A Fox Inside (24 page)

Could the woman ruin him? He knew she could.
Anybody
could ruin him. He didn’t have foundations. He only had props. He wanted to stop the car and get out and run, and was ashamed of himself because he wanted to, which only made him want to run the more.

He put on the brakes and swung the car off the road, under those everlasting eucalyptus trees. He knew it didn’t matter what he said to Miss Marie to-morrow. What mattered was what he thought about to-night. And she knew it, too. He didn’t want her to win, for a secret personal defeat can never be rectified. It ruins us for good.

“What is it?” asked Maggie.

He switched off the ignition and groped towards her. “Oh, come here,” he said. “Come here.”

N
OR DID MISS MARIE HAVE ANY
easier time of it. She, too, was locked up with her own thoughts, a little too dry to fight green memory.

*

She had been pretty as a girl, but too intelligent to make a marriage; and, at the same time, not quite eminent or rich enough to achieve the proper social marriage possible despite intelligence. Her father was a successful seed and grain merchant who put all his money into real estate and who owned a house half-way up Nob Hill, though the family was not particularly social. Even so, in those days, perhaps because of her
deportment
, she had known most of the more interesting of the better families, but always the older members of them rather than the younger. At the time of the
earthquake
and the Fire she had been staying in the country with friends. She was twenty-five and already over-ripe. She was a safe guest to ask anywhere, for she presented no danger either to the sons or the daughters of a family, and she left her father at home.

The earthquake began during the very early morning. They could see the first fires starting up in the sky over the mountain. She drove in the next day, in a barouche. She managed to get to the Van Ness approach to Nob
Hill, but there she had to abandon the carriage. The crowd was thin. The panic was over on her street. A few people were wandering about searching for things left behind among the façades of the houses fallen to the ground. There was still a lot of dust in the air, and though the fires were not visible by day, you could hear the city burning with a soft rush of omnivorous flame. There was something aimless about the wanderers. They were like the pickers of an unprofitable crop. They moved as such workers do, through fields of silence.

Her house was just below the crest of the rise, near the site of what is now the unfinished cathedral. She reached the top and looked at it. She just looked. The whole front had collapsed into the street. All the decorations had been shaken off the walls of what rooms remained. It was to look into the front parlour of a doll’s house. The pictures were still on the walls. They rose and fell in gusts of tricky wind. A bedstead projected from the
upstairs
rubble. And that was all.

She walked on towards the shell of the Fairmont Hotel, an unoccupied lamasery without windows, and from there she could look down on the city burning. Ruin had not even made it unrecognizable. She knew each street so well.

She walked down the hill. Her own carriage had been wrecked by a sudden cave in, but another one came by and picked her up. They went out from town to Twin Peaks. They had put up tents there. The emergency
organization
was impromptu but efficient. It was even possible to procure water. She met several people she knew. Some of them pitched in and helped and some did not. She was given a bed and was not uncomfortable.
For five days, at night, it was impossible not to see the city burning, and as it burned some ruined buildings and towers became more gauntly prominent than others,
until
you thought you would never be able to forget them.

A few days later they excavated her father from the rubble. He had suffocated to death. Six months later the insurance company, a Swiss concern, bankrupted by claims, announced that it would pay only to the letter “m”.

Friends were very kind. She managed to secure a teaching position in the public schools as did one or two of her friends, all old women now, or dead. You did not need a teaching certificate in those days and some of her father’s friends were on the Board of Education. They stayed on it and she stayed on as a teacher. She enjoyed teaching. It was just that her past had been completely removed, as though by surgery. She had had to start life again with only the clothes she stood in.

Then, as she did every year, she took her vacation in Santa Barbara, about 1935. She had arthritis, which the climate helped, and she found the town agreeable. She was in her fifties. She would be retiring soon. She did not know what she would do once she had retired. Every day she went down to the beach, planted a deck chair and a sun umbrella, and either read or knitted or else simply watched the ocean or the people.

