Winter of artifice; three novelettes (5 page)

Laura too was looking at Stella with affection. Then she whispered to her father and Stella with her abnormally sensitive hearing caught the last words, "buy her stockings."

(From then on it was Laura who assumed all her father's sentimental obligations, it was Laura who sent gifts to his mother, to her later.)

The father and daughter went ofiF together through the most beautiful shopping streets of Warsaw. She had become acutely aware of her mended stockings now that Laura had noticed them. Her father would be ashamed of walking with her. But he did not seem concerned. He was walking now with the famous grace that the stage had so much enhanced, a grace which made it appear that when he bowed, or kissed a hand, or spoke a comphment, he was doing it with his whole soul. It gave to his courtships such a romantic totality that a mere bow over a woman's hand took on the air of a ceremony in which he laid his life at her feet.

He entered a luxurious cane shop. He had the finest canes spread before him. He selected the most precious of all woods, and the most delicately carved. He asked Stella for her approval. He emptied his pocketbook, saying: "I can still take you home in a cab." And he took her home in a cab. With his new, bmnished cane he poLQted out Stella's drab house to the cabman. With a gestiu-e of romantic devotion, as if he were laying a red carpet under her feet, he delivered her to her poverty, to the aggressions of creditors, to the anxieties, the humihations, the corroding pain of everyday want.

Today she was not walking with her father in mended stockings. But she was riding in taxis like an ambassador between Laura and her father. Laura sent her father an intricate Venetian vase on an incredibly slender stem which could not be entrusted to the moving van. Stella was holding it in one hand, her muff in the other, and at her feet lay packages of old love letters. And her father sent her back in the same taxi with a locket, a ring, photographs, letters.

Stella attended the thousandth performance of a play called The Orphan in which her father starred.

"The Orphan," he said, "that suits me well now, that is how I feel, abandoned by Laura." And speaking of the orphan, he the orphan, the abandoned one, the victim for the first time, he wept. (But not over Laura's pain, or broken faith.)

In the middle of the performance, when he was sitting in an armchair and speaking, suddenly his arms fell, and he sat stiffly back. It was so swift, so brusque, that he looked hke a broken marionette. No man could break this way, so sharply, so absolutely. People rushed on the stage. "It's a heart attack." said the doctor.

Stella accompanied him to his house. He lay rigid as in death.

She could not weep. For him, yes, for his sadness. Not for her father. All links were broken. But a man, yes, any man who suffered. The darling of women. White hair and elegance. Sohtude. All the women around him and none near enough. Stella unable to move nearer, because none could move nearer to him. He barred tlie way with his self-love. His self-love isolated him. Self-love the watchman, barring all entrance, all communication. One could not console him. He was dying because with the end of luxury, protection, of his role, his life ends. He took all his sustenance from woman but he never knew it.

It was not Stella who killed him. She had not been the one to say: you killed my love.

Pity convulsed her, but she could do nothing. He was fulfilhng his destiny. He had sought only his pleasure. He was dying alone on the stage of self-pity.

But when he was lying down on a bench in the dressing room, his collar for the first time carelessly open, the fat doctor hstening to his heart (breaking with self-pity), so slender, so stylized, so meticulously chiselled, like an effigy, a burning pity choked her.

Someone whose every word she had hated, whose every act and thought she condemned, whose every mannerism was false, every gesture a role, yet because this figure lay on a couch dying of self-pity, lay with his eyes closed in a supreme comedian's act, Stella could love and pity again. Does the love of the father never die, even when it is buried a million times under stronger loves, even when she had looked at him without illusion? The figure, the slenderness of the body, the fineness of its form, still escaped from the dark tomb of buried love and was alive, because he had so artfully lain dowTi Hke a victim, fainted before a thousand people, because he had been an actor until the end; as for Laura, and Stella's mother — no one had seen or heard them weep.

A fragile Stella, lying in her ivory satin bed, amongst mirrors.

Her eloquent body can speak out all the feelings in the language of the dance. Now her hands he tired on her knees, tired and defeated.

