Collected Novels and Plays (21 page)

Francis saw that she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “What’s so moving about Poussin,” he had begun hopefully, “is the way he never
insists
on things.” Lady Good was far from taking the hint. “I might as well admit that I’m at my wits’ end,” was all the response he got.

“I frankly don’t understand him,” she went on. “I fail to see what he gives or what he gets. Had we not come away yesterday, my private opinion is that he would have
collapsed.
All those people, not one of whom he can abide! And yet he welcomes them, listens to them, lets them sap his strength—why?”

“He likes people. He forgets that he doesn’t like
those
people,” said Francis, covering a yawn.

“Is that it?” she wondered.

“The firm still means a lot to him. Most of those men were partners.”

Lady Good sneered. “Partners! Why,” speaking with renewed force,
“why
has Charlie Cheek taken to drink? I’d always thought it
fatal
for a reformed alcoholic to touch even a drop of liquor.”

“Probably Irene put him up to it. Let’s see, what would her plot be? Oh of course,” Francis brightened to think how plausible it sounded, “she means to have him die of drink. Then she can marry her favorite fella.”

“She could as easily get a divorce. More easily, I daresay.”

“All right. Then she means him
not
to die, but to turn back into a hopeless lush. He’ll be her Cross. Benji will think: That girl has guts. The old flame will burst from the ashes.”

Lady Good looked dubious.

“Don’t you agree?”

“Finish this for me, like a dear.” She pushed her glass of ale towards him, seeing that his own was empty. “I’d forgot it makes me sick. No, I think it’s because Charlie loves her.”

“Perfect!” Francis clapped his hands. “He loves her enough to start drinking for the sake of her plot, at the risk of his health, his life!”

“No, Francis.” She covered her eyes for a second. “Charlie loves Irene and her conduct makes him unhappy. When you love somebody—” She broke off.

A remarkable hour followed. Francis began to see what he would never before have suspected—that Lady Good was mistress of many moods, that in her blunt Anglo-Saxon way she could play the Serpent of old Nile as well as Xenia. Better than Xenia, he soon decided, because less artfully. She rambled on, now earnest, now resigned, now positively incoherent. Her subject, often at two or three removes, seemed to be Benjamin’s bewildering attachments to other
women—or was it his neglect of Prudence herself? What could she do but return to Jamaica?
She refused to be made a laughingstock—not that she cared in the slightest what a bunch of silly women thought. A moment later she revealed that Benjamin’s feeling had no bearing on the
main
issue, that of her duty to Sir Edward. She waxed sententious. Marriage brought with it distinct obligations. For over twenty-five years the Goods had shared
a life rich in intellectual exchange and mutual respect. Ned had his molasses factory, she had her books. The life had taught her—as the kind of book she cared for hadn’t—that marriage was no solution. The majority of her married friends would have gone much further, as human beings, without it. One wasn’t meant to live shut up with a member of the opposite sex. Among the London fogs Lady Good would have thrown herself into the packed career of a
bluestocking. But among breadfruit and sugar cane, those passionate climes, the only white woman for ten miles, with moreover nothing but contempt for the other colonial wives, it seemed natural that she had cultivated, alone at her piano, a longing for variety and romance. Hence Benjamin. The rub was that she hadn’t been the only one so honored. Complaining? No. What right had she to complain, considering how little he had had in return for all his—here Prudence threw
down her napkin. She wasn’t Irene, wasn’t going to endanger that quarter century of companionable esteem, not on your life, no! and
that
was why she had made up her mind to go home. That was
exactly
why, she concluded with a look of pleased surprise, as when a game of patience comes out unexpectedly. Had Francis done eating? Lady Good drained her coffee cup, feeling up to anything, even a second look at the Boston Museum.