She soon noticed one boy who came every day and who also watched the people. He was thin and weedy, with impossibly white skin and champagne shoulders. She supposed he was in his early ’teens. Physically he was unformed. His movements were jerky and she knew that he was unsure of himself. But he was teaching
himself to swim, and about his efforts in that direction there was a mathematical precision and certainty. His application was ferocious. He was overstraining himself. She wondered why.

She did not really go to Santa Barbara, but to
Carpenteria
, a small beach resort twenty miles south of it. She went there in preference to Santa Barbara because she was no longer smart and it never had been, which she found restful. It was a small, random, and almost empty town, a few cottages and houses scattered over an unfinished real estate development, grass in its streets. An arroyo led down to the sea between yellow cliffs. The beach was humpbacked, but of fine white sand. There were tourist cabins on it and one of these she rented, for she liked the sea smell and the sea sound of the night. It was not a place where younger people came, so he must live there, she thought.

She watched him for several mornings and realized with amusement that he had spotted her and wanted to speak. That made preliminaries unnecessary. She watched him come out of the sea with his too thin and not
attractive
body, and waited until he walked up the beach. He was puffing hard and his face was purple. Each day he crossed the beach closer to her chair.

“You don’t have to be so hard on yourself,” she said, as though they had talked before and been over the whole problem. She liked talking to people. But outside of school she seldom got the chance any more. “You shouldn’t. You might strain yourself.”

“You have to learn properly,” he said. “It’s important.”

“Is swimming so important?”

“It’s something I
can
learn,” he said.

“But why do something you obviously hate?” She smiled up at him. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen.” He had a lumpy, shapeless, cuttlefish kind of jaw and he hadn’t yet learned how to lie very well. He hadn’t yet learned that you have yourself to believe that which you want other people to believe about you. She knew he was older than that and wondered if it was only vanity or something else that made him conceal the truth.

They went on talking about why he wanted to learn things. It wasn’t knowledge he wanted. She suspected it was equality. He was ugly and he was clearly poor, but he had deceptively large brown eyes and a very bad temper. The temper, she thought, for she was already thinking about it, would have to go. She found she
preferred
to watch him in the water. In the water he looked more helpless and more malleable. Three days later she asked him to lunch. She had got tired of eating alone.

The chief glory of Carpenteria in those days was a forty-foot and heavily mature avocado tree. She gave him avocados. They were not the polished, bright green, smooth skinned kind like Fabergé jewels. Those were rare in those days. These had coarse purple skins, they were large, and they had an overipe, often fibrous, pustulent yellow fruit. She served them sliced in half, with paprika and lemon juice.

He did not know how to eat them and he did not like them, but he pretended that he did know how and that he did like them. The third time he came to lunch he had clearly persuaded himself that he did like them and had added them to his list of foods which carry social prestige in the eating. She watched this process with
lively amusement. That left him green olives,
sweetbreads
, Rocky Mountain oysters, seagull eggs,
pompano
, pheasant, grouse, venison and, when he was old enough, caviar. She was sure that he would persuade himself that he liked them all, and she had an impulse to try him out on abalone, wienerschnitzel and German wine soups. She was vastly amused and in some way fascinated. He was so patently learning and so patently afraid to show that he was. The eagerness was pathetic, but the effect on her was curiously appealing. She began to wonder who he was and what would become of him. His knowledge of some things was rather frightening. She looked forward to seeing him every day.

Then she told him she wanted to send him to a good school. She had gathered that his family was not much, though physically he seemed well-bred enough.

“They don’t understand,” he said. He looked up hopefully. “I could run away.” He seemed to take it for granted that she would take care of him.

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t do,” she said. “Perhaps I’d better speak to your parents.”

“No,” he said.

“Why on earth not? You’re very clever. You shouldn’t be lost. You could make anything of yourself.’

“Yes,” he said, “I know.”

