Psyche (35 page)

On the first afternoon that Psyche spent with her, a stormy Saturday afternoon with heavy snow obliterating the dismal view, Kathie outlined briefly her general approach to the task she had undertaken. “I agree with you that the sooner you leave this house the better, and so our time together will be short. I cannot teach you individual facts as such. I don't even want to. But I can and will teach you how to think, how to reason clearly. When I am finished with you, you may not know Archimedes' Principle, the date of the Spanish Armada, or who invented the telephone. What you will know is how to find these things out for yourself, how to place them in relation to the rest of man's development and history, and how to retain the knowledge thus gained if you find it of sufficient interest to do so. In short, you will be in a position to make full use of your greatest gift—your mind. I've watched you, and you think before you speak, always. You are thinking of the words you will employ as much as of the sense of what you are going to say, aren't you?”

“Yes. How did you know that? Do I make mistakes?”

“Rarely, if ever. That is, in part, how I knew. Chiefly it is because you think quickly, and it would be more natural for you to speak quickly. As a matter of purely academic interest, and I use the word in its true sense, how long did you stay with this artist you mentioned?”

“Four months, more or less.”

“Between you, you achieved a miracle,” Kathie commented. “But it isn't good enough. You are going to have to concentrate on the English language more than anything else. Words are your tools. They must not only be infinite in number, but as brightly
burnished as any blade ever forged in Damascus. You don't know where Damascus is, do you? Well, I am not going to tell you. Later you can look it up for yourself, and copy out those things about it that you find most interesting. To-morrow we will discuss the maturity—or lack of it—of what you have written. You don't know what infinite means, do you? Well, that you will learn at once.”

When she saw Psyche's first piece of written work, she groaned. “My God! Do I have to teach you how to write, too!”

She taught her a beautiful copper-plate. Much later Psyche learned that such writing was taught exclusively in private schools, and another stone of regret was laid on the cairn of sorrow that by then stood above her memories of Kathie.

Her life now full to overflowing. Psyche became a confirmed clock-watcher. Joe had given her a small gold watch at Christmas, and she wondered how she had ever lived without one. She was grateful to him during every minute that it ticked off during days that never seemed quite long enough. Bel would have clawed his eyes out if he had given so much as a dead geranium to any of the other girls, but she was immediately pleased that he should have done this for Psyche. It was a palpably seal of approval on what she herself had done, and was doing.

“That's real nice of you, Joe,” she had said, when he presented it, “Put it on, baby. It's real pretty on her, isn't it, Joe?”

Although Kathie, and to a lesser extent the old lady, were contributing toward the consummation of the dream Psyche pursued, it was to Bel that she continued to give her greatest measure of affection. And as the winter wore on she began to worry about Bel as much as Bel worried about her. To live forever on the alert, forever in danger of having one's livelihood taken from one, seemed terrible, regardless of how that livelihood was obtained. Certainly it did not seem right for anyone with a heart as warm and generous as Bel's.

“Bel,” she said one day, “aren't you afraid sometimes?”

“Afraid of what, baby?”

“Oh, afraid you'll make a mistake. That something will happen.”

Bel, looking sombrely down on a street where steady rain was turning the last of the winter's snow to slush, said flatly, “Something may happen, baby, but if it does it won't be my fault. I don't make mistakes. Only once. I did the wrong thing the day I let Joe into the dump.”

Psyche was completely taken aback. “But Joe's the only one with you, Bel! I thought you liked him a lot.”

“I do, baby. I do. That's where I make the mistake. It don't pay for a dame like me to get too soft about any one guy. It makes you think too much. Too damned much.”

“There isn't any way” Psyche began hesitantly.

“None, baby. No way at all. Go pour me a drink, will you, there's a good girl. This weather sure gives me the pip.”

When Psyche came back to the living-room with Bel's rye and water, it was to find the curtains pulled, the lamps lit, and Bel herself as bright and gay as her red dress.

