Psyche (32 page)

The girls, given their instructions by Bel, were friendly enough from the beginning, but it was not until they were convinced that Psyche herself had no intention of undercutting them that they fully accepted her anomalous position in the house. As time went on, perhaps because she was from their point of view so unsophisticated, so amusingly inexperienced, they developed a protective attitude toward her, seeing her as a symbol of what— without regret—they could never themselves hope to be again. Regarding her as very young, failing to recognize her as an already forceful and well-integrated person capable of making her own decisions, they gave themselves individual credit for keeping her at least as unsullied as when she came amongst them.

Psyche, for her part, was secretly sorry for all of them, because she could foresee nothing but the bleakest future ahead of them. Happiness, as she so firmly envisaged it, was not, and never would be, their lot. She did not judge them on moral grounds, in spite of Mag's teachings and her own innate recoil from the life they led, because to do so would be to judge Bel, and this she could not do.

She was destined to forget Ruth, and Joan, and Violet almost completely, remembering little more than that Ruth and Joan were sisters sharing an undistinguished prettiness and an ability to giggle, and that Violet sometimes cried in the night. Though whether she cried because she was alone on these occasions, or because she so rarely was, Psyche did not discover, for her strange violet eyes, as unrevealing as pale amethysts, never gave anything away.

Monique she remembered only because Monique taught her to dance.

But May and Kathie were memorable.

May missed real beauty because she had too much of everything. Her baby-blue eyes were too large, her wealth of curls too golden, her mouth too brilliantly full, and her figure, though well-proportioned, too extravagantly opulent. On the other side of the
footlights she would have been magnificent. At close quarters she was somewhat overpowering.

She ate little, seeming to subsist for the most part on a diet of chocolates. Good-natured, always smiling, she yawned often, displaying unabashed a healthy pink cavern lined with flawless white teeth.

As Bel put it, “May is an easy girl.”

Being with May was certainly restful, particularly if one closed one's eyes.

She dressed in pinks and blues, owned a squirrel coat dyed blue, and had a passion for jewellery curbed only by the limitations of her purse and the number of places on her anatomy where she might properly—or improperly—display it.

At one and the same time practical and romantic, men were to her divided into two simple categories, cheapskates and “the handsomest thing you ever saw”. What amused Psyche was that the two so often became interchangeable overnight, “the handsomest thing you ever saw” being summarily demoted to swell the already crowded ranks of the cheapskates.

May, originally a beauty-parlour operator, under protest put in three hours a day at this vocation, although, judging from the results, it seemed likely that she spent a great deal more time on beautifying herself than she vouchsafed to the customers.

“I don't know how she holds that job,” Bel said one day. “I guess it's just because she can get away with things. I never met a girl who could get more for less. She's clever, in her own way, May is.”

May was the epitome of what one might have expected of someone in her profession. Kathie, on the other hand, was, in all respects but one, the absolute antithesis. For Kathie, with her Puritan face, and tortured mouth reflecting an incessant warfare between mind and body, was a full-time dedicated teacher who ought, by rights, to have taught at a ranking university.

Outwardly denying in every way possible the curse set upon her in adolescence, she wore neither make-up nor jewellery, and her clothes were plain to the point of severity. In so far as she was able, she looked what she was, a poorly paid public-school
teacher. But she could do nothing about her eyes; deep-set and dark, they had but to look at a man to glow with an unholy magnetism as powerful as any sorcery of old. Even the glasses she affected when teaching did not entirely disguise this flame or the horror of self that accompanied it. Judith, with the head of Holofernes at her feet, might have looked as Kathie often did when she came from her room in the mornings.

It was impossible for Psyche to think of Kathie as one of the girls. She stood alone, apart from any known social grouping. Yet it was because Kathie was there that Psyche stayed at Bel's place as long as she did.

At first Psyche was contented enough with days each one of which added something to her general knowledge, served to fill in the startling hiatuses in her practical education.