“Do you know?” At that stage his assurance still amused her. But she had hurt him and he wandered away thoughtfully. Next morning he appeared at the cottage with a bag. She was taken aback. She sent him packing. And then, as she thought it over, she went up to the post office and asked a few questions. They looked at her oddly, but yes, they knew.

She left the post office, squinted in the sun, frowned, and followed directions. He was an orphan living with his married sister. Beyond the town was a long, narrow, ill-tended farm of bad yellow earth. It was an artichoke crop that had been allowed to go to seed. The tall,
desiccated
plants straggled up out of the baked earth, each topped by brittle purple blossoms. There was a board shack. The sister was not much and the husband was worse, but the house was clean and respectable. There was even a cat under the stove. To her surprise it was an expensive and well-tended Siamese cat. She made her proposal.

The husband was relieved but the sister remained suspicious. She was an oversexed but washed-out
looking
woman. They didn’t seem much to care. They had an enormous unpaid bill at the local grocery store. At any rate it seemed enormous to them. She paid it, so in a way she bought Charles for ninety-seven dollars and eighty-three cents. Then she went home. The next day he appeared with his bag, looking pale. He looked as though he had given up something he had not wanted to give up. He also looked determined.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. He was not exactly angry. He was scared. “I didn’t want you to know about them.”

“Somebody always knows these things,” she said. “What does it matter?” But she saw that to him it
mattered
very much, and that he would never forget that she knew where he came from. Considering what she was doing that was perhaps just as well.

She cut short her vacation, took him back to San Francisco, scrubbed him up, bought him some clothes,
and packed him off to the Jesuits. She thought somehow that the Jesuits were the appropriate choice. They always liked to know exactly what things were worth without actually asking the price and he had that sort of mind himself.

She enjoyed teaching people things. She did not enjoy it very much as a profession, for she found her raw material somewhat dull. Most of her students were not interested in the things she really had to teach. Charles was different. She did not have to teach him. She only had to show him. And so from the back of her mind she pulled out all the disused but not entirely worthless knowledge she possessed and she began to wake up. He came to her house twice a week. She began to look
forward
to that. Nothing was ever said about these sessions, but it gave her pleasure to be useful. They went through wines and table manners and forks. She even got out the Georgian oyster forks and what other silver had been salvaged from the house in 1906, after the looters had got through with it. Sometimes in junk stores she had seen things that she had seen before in other people’s houses.

Life with the boy was like pretending to be elegant again. And talk had to go with it, so she talked about the old families and their scandals, and she could see him memorizing everything. It was nice to watch knowledge like that being packed away securely and so not lost.

Between them they had a lot of fun, she thought, despite that cold eye with which he watched everything all the time. It was a pity he could not relax, but then the autodidact never could. It was his one obvious flaw, she believed. She found out soon enough that there were others.

As soon as he went to college he began to change. He kept people curiously in separate compartments. He had no friends. He should have made some, but he did not. She thought that was also a fault. He said he did not need them. The college—and he had got a scholarship to Stanford, again through her older friends—was the better of the two available, but it was fifty miles away. She missed him when he did not come to see her and he did not encourage her to go down to see him.

“It would look odd,” he said, embarrassed yet angry.

She was hurt. “What if it does?”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

She was beginning to understand very well. People like Charles could never be taught that while most people have to do the correct things, really correct people can do anything they feel like. That saddened her. It was the missing extra half-inch that would always cut him down to size.

He came to see her less and less. The house was empty without him, though he did sometimes stay the
week-end
. He was less tractable than before. She would catch him watching her, speculatively. She told him, because he asked and had been agreeable for once, everything she knew about Senator Ford.

“He’s on his way down,” he said.

She had a vision of people in his mind, arranged on a graph of influence, riding always against their will, in banked elevators of prestige. She didn’t like it. She could not see her own name on the graph and did not want to. But when he asked her about Lily Barnes he was more cautious about it, so she knew that Lily was important to him. She began to watch him.