The Unpossessed (19 page)

Emmett didn't move.

“Is it better,” said Bruno quizzically, “to have a half-thought-out Magazine and produce it? or the perfect conception that can never appear?” He sat looking this conjecture in the eye. “Too much knowledge after all,” he answered himself in a puzzled tone, “is death. If a baby knew all that was involved in sucking its mother's milk it might be a total abstainer till it died. . . .”

Bruno's words had lost their meaning to him, but he sat straining every nerve to listen as he would have listened had God sounded suddenly over the radio. Perhaps, he thought, it would go on forever; perhaps Bruno would invite him to stay all night, and having enjoyed each other's companionship, they would discover, at breakfast, how indispensable they were, Emmett to Bruno as Bruno forever to Emmett. . . .

“. . . on the other hand, if an inventor stopped to think, how many people will be put out of work by my patent, how bad will it be for the sum total of humanity to freeze ice-cream mechanically . . . a little ruthlessness is necessary, to accomplish anything. . . .”

Oh, let it go on forever, Emmett prayed.

“Oh hell!” cried Bruno boyishly and suddenly was some other person, some eager non-professorial Bruno that Emmett didn't know; “my God! I've been forgetting the man-of-action—sitting and weighing abstractions as it were last week! back in the Chinese pre-Magazine pre-progress age!” He was curiously joyous, curiously alive; and cruelly indifferent to Emmett. “I've forgotten the human volcano, the Rip Van Winkle volcano. Run along home, Emmett, and let me erupt by myself. No, I really mean it—beat it, my boy, I want to be alone. I'll knock this out if it takes me till tomorrow morning—let's see, the meeting with your mother Friday, a boat comes in on Saturday . . .”

“But can't I stay and help,” said Emmett miserably; but he was standing, he knew he was beaten.

“No, no, you've done enough, get the hell out and rest,” said Bruno; and waved him away; and drew his chair closer to the table as though he were already by himself.

And so he was dismissed. Emmett sadly crossed the room. Home again, home to loneliness, and terror. For Emmett knew that without Bruno, out of Bruno's presence, he was
dead
, he belonged nowhere and to nobody else. The evening unrolled before him like a coma that must be got through somehow before he could come back to Bruno in the morning. He squared his shoulders for his end. But turning he saw that Bruno had forgotten him already; was rummaging (the unfamiliar man-of-action) over the littered table-top. Emmett's sadness turned to sudden hate (his only friend was keeping something from him!); hysteria mounted—an inexplicable mingling of his fear and hate and painful love; and as coldly as he could he said good night.

He shook the reproachful Emmett from his conscience. For he must not encourage Emmett, Bruno thought; neither for the boy's sake nor his own. Product of luxury without warmth and leisure without direction, Emmett would cling to anything to prolong his baby-state and turned to Bruno like an unweaned pup. And Bruno knew he had permitted it, allowed the boy to grow dependent, through a shameful corresponding weakness in himself. The thought of Emmett was distasteful now, tinged with a faint perversion. But he was done with meddling in younger, weaker lives, done with doing his living at cynical second-hand. He turned with vigor to the tangled Manifesto.

The symphony resumed its happy swell. The old triumvirate revived—Bruno, Jeffrey, Miles, each playing his assigned part in the heroic whole; the Black Sheep the youthful drums, quickening the tempo and sounding impatiently throughout; and Elizabeth the top part, the high part, the thin and soaring melody. Without the Sheep he knew the old triumvirate would weaken; he knew too well Jeffrey's straw-in-the-wind quality, Miles' too-rigid rules of thinking—but he loved them both, he loved the thing that the three of them together still represented in his mind: a bold minority, taking their stand (when they were just the Black Sheep's age) against the strong in brawn and numbers. The three standing together again brought back youth as Elizabeth did, injecting Bruno with a sentimental faith.

The important factor was Elizabeth. Small part of an ocean lay between them now, a matter of days, of hours. As she crossed the sea to come to him, he made loyal journeys through a clearing fog to her; and found her where she always must have been, in the very center of his life. Happy nostalgia swam over him because he knew they would rebuild together all that they had deliberately thrown away, the last movement of the symphony would commence with their first sight of one another. He bent determinedly over the Manifesto. He felt his old friends (however they split on small points, however impelled each of them still was to listen chiefly to his individual self) nevertheless on the main points solid behind him: that there was to be the Magazine, the culmination of all they had thought through and lived through since their ardent college days.

