A Young Man's Heart (6 page)

“He wanted me to—to go back to our old room,” she said.

This, in its turn, puzzled Blair. What was all this, this sudden shifting and contesting of
rooms,
inanimate things that had never mattered before as far as he knew, this haggling over sleeping-places, this altogether unaccountable behavior, descending as suddenly into their midst as the flash of lightning that appeared to have precipitated if all? One slept where one had always slept, for months, for years. And then suddenly Giraldy, dispossessing him in the middle of night to make room for Estelle. And Estelle, in turn, intruded upon by Giraldy, to be coerced into a return. It was like a child’s game, that even he and Mariquita would have scorned at their present stage of growth. And yet he was not so utterly naive as to take all this at its face value and not sense an implication of indecency lurking somewhere about it. Giraldy’s face
in the doorway just now had been too youthful, the eyes too bright and liquid. For a little while the air had throbbed with magnetism, with a secretive excitement, instinctively recognized as unbenign, that had touched Blair without enabling him to grasp the meaning of it. There was a game for Greater Children going on about him, and he could not discover what it was.

“He doesn’t understand,” Estelle was saying. “I couldn’t go back—now. Why does he think I left him two nights ago, Blair?” she said confidentially, yet speaking as though he were not there at all, eyes staring at the wall above his head. “I was sitting there by the window, and the rain came on”—she described what she had seen to him— “above that pink wall facing us, the one you and the girl know so well, the lightning seemed to run along the top of it. Oh, it was so bright I thought it would put my eyes out. And some of it came down the side and ran into the ground. It made a cross. It stood there for a moment. I saw it.”

He believed she had seen it; uncompromisingly, enthusiastically believed she had seen it. And, uninitiated into the art of splitting hairs, because he believed she had seen it, he believed it had been there to see.

“When you see a cross like that, what does it mean?” he asked.

She smiled in a dreamy, far-off way, ineffably indulgent toward him, toward herself, and toward all others. “It means you have found out more about yourself in one minute than in all the years of your life before.”

He pondered this and, unable to assimilate it, relegated it to the cryptic. He realized, too, that the old woman could have given him a much more meaty explanation. She was well versed in all the branches of symbolic lore: dreams, shooting stars, coffee grounds, tea leaves, etc. “There is going to be a death,” she would have said. “There is going to be a birth.” “There is going to be an illness.” Or something of that sort. Something definite and practical, at least. Blair was disappointed in Estelle for neglecting so rare an opportunity in divination.

“He can’t be expected to understand,” she said. “I’ve already broken up his home once. Now, it seems, I am doing it again.”

Blair visualized overturned chairs and shattered crockery, dismembered bedding and curtains torn from their racks.

“When did you?” he said interestedly, “when did you break it?”

“When your mother left,” she said.

“When you got married and came here with us?”

“Sasha is still your father’s wife, Blair,” she said slowly, “we weren’t married.”

Extravagant disappointment was all he could feel at first. A terrific sense of anti-climax took hold of him. The Children’s Game stood revealed—and took a paltry aspect. It was no more than like entering a forbidden room, than like stealing jam from a pantry behind someone’s back. Was this what they had occupied themselves with? Only this— where he would have liked to unearth mysteries, plots, gallant stakes, heroic roles? Grownups seemed unworthy of their estate.

“Then you’re only our
friend?”
he added disappointedly.

“I’ve been no one’s friend, least of all my own,” she said. “Enough harm has been done—a little good won’t be amiss.”

When next he opened his eyes, she was still sitting there in the kitchen, drinking a cup of chocolate the old woman had just prepared for her. The pink wrapper radiated a cheerful glow in the light of the early sun, but her face was like old ivory. The old woman came and stood before him with a second cup. “Here’s yours,” she said.

While he was drinking it Mariquita came in from the street with the baby to see if he were awake yet.

“Finally!” she exclaimed. “I have been out there two hours waiting for you.”

She squatted down on the floor, holding the baby between her knees, to allow him time to finish his breakfast.

“Mira,”
she said to the baby, pointing rudely to Blair, “if you ever become as lazy as that up there, I’ll let the owls have you.”

“Tss!” admonished the old woman, “keep quiet, the young lady doesn’t feel well.”

Estelle handed back her cup and stood up. “Now that he is out of the house, I will go in and try to get a little rest,” they heard her say. She reached the doorway, rested a hand against it a moment as if to steady herself, and continued down the red-tiled corridor, her pink wrapper gathered tight across the small of her back as she proceeded slowly on her way.

“She did not sleep the whole night,” Mariquita said.

“What does sleep matter?” the old woman answered sharply. “She is concerned with her soul.”

That afternoon two friends of Estelle’s called on her. They were dressed almost identically, evidently the result of having both fancied the same pattern in some Paris fashion paper and of having handed it on to their native dressmakers without first consulting one another. Yet they appeared to be on fairly good terms, nevertheless. Ever so slightly conscious of their own elegance, they stood there in light green and light blue, aigrets in their turbans, flaring, daringly short skirts (nearly to their calves), tango slippers with ribbons that laced well above the ankles, and exchanged a quizzical look between themselves at being made to wait in the patio while the old woman went in to inquire. She returned with the information that Estelle had a headache and could not see anyone. Blair, who was a witness, saw their brows go up at this and heard them laugh mockingly. They turned and went away again, leaving no message of sympathy, concerning themselves only with the opening and tilting of their parasols, like great translucent wings of a disjointed butterfly, as they stepped out of the doorway.

