Bad Characters Page 11

  The voice speaking into the phone took on a new tone, and Hannah, noticing this, looked out through the crack again. “What? Oh, please don’t change the subject, pet, I really want your help. It isn’t a trifle, it’s terribly important, I really think it is the final effrontery.… All right, then, if you promise that we can come back to it.” With her free hand, Hannah’s mother lightly stroked the cat, who did not heed, and she lay back among her many pillows, listening to her sister but letting her eyes rove the room as if she were planning changes in its decoration. “Yes, I did hear it but I can’t remember where,” she said inattentively. Then, smiling in the pleasure of gossip, forgetting herself for a moment, she went on, “Perhaps I heard it from Peggy the night she came to dinner with that frightful new man of hers. That’s it—it was from him I heard it, and automatically discounted it for no other reason than that I took an instantaneous dislike to him. If he is typical of his department, the C.I.A. must be nothing more nor less than the Gestapo.”

  Hannah’s head began to ache and she rolled it slowly, looking up the steep, ladderlike steps into the shadowy attic. She was bored now that the talk was not of her, and she only half heard her mother’s agile voice rising, descending, laughing quickly, pleading, “Oh, no! It’s not possible!” and she sucked her fingers, one by one. Her tears had stopped and she missed them as she might have missed something she had lost. Like her hair, like all her golden princess curls that the barber had gazed at sadly as they lay dead and ruined on the tiled floor.

  * * *

  Now that Hannah’s hair was short, her days were long: it was a million hours between breakfast and lunch, and before, it had been no time at all, because her mother, still lying in her oceanic bed, had every morning made Hannah’s curls, taking her time, telling anyone who telephoned that she would call back, that just now she was busy “playing with this angel’s hair.”

  Today was Wednesday, and Hannah had lived four lifetimes since Saturday afternoon. Sunday had been endless, even though her brothers and her sister had been as exciting as ever, with their jokes and contests and their acrobatics and their game of cops-and-robbers that had set the servants wild. But even in their mad preoccupation it had been evident that the sight of Hannah embarrassed them. “The baby looks like a skinned cat,” said Andy, and Hughie said, “It was a dopey thing to do. The poor little old baby looks like a mushroom.” The parents did nothing to stop this talk, for all day long they were fighting behind the closed door of the den, not even coming out for meals, their voices growing slower and more sibilant as they drank more. “I hate them,” Johnny had said in the middle of the long, musty afternoon, when the cops were spent and the robbers were sick of water-pistol fights. “When they get stinking, I hate them,” said Johnny. “I bet a thousand dollars he had had a couple when he had them cut the baby’s hair.” Janie shouted, “Oh, that baby, baby, baby, baby! Is that goofy baby the only pebble on the beach? Why do they have to mess up Sunday fighting over her? I’m going crazy!” And she ran around in a circle like a dog, pulling at her hair with both hands.

  On Monday morning, when Hannah’s father took the older children off to Marion Country Day School on his way to the city, she had nearly cried herself sick, feeling that this Monday the pain of their desertion was more than she could bear. She would not let go of Janie’s hand, and she cried, “You’ll be sorry if you come back and find I’m dead!” Janie, who was ten and hot-blooded—she took after Daddy, who had Huguenot blood—had slapped Hannah’s hand and said, “The nerve of some people’s children!” Hannah had stood under the porte-cochere, shivering in her wrapper and slippers, until the car went out the driveway between the tulip trees; she had waved and called, “Goodbye, dearest Janie and Johnny and Andy and Hughie!” Only Johnny had looked back; he rolled down the window and leaned out and called, “Ta-ta, half pint.” They were all too old and busy to pay much attention to her, though often they brought her presents from school—a jawbreaker or a necklace made of paper clips. The four older children were a year apart, starting with John, who was thirteen, and ending with Janie, and when family photographs were taken, they were sometimes lined up according to height; these were called “stair-step portraits,” and while Hannah, of course, was included, she was so much smaller than Janie that she spoiled the design, and one time Uncle Harry, looking at a picture taken on Palm Sunday when all five children were sternly holding their palms like spears, had said, pointing to Hannah, “Is that the runt of the litter or is it a toy breed?” Andy, who was Uncle Harry’s pet, said, “We just keep it around the house for its hair. It’s made of spun gold, you know, and very invaluable.” This evidently was something the barber had not known, for he had swept the curls into a dustpan and thrown them into a chute marked “Waste.” She wondered how long they would keep her now that her sole reason for existence was gone.

