The Goddess Abides: A Novel (16 page)

“And what is love?” she asked.

“I am finding out,” he said. “Someday—perhaps—I will tell you.”

The minutes had slipped away as they talked and suddenly the grandfather clock in a corner struck twelve. They waited in silence, and he reached for her hands and held them in both his own. At the twelfth stroke, he stooped and kissed her lips.

“It’s a new year,” he said. “A new year, and in it anything can happen.”

…But in the night she woke, and remembered everything that Jared had said about his uncle. In all her life only Edwin had been articulate about love and being a philosopher he had made even love a philosophy. Thinking of him, she could imagine him declaring in his gently dogmatic fashion that love had manifold forms, and none of these was to be summarily rejected. Thus remembering him, she found herself contrasting the two older men, Edwin so free in his own fashion within the limitless boundaries of his organized freedom and Edmond so controlled within his self-imposed restriction. Each in his own way proclaimed the supreme meaning of love, the one by acceptance and delight, the other by refusal and abstinence. The difference defined the nature of the two men, the one accepting and joyous in spite of age and infirmity, the other diffident, hiding himself in a mist of words, signifying—what? And Jared, how was it with him? Would love enlarge or confine him? For that matter, what would love do to her? Neither question could be answered as yet. She did not know the limits of love. She had only acknowledged love. She had declared, by such acknowledgment at least, its presence within her. The question now was what she would do with it—or more accurately, what it would do with her.

She lay in the silence of the night and the darkness until, oppressed, she put on the light by her bed and saw snowflakes piling on the sill of an open window and blowing softly upon the blue carpet of the floor. Getting up, she closed the window and brushed the snow into the brass fire shovel and thence upon the dead gray logs where the fire had died. She was about to get into bed, shivering with cold, when she heard footsteps pacing down the hall. She listened, wondering, and then put on her blue velvet dressing gown and opened her door. Edmond Hartley was at the head of the stairs about to descend, fully dressed, when he saw her.

“I am sleepless,” he said, “and I was about to go in search of a book I saw in the library today.”

“Shall I come to your help?” she asked.

“My dear lady, you are very kind.”

“In a minute,” she said, and returned to her mirror to brush her hair and pin it back, and touch her face with powder, her lips with color. Vanity, she told herself, but vain she was, even when she was alone. And leaving the room, she found him waiting at the head of the stair without the slightest sign of noticing that the blue of her robe matched the blue of her eyes, or that she was, in fact, quite beautiful. With an air of almost tolerant patience be allowed her to precede him down the stairs and into the library, where expertly he coaxed the dying coals in the fireplace into flames again, while she lit one lamp after another until the whole room glowed, the books on their shelves, the great bowl of flowers on the long mahogany table, the ruby red in the pattern of the Oriental rugs, the polished floor.

“Why are you sleepless?” she asked, seating herself by the fire.

He was searching a bookshelf now, his back to her.

“I am not a good sleeper at best,” he replied absently, “and in a strange house—ah, here’s the book I was looking for, a rare edition of Mallarme.”

“It belonged to my father,” she said.

“But he was a scientist—”

She broke in, “He was everything.”

“Ah, like Jared.”

He sat down in a large armchair opposite her and opened the book. Then, not looking at her, he went on, “I’ve been the worst possible person to bring up a lively brilliant boy. I haven’t dared to let myself love him—fearing myself, lest I love him too much—a poisonous love.”

“Can love be poisonous?” she asked.

He darted a strange sidewise look at her and closed the book. “Ah, yes, indeed it can. I learned that very early. I might say I was—conditioned to it when I was very young—by an older man.”

His lips seemed suddenly dry, and he ran his tongue over them. “I never thought I could ever tell that to anyone. But I want you to—to—know why I have never allowed Jared—to come close to me.”

He lifted his somber eyes and in them she saw a desperate pleading to be understood.