His first reaction was to be entertained. Later, though still entertained, Francis found himself growing more and more depressed. What’s wrong with me? He kept wondering. The complexities of his father’s world and his father’s women had absorbed him in the past. They seemed now, however, on the point of no longer doing so. Together with something close to fear, Francis felt a real resentment of the way his companion summoned him back, step by step,
from the simplifying half-lights in
which she had shown herself the day before. He had loved that dim ikon of her, wisely renouncing. He had loved even more Benjamin’s air of acquiescence to it, of final willingness to admit that the last love of a long life was soon to take leave of him. But today brought to light nothing renunciatory about Lady Good. Like all the others, she gazed at Francis from the very heart of her dilemma. “You have played the
child long enough,” she might have been saying. “Please to remember you are a grown man, one who must reasonably be expected to witness without flinching the moral crisis of a grown woman.” He scowled at the ruins of his gorgonzola. If such were the thrills and chills of maturity—! Signaling to their waiter, he tried to reason with himself. She
wasn’t
like the others. She was kinder, finer—Francis reached for the essential point to
be made but it kept eluding him. They were on their feet, weaving through tables in the cold gloom they had so swiftly grown used to, before it came to him. She was unlike the others because nothing sexual entered into her feelings for Benjamin. Yes; that made sense. Reassured, he smiled, although a bit mechanically. Outside the sun broke on them like a wave.

For Lady Good had waited for the brilliant racket of the street to deflect what he knew to be her most pointed words.

“A thing I wish
you’d
decide for me,” she said in the tone of one who must choose between crumpets and cake, “is whether or not I should go to bed with Benjamin.”

Francis gave a little start, more like a twitch, the relic of some old disorder. He put a hand to his hot cheek. Quite so, he tried to think, one mustn’t neglect that side of it. But hadn’t he always known the truth? Wasn’t it—going to bed with Benjamin—for all of them,
the
side? What else explained cocktails, silk dresses, flowers in the ocean room? Here now was Lady Good impeccably giving him the clue to
her
charade. He might have known. Still, he wanted to be polite, and caught her eye with a glare of nervous interest.

“Oh, it’s not a matter of satisfying him physically,” she sang out as
they paused on a curb. “I’m certain I could do that. But there’s so much else to consider.”

Francis thought of his father’s body, so feeble, so veined and scarred. “I’d always imagined he wasn’t well enough.”

“It appears now that he is. Didn’t Dr. Samuels say he was? And if Irene—” but she stopped herself. “I’ve wondered, too,” she smiled, “if I mightn’t simply be afraid of
that
, of his no longer caring for me, Benjamin I mean, were I once to let it reach that stage. Is it really what
he
wants? I can’t think that it is. But then, I’m not a man, I don’t know.”

Had she appealed to his own experience? “Perhaps,” said Francis, “he’s afraid not to want it.”

Lady Good stiffened. “If he didn’t, you mean, his life would be over? Is that his criterion—potency? Is it yours?”

“Isn’t it everybody’s?” Francis ventured, though surely her question had been rhetorical. She kept right on talking, at any rate.

“Then there’s the whole thing of what I owe to Ned. Would it be fair to him? He’s been so wonderfully understanding up to now. Dear Francis,” breaking in on herself, “I seem to be caught in a squirrel run. What a trial for you! You must think me very silly. But I’m not like those other women, I can’t treat things lightly.”

“Oh look!” he exclaimed in spite of himself, squinting at a yellow poster. “A revival of
Intolerance”
. But it had taken place the previous month.

“You’re right, of course,” Lady Good sighed, “it’s not
your
decision. You can’t help me.”

Francis blushed. He wished she hadn’t found this out.

“I think you’re wrong about his not caring for you,” he said. “Whatever happens, he’s tremendously loyal. Just look at all the others, the women at the Cottage, the
wives!
He’s loved them and he’s loyal. They may be the death of him, but he’s loyal.”

“Then I am selfish,” said Lady Good, “in not wanting to be the death of him.”

“He’s even loyal to Irene!”

“Precisely.” Her voice reached him over water. Francis looked at her, impressed. Then, without warning, she laughed. “You’ve helped me make my decision after all.”

“What do you mean?” he asked with excitement. “Your mind’s made up?”

Whereupon she laughed again, and took his arm.

It was amazing. He had never admired her more. Throughout the dreadful avowal she had kept a truly breathtaking dignity. If Prudence had been the heroine of a novel he would have fallen in love with her on the spot. As it was, however, Francis had already begun to distinguish between her perfect form and what she had managed to convey with it. From then on, he knew, they would have less and less to say to one another. The knowledge left him melancholy, as though
he
was the renouncing figure. Then, after a bit, he felt in his heart that he was bored with her.