In about an hour’s time Estelle called Mariquita into her room. The latter, reappearing in the street-doorway after a lengthy interval, stood there holding the hem of her garment out before her and excitedly beckoned Blair over. By the time he joined her she had emptied the lap of her dress of numerous objects and was kneeling on the ground sorting them out.

“Look what the señora gave me,” she said, turning a dazzled face up to him for a moment.

Estelle’s burst of generosity had included a string of false pearls, a vial of liquid cheek-rouge, which showed fadedly pink at the top and was dark with sediment at the bottom, but when shaken, as Mariquita proceeded to do, resumed a rich garnet tint throughout; a mammoth linen rose with silver leaves from some tour-de-force hat, a pocket-mirror the size of a watch, a pair of kid gloves split at one of the fingertips, plush garters with satin rosettes, and a small metal cylinder containing a column of blue wax which could be made to rise and fall at pressure of the thumb (an eyebrow pencil—the first either one of them had seen. Mariquita, in ignorance of where to apply it, streaked the palm of her hand with it a number of times). All of them articles which Blair scornfully considered valueless and uninteresting, and not in the least worth inheriting.

“But these are not anything,” the almost frantic Mariquita proceeded to tell him, “there is much more that is in the kitchen. Dresses—
pero finas! finas!
—shoes, and even two hats. She says I must take them home and show them first, and if they let me wear them, I can have them.”

“Why is she doing it?” Blair asked her.

“Se va.
She is leaving.”

By the shrug she gave she made it plain her concern was not with any motive Estelle may have had, but with the tangible results spread before her. The glass-blown pearls immediately went around her neck, and the swollen rose was thrust first under, then over, and finally in back of, one ear, while she studied the results obtained by means of the pocket-mirror. The baby was placated with the eyebrow pencil and told not to eat it.

That night when Mariquita and the old woman returned to their home, or homes, for Blair had never found out whether they lived under the same roof or not, they carried away with them the spoils of a stricken conscience. They went shawlless, for each had tied the four corners of her shawl together and made a bundle of it. And in addition Mariquita flaunted a number of Estelle’s dresses over her arm. Estelle had not appeared at dinner, and Giraldy, noticing the two as they were leaving the patio, insisted upon their setting the shawls down and untying them while he analyzed the contents of each one. Blair stood looking on and flashed Mariquita a look of sympathy. Giraldy apparently came to the conclusion he had been wasting his time, and put an end to the inquisition by brushing his hands vigorously. “Take the filth away,” he commented pityingly. When they had obsequiously bid him good night and vanished, he noticed Blair standing there.

“Wouldn’t you like a bangle or a handkerchief for a keepsake?”

Blair decided he had been insulted, and thrusting his hands between his belt and stomach was about to take refuge in sulking, until he suddenly discerned that the irony was at Estelle’s expense.

He smiled then and said, “No.”

In the morning Estelle again had two callers, but so unlike those of the day before that to Blair, peering out at them with startled eyes from behind one of the patio rubber plants, they seemed hardly to be human at all. Veiled in black, they were like apparitions of death, all human attributes but the face carefully done away with, and the face itself bearing a pallor that was not of the land of the living. The old woman bowed humbly and brought them out two chairs upon which they settled themselves like masses of dense smoke. Blair could not tear himself away, and though they undoubtedly saw him, and though the fact that he kept the rubber plant between him and themselves was not complimentary, it was as though nothing had any existence at all for them, no living being, no inanimate thing, save only the abstract purpose that had brought them there.

Presently they had risen again, soundlessly, effortlessly, and Estelle had thrown open the glass patio-doors to her room and stood beyond the threshold. Her manner was a peculiar mixture of the abject and the triumphant. She was dressed in black, without ornament, and her large black hat had been stripped of its flowers. The two ghostly presences confronting her slightly inclined their heads. He saw Estelle, walking as in a dream, go to them. They turned about to face in the direction she was facing, and each taking her by an arm, and the old woman bobbing her head and mumbling and holding wide the patio gate for them, they glided through the arched street-doorway, shutting off the inflowing sunlight for a moment, which when they had quite gone, streamed in again as brightly as before.

The old woman said nothing. To her it must have appeared a good deed, well done. Mariquita, however, despite her usual reverence in all such matters, showed a disposition to be a little more worldly in this one instance.

“You will never see her again, Blerr. She has gone with the
religiosas.
One who goes in there, never afterward leaves.”

Blair was a little saddened. Vague memories of Sasha recurred to him. It was as though in the span of a single childhood he had lost, not one, but two mothers. True, there could never again be the emotional vacuum, the sense of youthful misery, that Sasha had left behind her. He was older now, for one thing. But Estelle had become a habit, her passing gave him a transient loneliness.

That night, however, Giraldy, as though mad with chagrin, filled the
Bruselas
Street flat with guests. The sound of his maliciously gay piano-playing streamed through the open doors and lighted windows until a late hour. There was dancing and there was drinking, and silhouettes drifted in and out of the shadowy patio, whispering and pausing to unite in a hurried embrace. The Señora was there, with her loud mock-English and her pomaded aviator-husband, and the couple from Galveston; the jockey, blue-shirted and jacketless, and the two birds of paradise whom only yesterday Estelle had turned from the door, boisterous now with gratified resentment. One of them came in to Blair to ask his help in finding some sort of black veil or mantle. She was going to give an impersonation of Estelle taking the vows.