“I understand,” she said gently. “I do understand. And I think it most noble of you to—to use such restraint, such control, such reverence for true love. I respect you very much.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. I—I don’t know if I have ever been spoken to like that before. But I have never wanted to do anything—or seem to do anything—that would warp the—the meaning of love for Jared. It was better, I thought, to let him grow up without any expression of the love I truly feel for him rather than shape a false image of love. The image of love is so easily warped—misshaped—perverted somehow, so that never again does it appear what it is, the only reason for living, the only refuge, the only source of energy and soul’s growth. The very power of love—the most powerful force in life—makes love produce, when it is warped, or perverted, or even misplaced, the greatest suffering in life.”

He spoke so sincerely, so deeply, that she saw him anew, a man of profound and agonized feeling, and she was silent before him.

“Teach him, my dear,” he urged. “Teach him what love is. Only a woman can do that—a woman like you.”

“I will try,” she said.

…“I want you to come to New York and see how the hand is working,” Jared said over the telephone.

She was at her desk in the library one fine spring morning, the rhododendrons outside the window already showing shades of rose and magenta as she could see. The forsythias at the far end of the lawn were in their final golden bloom, their dying brilliance gleaming against the darkness of the flanking evergreens.

“And why must I come to New York?” she asked. “You know I don’t love that city.”

“I know, but it’s really wonderful to see how the hand is working, so well that the man is going home shortly. Besides, it will give you a reason to see my people.”

She knew by now, of course, that when he said “my people,” he meant the people who needed the instruments he designed to take the place of the hands and feet, the eyes, hearts, kidneys they might lose or had lost. She had scarcely seen him in the months since he and his uncle had spent the New Year with her, but his long telephone calls, made usually at midnight, and of late his short, dramatic letters, had kept him close to her. And she? It seemed that she had done nothing except play the grand piano in the music, room, attend a few committee meetings and dinners and concerts, and wait until he called or wrote. She no longer hid from herself the fact that he absorbed her entire inner life and thought, so that whatever she did was of no real importance in comparison with the necessity of being there in the house when he called. Let him find her always there, ready for his every need! When he wrote, she sent her immediate, answering letter, and in this communication, at once remote and intimate, they began to use endearments that might have lit a flame had they been in each other’s presence. Upon a page, in black ink, even the words “my dearest” remained cool.

“This is Tuesday,” he was saying. “Can you make it tomorrow? Then we will have dinner together—maybe dance somewhere? We’ve never done that. Odd, I never thought of it. There’s always so much to talk about when I am with you. About three? I’ll meet you at the rehabilitation center—you have the address.”

“Tomorrow at three,” she promised.

And how absurd, she thought, five minutes later, the call ended, that she was already thinking of what she should wear! She decided on a pale gray suit with a matching coat, very thin and gracefully cut and fitting her beautifully, with hat, shoes and bag of the same silvery shade, and this gray a foil for her apple-green jade jewelry which Arnold had bought for her in Hong Kong on their last journey around the world. Thus arrayed, she left the house the next day after luncheon, the chauffeur smart in a new black uniform. Though she was accustomed to the luxuries of her life, she felt today a peculiar happiness, as though she were young again, as though she were going to meet the lover she had never had. She put from her mind every small annoyance of her life and drifted away into a mood of total happiness. For hours she would be with Jared, whom now she knew she loved as she had never loved anyone before, so that she felt herself changed and glorified by love. Do what she might, how could she hide from him the truth? But why indeed must truth be hidden?

…“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jared demanded proudly.

They stood in a large rectangular room, bare of decoration but bright with the afternoon sun streaming through the uncurtained windows. Around the wails were narrow hospital beds, each occupied by men with varied amputations. There was not a whole man among them, she saw as she glanced about her. Only Jared was perfect, cruelly perfect, she thought, and it was to the credit of those pallid men, lying or sitting, that there was no hatred on their drawn faces.

What Jared called “beautiful” was in fact the most hideous object she had ever seen, a two-fingered instrument on a metal arm and coated with a rubbery surface the color of human flesh.

“Let me see how it works,” she countered.