“Of course, I believe in a hopeless passion,” he threw out as he led her up the steps of the Museum.

But this was going too far. She gave him a stern gray twinkle. “I wish I thought you did, Francis.”

Back inside, they started through the Persian and Indian rooms. These being empty, Lady Good, soon baffled by the calligraphy on a blue tile, took up her topic afresh.

“I honestly
don’t
see what Irene gets out of it.”

“Nothing at present,” he murmured distantly.

“I beg your pardon, dear?”

“Nothing at present, I said.”

“I know one thing, I should never be so insensitive. At the first sign of any loss of interest in
me
, I should hastily withdraw.” It was then, at last, that Lady Good must have felt something of the sort in her listener, for she said no more.

So they walked, neither together nor as yet very far apart, and did not
speak, unless to remark upon the glaze of a pot, the curl of a lip suggesting at once laughter and tears, the great gods of porous stone, seated or dancing, their flesh like folds of lava. There was a distance between these figures and Francis which did not shrink as he approached them.

It wasn’t, he knew, the shimmering glass—wherein Lady Good’s movements were reflected from the far side of the room—that kept him from a nicer apprehension of the picture beneath. Something in the picture itself, a perfection that it had, or an understanding of its subject that he didn’t, put him off.

He had stopped to examine a miniature of Krishna among the milkmaids. They smiled up at the slate blue god, eight or ten damsels. Behind a wall palms rose; behind these, princely terraces. A yellow-and-black sun with a man’s face looked down on it all.

Were they dancing? What did it mean? Francis felt that his brow was burning. I have caught some terrible disease, he thought.

13.
What odd ideas people had of how to act when first married! Jane’s was to pretend it hadn’t happened, that she had hardly reached the age of fraternity pins and high-school yearbooks. She skipped off the elevator, shrieked, kissed Francis smartly as if still vague about the possible meaning of kisses, then peered up and down the carpeted hall with the wariness of one fresh from the farm, who’d heard what went on
in hotels. He had to admit she looked the part in her pale lilac dress, virginal, high-throated, puff-sleeved, a matching ribbon wound in her black curls. She wore less lipstick than before, and no nail polish. It was well he had asked her up for a drink in their sitting room—she’d get little more than lemonade in the bar downstairs. As against her battered appearance
on the pier in New York, the effect today was of a really extraordinary youngness.
It wasn’t only an effect, either; she
was
young, younger than Francis had ever known her.

What with an hour’s nap, more aspirin, the knowledge of a cocktail already poured, he was feeling better when Jane arrived. A moment before he had carried two brimming glasses to where his father and Lady Good sat on the loveseat, holding hands. The day at the hospital had worn Mr. Tanning out—not so much the tests as the waiting, the sense of being ignored for long minutes at a time. That he was old and ill had been put to him strongly enough by his mere
presence there, seated on a table, wrapped in a starched smock. At such times a great deal of attention was needed to ward off the foretaste of pain and death. And there hadn’t been, Benjamin told them ruefully, a single sexy nurse.

“Well, Francis’s friend is bound to be most attractive,” said Lady Good, her glass dribbling.

“Then there was this smart aleck of a young doctor,” Benjamin went on. “Do you know what he wanted to do? He has a theory about deadening the nerve that connects the heart and the brain. He uses a needle six inches long, inserted just over the collarbone. I tried to ask him how he could be sure of hitting the nerve. ‘Oh Mr. Tanning,’ he said, ‘don’t worry about that—that’s
my
business!’
‘The hell it is,’ I said. I just didn’t like the sound of it, Francis. The old poop’s been deadened enough in his day.”

The telephone rang, announcing their guest.

Of course, when Francis brought her in, he couldn’t think of her married name. Jane herself took a few seconds to produce it. Both of them seemed to have forgotten not only Roger Massey but the whole nature of his connection with Jane.

“What’s this?” cried Mr. Tanning. “Married? Do my old ears deceive me?”

“Four weeks Friday,” confessed Jane. “Isn’t it crazy?”