Her dance is perpetually broken by the wounds of love.

In her white nightgown she does not look like an enchantress but hke an orphan.

In her white nightgovra she runs out of her room downstairs to spare the servants an added fatigue, she the exhausted one.

Her body and face so animated that they do not seem made of flesh, but like antennae, breath, nerve.

Dehcate, she Hes back hke a tired child, but so knowing.

Bright, she speaks as she feels, always.

Unreal — her voice vanishes to a whisper, as if she herself were going to vanish and one must hold one's breath to hear her.

Oriental, she takes the pose of the Bah dancers. Her head always

free from her body like the bird's head so free from its fragile stem.

The language of her hands. As they curve, leap, circle, trepidate, one fears they will always end clasped in a prayer tliat no one should hurt her.

No role could contain her intensity.

She gave off such a briUiance in acting it was unbearable. Too great an exaltation for the role, which breaks like too small a vessel. Too great a warmth. The role was dwarfed, was twisted and lost. When she begged for the roles which could contain this intensity they were denied her.

Off the stage she continued the same mischievous wrinkling of her little nose, the same entranced eyes, tlie child's ease and grace and impulsiveness (in the most pompous restaurant of the city she reached out towards a passing silver tray carried by a pompous waiter and stole a fried potato).

The intensity made the incidents she portrayed seem inadequate and small. There was a glow from so deep a source of feeling that it drowned the mediocre personages of the Hollywood gallery.

She ate like a child, avidly, as if in fear that it would be taken away from her, forbidden her by some parent. Like the child, she had no coquetry. She was unconscious of her tangled hair and liked her face washed of make-up. If someone made love to her while slie still carried the weight of the wax on her eyelashes, if someone made love to her artificially exaggerated eyelashes, she was offended, as if by a betrayal.

She was a child carrying a very old soul and burdened with it, and wishing to deposit it in some great and passionate role. In Joan of Arc, or Marie Bashkirtseff ... or Rejane, or Eleonora Duse.

There are those who disguise themselves, like Stella's father.

who disguised himself and acted what he was not. But Stella only wanted to transform and enlarge herself and wanted to act only what she felt she was, or could be. And Hollywood would not let her. Hollywood had its sizes and standards of characters. One could not transgress certain hmited standard sizes.

Phihp. When Stella first saw him she laughed at him. He was too handsome. She laughed: "Such a wonderful Don Juan plumage," she said, and turned away. The Don Juan plimnage had never charmed her.

But the next morning she saw him walking before her, holding himself as in a state of euphoria. She was still mocldng his magnificence. But as he passed her, with a free, large, lyrical walk, he smiled at his companion so briUiant a smile, so wild, so sensual that she felt a pang. It was the smile of joy, a joy unknown to her.

At the same time she took a deeper breath into her lungs, as if the air had changed, become free of suflFocating fogs, noxious poisons.

He was at first impenetrable to her, because the climate of lightness was anew to her.

She glided on the wings of his smile and his humor.

When she left him she heard the wind through the leaves hke the very breath of life and again she breathed the large free altitudes where anguish cannot reach to suffocate.

She followed with him the capricious outlines of piu^e desire, trusting his smile.

The pursuit of joy. She possessed his smile, his eyes, his assur-

ance. There are beings who come to one to the tune of music. She always erpected him to appear in a sleigh, to the tune ot sleigh bells. As a child she had heard sleigh bells and thought: they have the sound of joy. When she opened his cigarette case she expected the tinkling, light, joyous music of music boxes.

The absence of pain must mean it was not love but an enchantment. He came bringing joy and when he left she felt it was to go to his mysterious source and fetch some more. She waited wdthout impatience and without fear. He was replenisliing his supply. And every object he came in contact with was charged with the music that causes gayety to flower.

The knowledge that he was coming held her in a suspense of pleasure, that of a high, perilous trapeze leap. The long intervals between their meetings, the absence of love, made it like some brilhant trapeze incident, spangled, accompanied by music. She could admire their deftness and accuracy in keeping themselves outside of the circle of pain. The httle seed of anguish to which she was so susceptible could not germinate in this atmosphere.

