, flat against each other, had made her think that was the way their bodies would be, and thinking that, she had felt that same warm shiver, and wondered whether he was feeling it too.

  He was very formal, very respectful. Perhaps he only liked her mind. Perhaps he had another girl for the other thing? That happened sometimes, so she had heard. But would he come all this way just to talk to her and hold her hand?