Learning how to shop, both by telephone and in person, she gradually relieved Bel of all the household marketing. As often as was expedient, she went to the shops, rather than telephoning, because she liked being one of a crowd and took a real pleasure in her growing competence as a city dweller. Street-cars ceased to terrify her, and, threading her way in and out amongst heavy traffic on foot, she soon forgot that at one time it had required all her courage to step off the pavement.

She took over more than her share of the cooking, but Bel would not allow her, as she suggested, to do it all.

“That wouldn't be good, baby,” she said. “The girls would get to thinking of you as a kind of servant, and then they'd push you around.”

There was a good deal of wisdom in this, so Psyche concentrated on those things that Bel herself had previously had to do unaided, leaving the girls to press their own clothes and take their proper turns with cooking and dish-washing.

The only servant the establishment boasted was a taciturn old woman with a seamed face, dyed hair, and work-coarsened hands, who came in during the daytime to clean. Psyche avoided her because the old woman watched her with such a hungry mixture of envy and admiration, often mumbling under her breath, “Just like you—just like you, dearie.”

There was no mistaking her natural assumption that Psyche's rôle in the house was the same as that of the other girls, and that she herself had once followed a similar course and also been lovely to look at. The horrible part of this was that it was believable, for the ghost of a long-lost beauty still peered forth from the rheumy old eyes.

Psyche, repelled afresh whenever she encountered her, wondered how the others could continue to see that living example and go on as they were doing.

The task that she most enjoyed was that of attending to some of the wants of the old lady in the apartment downstairs.

The first time she went down, Bel cautioned her, “Just act as if you had dropped in for a visit. That old dame's got a lot of pride. If she seems to like you, you can do like I've been doing, and sort of pick up a few things and tidy up a bit for her. Because she can't see so good, she loses things if they aren't in their right places.”

Open affection in her eyes, Psyche said, “You are so nice, Bel.”

“The hell with that. I'm just human. Go on down, baby, and see how you make out.”

Psyche was able to make friends with all classes and distinctions of people without too much effort. The friendship that sprang up between herself and the reserved, aristocratic old lady, however, required no effort at all. Recognizing almost immediately qualities in each other that both possessed, they spanned the incalculable difference in their two backgrounds as if it did not exist.

Psyche had never before had any close contact with anyone on a purely voluntary basis, and the freedom from any necessity to proffer confidences that this gave her was one that she accepted with unqualified relief. Even when they knew each other very well, she did not talk about herself, and it was not at first-hand that she finally learned the story behind the tragic descent in the world of this cultivated and once wealthy lady. In the long talks they had together they discussed manners and modes, attitudes, and human behaviour. Since both of them were, by force of circumstances, remarkably unworldly, there was a delightful simplicity
about these conversations; a simplicity saved from banality by two quick minds starved for an opportunity to think aloud.

Psyche, always observant, realized that there was much she could learn in niceties of behaviour from her new friend, and when observation alone was not sufficient to provide her with the answers she sought, made no secret of her ignorance. The occasion on which she first had tea in the small apartment cluttered with treasures of another era found her completely at a loss.

Having been instructed where to find a heavy silver tea service, and finding it somewhere else, she said, “I'm sorry, I don't know exactly how to arrange things.”

“The tea-pot on your right, my dear. The hot water jug beside it. The cream and sugar on your left, and the cups in front of you. It is customary to serve lemon, but I am afraid I have been rather remiss and there are no lemons in the house.”

After that Psyche took it upon herself to see that there were always “lemons in the house”. In time she not only dropped in on the old lady but also accompanied her on at least one of her two daily promenades up and down in front of the big house facing the park. On days when the weather made walking impossible, she served tea—with an elegance that both pleased and amused her—and read aloud from one of the many leather-bound volumes arranged precisely in a glass-fronted bookcase. Here her lack of any proper education showed up only too clearly, and she was at times painfully embarrassed by her inability to pronounce words properly, or to give to poetry the easy flow it demanded.