She laughed when he confessed to her his Don Juan fatigues, the exigencies of the role women imposed upon him. "Women keep such strict accoimts and compare notes to see if you are always at the same level!" A weary Don Juan resting his head upon her knees. As if he knew that for her, awake or asleep, he was always the magician of joy.

He bore no resemblance to any other person or moment of her Ufa She felt as if she had escaped from a fatal, repetitious pattern.

One evening Stella entered a restaurant alone and was seated at ■17

the side of Bruno. So much time had passed and she felt herself in another world, yet the sight of Bruno caused her pain. He was deeply disturbed.

They sat together and lingered over the dinner.

At midnight Stella was to meet Philip. At eleven-thirty when she began to gather her coat, Bruno said: "Let me see you home."

Thinking of the possibility of an encounter between him and Phihp (at midnight PhiUp was coming to her place), she showed hesitation. This hesitation caused Bruno such acute pain that he began to tremble. At all cost, she felt, he must not know.... So she said quickly: "I'm not going home. I'm expected at some friends'. I forgot them when I saw you. But I promised to drop in."

"Can I take you there?"

She thought: if I mention friends he knows, he will come with me. She said: "Just put me in a taxi."

This reawakened his doubts. Again a look of pain crossed his face, and Stella was hurt by it, so she said hastily and spontaneously: "You can take me there. It's on East Eighty-ninth."

While he talked tenderly in the taxi, she thought desperately that she must find a house with two entrances, of which there are many on Fifth Avenue, but as she had never been on East Eighty-ninth Street, she wondered what she would find on the corner, perhaps a club, or a private house, or a Vanderbilt mansion.

From the taxi window she looked anxiously at the big, empty lot on the right and the private house on the left. Bruno's voice so vulnerable, her fear of hiu-ting liim. Time pressing, and Philip waiting for her before the door of her apartment. Then she signalled the driver to stop before an apartment house on the corner of Eighty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue.

Then she kissed Bruno hghtly but was startled when he stepped out with her and dismissed the taxi. "I need a walk," he said.

First of all the front door was locked and she had to ring for the doorman whom she had not expected to see quite so soon. As she continued to walk into the hallway, he asked. "Who do you want to see? Where are you going?"

She could only say: "There is a door on Madison Avenue?" This aroused his suspicion and he answered roughly: "Why do you want to know? Who do you want to see?"

"Nobody," said Stella. "I just came in here because there was a man following me and annoying me. I thought I might walk through and slip out of the other entrance and get a cab and go home."

"That door is locked for the night. You can't go through there."

"Very well, then, I'll wait here for a while until that man leaves."

The doorman could see through the door the figure of Bruno walking back and forth. What had happened? Was he considering trying to find her? Did he beheve she had no friends in this house and that he would catch her coming out again? Was he intuitively jealous and wondering if his intuition was right? Waiting. He waited there, smoking, walking in the snowy night. She was sitting in the red-carpeted hall, in a red plu.sh chair, while the doorman paced up and down, and Bruno paced up and down before the house.

Thinking of Phihp waiting for her, sitting there, heart beating and pounding, mind whirling.

She stood up and walked cautiously to the door and saw Bruno still walking in the cold.

Pain and laughter, pain out of the old love for Bruno, laughter from some inner, secret sense of playing with difficulties.

She said to the doorman: "That man is still there. Listen, I must get away somehow. You must do something for me."

Not too gallantly, he called the elevator boy. The elevator boy took her down the cellar, through a labyrinth of grey hallways. Another elevator boy joined them. She told them about the man who followed her, adding details to the story.

Passing trunks, vaUses, piles of newspapers, and rows and rows of garbage cans, then bowing their heads, they passed through one more aUeyway, up some stairs and imlocked the back door.

One of the boys went for a taxi. She thanked them, v^dth the gayety of a child in a game. They said it was a great pleasure and that New York was a hell of a place for a lady.