ELIZABETH knew that she was waking and she swam laboriously out of sleep: she knew that she would not know when she opened her eyes in what bed or what stage of life she would wake to. Not in Paris with Dennis Kirby; for a moment she felt him on her breast, his impression lay lightly like a shadow, and then was gone; not in Paris with Denny. Not in a studio smelling of turpentine; not in the little coffin-shaped room at college, with the library chimes ringing out clear and false across the campus. She knew she would not wake to the nursery at Longview with the sun coming up out of Lake Michigan, with Fräulein drawing back the curtains—she closed her eyes more tightly as though sleep might take her back; held them shut and prayed that when she fully waked some miracle would have taken place, and there she would be, back in that white iron bed, that light-flooded room; a child with pigtails scattered on the pillow—the rest, the other rooms, the subsequent beds, a fevered night-mare. Behind her own closed lids she lay safe and could
feel
in that deliberate dark the dimensions of the familiar nursery; she could feel the white-painted bureau on her right, the snapshot of Bruno in his sailor-suit, riding his first two-wheeler; the collection of eleven dolls with which she would not play because Bruno called it sissy; the heart-shaped locket which she wore even to bathe and sleep in, that Bruno's father gave her for her seventh birthday: the walls, the windows, Fräulein guarding them, pushing out the outside. Emptiness crept from her chest to run with a vague ache through her body, as though all her limbs were hollow. It was nostalgia; the strongest, most painful, the only real nostalgia: nostalgia for childhood, for oneself as one started to be.

Whatever bed I wake in I shall not belong there! I shall not be there! the ache compellingly taking over her body informed her.
I want to go back, to go back
, to before the fast express, go back twenty years and more to that era of timeless peace, to the days without end, the wide sunny days, each issued like a coin to be squandered recklessly; to be saved forever; each one a lifetime in itself, encompassing a thousand births, a thousand deaths, with a fine wide stream of warm brown family, a thin strong thread of happy Bruno, running through. Bruno explaining to a pair of pigtails the mysterious nature of time and eternity; where God lived; how babies came. Time rolling always out of a gigantic spool which unwound itself ponderously like syrup round and round before the window so many child's paces from a child's bed; jumping each morning like the hands of the school clock, giving out another day. Terror of being alone through the long, long nights: would daylight ever come again; had that afternoon of shooting marbles with Bruno in the back-yard been their last (the world ending every night when one was only seven)—then leaping with joy to find Fräulein at the windows; the time-spool jump: another day, a
day
, a day-long day, in which to live with Bruno.

But time narrowed, time conformed; the wide days were pressed into service, became so many units in a week; a week was recognized; one day it would be summer and the next day fall and seeing the bare branches emerge even a child knew that special fall would never come again. The day came wide and beautiful; but as its hours progressed they narrowed, then flew; and were lost down a dwindling funnel. There was a quick week of packing, of holding one's breath; the heart beat faster like the clock, the time-spool spinning negligently; and Bruno was gone, to prep-school.

Bewildering days, a foretaste of life without Bruno, dry and cold, no longer precious to wake to; time rolling faster, less important, from the great spool grown smaller, spinning quicker. Good that night came now; good the first snow, because spring would be that much sooner; and after spring summer and the thought of next year's fall more endurable by far than this one.
Give away my dolls, I'm not a child any more
, she told Fräulein, told her mother. How they laughed and cried over her.
Eight years old and not a child
, they cried,
why you're our baby, Betsey
—jealous and frightened that they could not live forever in their child's slow rhythm.
I'm not a child
, she firmly said.
Our melodramatic baby
, they laughed and cried.
Bruno's coming home, coming home for
CHRISTMAS,
they said; but aren't you glad, Elizabeth? Why, what a child! your only cousin coming home and—I believe the child's forgotten
BRUNO. They laughed and cried; they cried and laughed; the mothers, the fathers, the uncles and aunts. She closed her mouth and closed her face; she broke her bank to buy Bruno a present.