“That's better, isn't it? When it's lousy outside, you can always make your own weather, can't you? Tell me, baby, are you still learning as fast as you want?”

Psyche smiled, and made a small grimace. “Even faster!”

It was true. Kathie was forcing the pace as if each day might be their last. Spending very little time on anything else, she now carried the lessons with Psyche over into the evenings, something she had not done previously.

One evening, after they had picked up and closed the books that were scattered half across the room, Kathie paused midway between desk and door. Psyche, looking at her, realized that she was even thinner than she had been, and that her strained face was more haunted than ever.

“Kathie,” she said softly. “Kathie, you're doing too much for me. You're making yourself sick.”

“It's the only worth-while thing I do. It's all I've got left,” Kathie replied harshly. Then, her voice tight and unnatural, she said, “If you'll give up that damned walking for one night, I—I'll stay down here, and we can go on.”

Psyche rubbed the back of a slender hand across her aching eyes. “It wouldn't be any good. I can't think straight any longer.”

“All right,” Kathie told her quietly. “Good night.” And turning she went swiftly to the door.

Psyche's coat lay across the bed, but she did not at once make any move toward it. Leaning against the edge of the desk, she stared at her reflection in the long mirror above Kathie's bare-topped maple dressing-table. Seeing herself more objectively than she usually did, she saw that she had changed in appearance. The planes of her face were sharper than they had been, and she had lost the golden tan which had been her skin colour summer and winter at a shack where the brilliance of sunlight on snow had been as strong as that of the midsummer sun. But the change went deeper than that. The blue eyes looking back at her were more thoughtful than they had been, the clear-cut mouth was firmer, and there was something faintly questioning in the lift of the dark eyebrows. I am not as pretty as I was, she thought dispassionately, but I am more me—and I am glad. Thinking this, she remembered a time when she had been mortally afraid of losing herself in a mirror, and smiled at the child she had once been.

Still smiling, she rose, put on her coat, and went out.

Spring was late in coming that year, and it was not until the end of April that crocuses bloomed in the park, and the naked skeletons of the trees began to veil themselves in delicate cobwebs of soft green. But, if it was late, when it did come it was benign, the lengthening days warm and sunny. The birds came back from the south, flock after flock, to mingle with sparrows that knew no other compulsion than a year-round search for bread crumbs on a familiar asphalt heath. The loungers reappeared on the park benches. The Lithuanians emerged from a crowded hibernation. And Bel resumed her regal, late-afternoon sorties to the park.

Psyche, made lazy by the season, by a gentle breeze and golden sunlight, deserted her books one day in favour of strolling with Bel and sitting with her once again on, as it happened, the same park bench where she had met her some eight months earlier.

“It doesn't seem long, does it, baby?”

“No, it doesn't.” Not long in time, certainly, but in every other way a small lifetime. A little lifetime in which she had acquired friends, confidence in herself, some money, and, above all, the
varied knowledge that would make it henceforth possible for her to at least support herself.

Watching a small boy follow a pigeon across the gravel path onto fresh green grass, she knew, contrary to what anyone else might think, that her meeting with Bel was one of the most fortunate encounters of her life, past, present, or future. Never, as long as she lived, would she ever deny Bel.

She would have liked to say this, but it was not possible. It came too close to something that they had never talked about in so many words, she and Bel.

Her eyes still following a perplexed little boy who was discovering that he could not narrow the distance between himself and a pigeon apparently unaware of his existence, she asked idly, “Who goes into the gallery on the other side of the park, Bel?”

“Folks who are interested in pictures, I guess,” Bel replied indifferently.

“I wish I belonged.”

“What do you mean, baby?”

“I wish I were a member, or whatever you have to be to get in.”

“Far as I know, all you have to do is pay your way.”

Psyche's attention no longer wandered. “You mean anyone can go in there? You and me, for example?”

“Far as I know.”

Psyche was on her feet in one swift, graceful movement. “Come on, Bel, we're going to go and find out, right now.”