She would stumble, and, glad that the still beautiful but dim blue eyes could not see her flushed face, say, “I'm so sorry—I'm doing it very badly.”

“Not at all, my dear. You have a lovely voice. You are simply not accustomed to reading aloud. Perhaps I remember—‘The splendour falls on castle walls, and' Do go on, my dear, I am enjoying it so much.”

Psyche realized how gracefully and tactfully she was being helped, but she did not understand until long afterwards that their reading matter had been chosen far more on her account than
her hearer's; that a debt was being quietly repayed even while it was being incurred.

That another debt was to be discharged at a time when she and the old lady would be all that stood between Bel and the toppling of the structure she had so carefully built up, she could not, of course, foresee.

She never brought the manners and freedom of speech of Bel's place downstairs with her, but she derived a mischievous pleasurefrom unobtrusively practising a few of the airs of the drawing-room upstairs. She could have laughed openly when She discovered, in an argument with Monique, how effective were slightly raised eyebrows, and a cool, “I would rather youdidn't——

Bel was very pleased with the merging of her two altruistic interests. “Seems like you can hit it off with anybody, baby,” she told Psyche. “It saves me a lot not to have to be going up and down like I was before. I'd like to see the person you couldn't hit it off with any time and all the time.”

“You're asking to meet Nick, though you mayn't know it.”

“Him! He doesn't count. He was just a louse.”

“He wasn't just that,” Psyche said slowly. “That was the trouble. He wasn't just a louse.”

Bel shrugged. “Have it your own way, baby. I can't agree with you, but you should know.”

Psyche found Bel almost always like that, pleasant and agreeable. During the nine months she stayed at Bel's they had only one open difference of opinion, and that was about money. Accepting her board and lodging gratefully, feeling she more or less earned that, she flatly refused to take any money.

“For God's sake, be reasonable, can't you, baby? You can't live with no cash at all.”

“Maybe not, but I won't take it from you.”

“Why in hell not when I want to give it to you?”

“I haven't earned it.”

“It's my money. Can't I do what I please with it?”

Psyche's face and voice were equally implacable. “Not this time.”

“How are you going to buy anything for yourself?”

“I don't know. I'll figure it out.”

Tossing a mangled cigarette into an enormous brass ash-tray, Bel tried coaxing. “Take a little something, just to go on with. To please me.”

“Bel—I can't. Don't you see that?”

“I see that you won't,” Bel told her crossly.

Very occasionally, when she was either excited or upset, or both, Psyche lost her careful grip on the mode of speech Nick had taught her. Now, shaking her shining hair back from her face with a sharp toss of her head, she said fiercely, “Leave me be, can't you, Bel! I wouldn't have nothin' if I was just to take, take, take!”

It was Psyche who eventually solved the impasse, and in a manner which at first shocked Bel, so different were the standards she applied to Psyche from those which she set up for herself and her girls.

On an afternoon a few days later Psyche came down from the little room which she could not think of as having ever belonged to anyone else, and found Monique dancing alone in the living-room. When Monique had nothing else to do, she always danced. Her small, vivacious face wiped clean for the moment of any expression, her eyes opaque, she would become one with the music of the never silent radio. But in spite of, perhaps even because of, the immobility of her face, tomtoms beat in the heart of an unknown jungle when Monique danced.

Responding to rhythms more primitive than she knew, Psyche said involuntarily, “How I wish I could do that!”

Monique seemed scarcely aware of her presence, and she did not break her step.
“Quoi?
The rumba?”

“Any of it.”

“Vous
ne pouvez pas danser? Mais, c'est incroyable! Venez ici, et je vous montrerai comment le faire
. Come on, honey, I'll give you a lesson
tout de suite
. Why, there should be a law against letting girls grow up in such ignorance.
Maintenant, faîtes comme moi, mais lentement au commencement
. Do just as I do, but take it easy at first.”