He's downstairs, Elizabeth you funny child! your grown-up cousin's come to see you! come and see Bruno in his first long pants
. She hid in her room; she hid his present; she brushed her hair standing consciously before the mirror for the first time in her life; she undid her pigtails, braided them all over again. She rushed down the first flight; she stopped dead on the landing, the window framed a picture she would never forget, her eyes large and trembling to receive it; she crept down the last stairs as though she had been summoned for punishment.
Doesn't he look handsome, Elizabeth?
they all cried and laughed, and stood like vultures in at the death. Strange Bruno stood there firmly planted on the carpet, his legs going down in their fine long pants, his face a yard above them, disconnected; beside him another boy, a stranger-boy, no stranger than Bruno, standing and laughing in triumph because Bruno had brought him home.
And look, he's brought you a friend, the Davidson boy, a beau
. She stood stock still on the bottom stair, a mile away; she thought of the safety of the landing, twenty steps above; her patent-leather feet refused to move.
Why you funny children!
cried the mothers, the fathers, the uncles and aunts,
you funny, funny children! don't you know your cousin any more, Elizabeth? don't you know your cousin, Bruno? How quickly children forget
, they all sighed, and smiled, and touched their eyes. The room stretched a mile between them, lined with strangers, poking fun and laughing. The strange boy continued to stand, obstinately, beside Bruno; his triumphant smile a ghastly challenge.
Ah, ah, she can't look at Bruno because he's brought home a friend, ah, fickle Elizabeth, your cousin's fickle, Bruno
. At last Bruno revolving slowly through the space, a prep-school man, a long-pants man; the boy beside him moving like a shadow smiling his strange triumphant smile.
Hello kid, meet my kid cousin Arthur, doesn't she look like a baby-lamb?
Shocked grown-up silence, amusement filtering through like pepper in her nostrils.
Show him you're a lady, Betsey, set him an example, tell Bruno how nice he looks in his new long pants, shake hands nicely with the David-son boy, tell him you're glad to meet him
. The stranger-boy with the stranger name held out his stranger prep-school hand. Bruno's long, long pants were stilts, sending his head a mile above her own so their eyes could never meet again; he stared like the stranger out over her head.
Bruno looks silly, I think
, she said. They stood there flanked against each other, pitted against each other, like hostile, stranger children; she ignored strange Arthur's hand.
And they used to be so devoted, inseparable, almost too much, we used to think
, moaned the mothers and fathers, the uncles and aunts;
children are so cruel
, they smiled and touched their eyes;
she's flirting with you, Arthur, don't mind if she doesn't shake hands
, they laughed and cried. But Bruno was climbing through the window with the stranger Arthur after him toward two bicycles which stood against the porch. Christmas died before it came; Bruno was gone before he had come home. The spool spun fast and brittle.

He called Tommy Spencer a fat-head when she asked Tommy to take her to the high-school dance; he said Jerry Marks (when she hung over the balcony of the gym to watch Jerry shoot baskets) was a matinee idol; he said Dick Hyams whose fraternity pin she wore for six months was a sissy, a jack-ass, a small-town sheik—and when Easter vacation came she gave Dick back his pin. Well, why don't
you
take me to the dance Bruno, she said; he laughed his superior laugh. You've got no sex-appeal for me, Betsey, he said; he was running around with the town's wild girls, hitting the high spots all around Chicago; and then he was writing letters from New York, all wise-cracks and adages, no news about himself; and briefly home again, sitting restlessly next door, unbearably dipped back in slow family life.
Get out, get out of it, Elizabeth, as soon as you can get out
. Off down the block on his bicycle, off down the block in his roadster. She couldn't stay home and get his letters; couldn't stay home and watch him tearing down the street, around the corner, out of her life. She could ride as fast as he. She could run like him banging the door behind her, she could leave the family sitting growing old with the safe mahogany chairs they sat on. She could step forever on the accelerator, she could sit a restless prisoner on the fast express, by his advice, with Bruno's sanction; she could go twenty times faster in her direction than Bruno in the other, she could fly, she could spin, she was casual, gay, she dropped him letters from way stations, he wrote back that men-artists were generally fools, that Wheelwright sounded like a ninny, she wrote that it wasn't Wheelwright any more, she had moved her toothbrush to the next one, he wrote back saying he hadn't raised his girl to be a travelling salesman, she stepped on the accelerator and met him for a mute three days in New York, then sprang on the train again, rolled on again, sped away again, faster and faster, careening on the downhill special, left him on the station platform with all they had to say and could not say standing like a spectre beside him, waving like a spectre after her,
don't forget to write
, she cried rapping on the windowpane, and
life goes on but you're ahead of it
, he roared above the roar of the train gathering motion, the train gathering noise and stood there looking after her with her own expression in his eyes while she bounced on the dusty straw seat and hurtled down the singing tracks.