“Who, me? Have a heart, baby! I'm not a great one for art.”

“Come on,” Psyche said firmly. “I'm not going alone. Bel, think of it, paintings! Perhaps I'll see something I know, something I saw in one of Nick's books.”

In the face of her vivid excitement, Bel ceased to resist, but she made no secret of her reluctance. “I don't belong in that type place,” she said, straightening her brief skirt as she rose, and taking a firmer grip on her capacious handbag.

They were alone as they mounted a short flight of stone steps to revolving glass doors.

“Maybe it's closed,” Bel remarked hopefully.

Psyche, looking at a framed notice beside the doors, said, “No, it will be open for another hour. It's the middle of the week, and late in the day, that's all.”

Bel, exploring the depths of her handbag for a change purse as they went through the turnstile inside, did not look up until they were approaching the Sculpture Court, a sunken square lit from above by a single enormous skylight. When she did look, all she could do was stare in stunned disbelief, her coat a brilliant splash of colour against the austerity of tall pillars, marble floors, and plaster and bronze figures cast in a fluid but everlasting immobility. An opulent scarlet statue, momentarily as motionless as those others on which she gazed, she scarcely seemed to breathe.

Then, expelling a long breath, she said in a hushed voice, “Well —call me a dirty name! And they'll throw a girl into the clink for showing her navel at fifty paces.”

Psyche, who had moved on toward the arched entrance to a long gallery, said, over her shoulder, “Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Bel, what exactly does contemporary mean?”

“Search me,” Bel replied, but her answer was automatic. Turning, she walked back to the attendant near the door. “Tell me, Mac, do they let kids into this joint?”

“Yes, madam, of course. And on Saturday mornings there are classes which”

But Bel was no longer listening. Staring blankly out across the Sculpture Court, she was muttering, “It don't make sense. It just don't make sense.”

Psyche's call was soft, but it echoed in the empty vastness of the great entrance hall. “Bel, we haven't much time!”

Catching up with her, Bel followed her in frowning silence.

The gallery which Psyche had chosen to start with was a large one, and Bel, after looking, for the most part with open disapproval, at a few of the pictures, retired to a couch in the middle of the room. Failing to see an ash-tray, she sat back with her hands in her lap, her lips compressed as primly as those of any country school-teacher exposed against her will to a burlesque show. “Little kids. Little innocent kids. It don't make sense.”

Psyche, meanwhile, utterly engrossed, moved slowly from one
canvas to another, missing nothing of brush stroke, colour, or composition. All that Nick had let fall in the course of his many monologues came back to her, and his crisp, ironic voice cut so clearly across her memory she almost expected to find him standing beside her. If she had, she knew she would have been unreservedly glad to see him, for she no longer thought of him as anything other than an artist. If she dreamed at all, it was not of Nick.

“Why haven't I come here before?” she wondered. “Why was I so long in discovering this place? I must come again with Kathie.” And, thinking this, she could not know that it would be a long time before she came back, and that she would never come with Kathie.

Reaching the end of the wall she had been following, she hesitated between circling the gallery in which she was, and moving on through another arch into the next. Looking at her watch, realizing that closing time would make it impossible for her to see much more that day, she decided to take a quick look into the room beyond.

She saw the
Venus
immediately. With an entire wall to itself, individually lit, it would have been impossible to miss it.

‘Bel— she gasped, and this time her voice was high and clear. “Bel—look! There's me!”

The sharp tap of Bel's high heels on the marble floor was the rapid tattoo of soldiery called to arms. Arriving in the second gallery, she had no need to ask questions.
The American Venus
, aloof and beautiful, was in herself a wordless answer to any question she might have posed.

Colour suffusing her cheeks, dimming bright patches of rouge, she said in a tight voice, “The dirty louse! Why the hell couldn't he have had the decency to be satisfied with making love to you!”

“That was only once,” Psyche told her, her eyes fixed on the painting.