“Show her,” Jared commanded.

The man, very young, to whom the instrument was attached somewhere under his shirt, obeyed. The two fingers moved, separately and together, like thumb and forefinger.

“Now take her hand,” Jared told him.

She controlled the instant desire to step back out of reach and instead let her hand be clasped gently by the two rubbery fingers.

“Can you
feel
her hand, how soft it is, how smooth?” Jared asked eagerly.

“Sure I can feel,” the man said, and let his right eyelid drop in a mischievous wink.

She laughed and instantly every man in the room was laughing and now she did not mind at all the touch of the rubbery fingers, the forefinger stroking the palm of her hand.

“That’s enough,” Jared said. “You needn’t carry even a good thing to an extreme.”

He was laughing, too, as he spoke, but she could see he was proud.

“You have every right to be proud,” she said, gently withdrawing her hand.

“Thanks—I’m happy, myself,” he replied. “This fellow—he lost his right arm in Danang, didn't you, Bill?”

“Danang it was, sir. I picked up what looked like a bunch of bananas and suddenly they went off—bang!”

Jared clapped his left shoulder.

“Well, what we’ve done together will help a lot of other men, too. Just remember that, will you?”

“Sure will,” the man said.

They moved away then, she and Jared, away from the wounded, and in the corridor she sighed, forgetting for the moment everything except the drawn face, the skeleton-thin body of the man with the hand,

“He’s so piteously young, Jared,” she said.

“Not yet twenty-one,” he agreed, “and I don’t know a greater joy in life than to see that substitute hand working.”

Absorbed in common joy, they forgot each other.

“How much does he really feel?” she asked, “and how much does his imagination supply?”

“Well, darling,” Jared said with a wry smile, “I daresay he’s felt many a soft hand in reality, and memory helps imagination, I’m sure—and eyesight, of course. Your hand
looks
soft, you know! But some of it’s real—the pressure of a pliant material against warm flesh. Ah, yes, a good deal of it is real, enough to convey pleasure, at any rate.”

What a loss, she thought, that the word of endearment he had seemed to use unconsciously had been so often carelessly used that now it was meaningless! Was it not meaningless? But he had never used it before. She stilled the sudden beat of her heart and spoke softly.

“I hope he will meet a girl someday very soon, who will be able to know what the hand you made for him can feel. Then she will think it is beautiful, too.”

“I hope so,” he said gravely.

He stopped at a door and took a key from his pocket and fitted it to the lock. “This is my laboratory. Remember I told you I wanted to work on the stethoscope? Well, I’m doing it.”

He opened the door and they went in. It was a fairly large room, crowded with machinery of a delicate sort, and at one end, under the windows stood a long worktable with a chromium top. Upon it was a complex piece of machinery.

“I don’t understand any of it,” she told him.

“It’s a method of testing stethoscopes,” he explained. “Very important, you know, that a stethoscope observes accurately and reports intelligibly. It must not have what it hears distorted by some sort of vibrating sound, for example. For this I’ve designed a monitory microphone—this thing here—but then the listening ear must hear properly, too. I’ve designed this artificial ear—doesn’t look much like an ear, does it? But it hears—that is, with a system like this—how much, actually, does the ear hear? How far? How clearly? But I had to check even this artificial ear with another one made of different material, and of course everything has to be checked again and again. I use recordings of the human chest wall—the heart, breathing, and so on—”

She listened, following knowledgeably enough now what he was saying, but while her brain comprehended, some other and more subtle part of her being was tensely aware of his physical nearness, his hands moving about the machinery as he demonstrated its functioning, his voice music to her ear, his profile, clear-cut against the gray walls, his whole dynamic being absorbed in what he was saying. A wave of joy swept through her being. She felt alive as she had never felt in her life before, even in her youth. They were together and bright hours lay ahead.

…Hours later she was in his arms. They were dancing between courses at their dinner in a famous restaurant, an after-theater place which would not be crowded until nearly midnight. They had come early, but the orchestra was already playing a slow waltz.