  In the other days, after Daddy and the children left and the maids began their panicky, silent cleaning, flinging open all the windows to chill the house to its heart, Hannah would run upstairs to the big bedroom to sit on the foot of the bosomy bed and wait while her mother drank her third cup of coffee and did the crossword puzzle in the Tribune. When she was stuck for a definition, she would put down her pencil and thoughtfully twist the diamond ring on her finger; if it caught the sun, Hannah would close her eyes and try to retain the flashing swords of green and purple, just as she unconsciously tried to seal forever in her memory the smell of the strong Italian coffee coming in a thin black stream out of the silver pot. Hannah remembered one day when her mother said to the cat, “What is that wretched four-letter word that means ‘allowance for waste,’ Nephew? We had it just the other day.” Finally, when the puzzle was done and Edna had taken away the tray, she stretched out her arms to Hannah, who scrambled into her embrace, and she said, “I suppose you want your tawny tresses curled,” and held her at arm’s length and gazed at her hair with disbelieving eyes. “Bring us the brush, baby.” All the while she brushed, then combed, then made long, old-fashioned sausage curls, turning and molding them on her index finger, she talked lightly and secretly about the dreams she had had and Christmas plans and what went on inside Nephew’s head and why it was that she respected but could not bear Andy’s violin teacher. She included Hannah, as if she were thirty years old, asking for her opinion or her corroboration of something. “Do you agree with me that Nephew is the very soul of Egypt? Or do you think there are Chinese overtones in his style?” After telling a dream (her dreams were full of voyages; one time she sailed into Oslo in Noah’s ark and another time she went on the Queen Mary to Southampton in her night clothes without either luggage or a passport), she said, “What on earth do you suppose that means, Hannah? My id doesn’t seem to know where it is at.” Bewitching, indecipherable, she always dulcified this hour with her smoky, loving voice and her loving fingers that sometimes could not resist meandering over Hannah’s head, ruining a curl by cleaving through it as she exclaimed, “Dear Lord, I never saw such stuff as this!” Actually, her own hair was the same vivacious color and the same gentle texture as Hannah’s, and sometimes her hands would leave the child’s head and go to her own, to stroke it lovingly.

  * * *

  Lately now, for this last month, when the afternoons were snug and short and the lamps were turned on early and the hearth fires smelled of nuts, there had been another hour as well when Hannah and her hair had been the center of attention. Every day at half past two, she and her mother drove in the toylike English car over to Mr. Robinson Fowler’s house, three miles away, on the top of a bald and beautiful hill from which it was possible, on a clear day, to see the beaches of Long Island. In a big, dirty studio, jammed with plaster casts and tin cans full of turpentine and stacked-up canvases and nameless metal odds and ends, Mr. Fowler, a large, quiet man who mumbled when he talked, was painting a life-size portrait of Hannah and her mother. Her mother, wearing a full skirt of scarlet felt and a starched white Gibson-girl shirt and a black ribbon in her hair, sat on
a purple Victorian sofa, and Hannah, in a blue velvet jacket trimmed with black frogs and a paler-blue accordion-pleated skirt, stood leaning against her knee. In the picture, these colors were all different, all smudgy and gray, and the point of this, said Mr. Fowler, was to accent the lambencies of the hair. Before they took their pose, all the morning’s careful curls were combed out, for Mr. Fowler wanted to paint Hannah’s hair, he murmured in his closed mouth, “in a state of nature.” Occasionally, he emerged from behind his easel and came across to them with his shambling, easygoing, friendly gait, to push back a lock of hair that had fallen over Hannah’s forehead, and the touch of his fingers, huge as they were, was as light as her mother’s.

  Hannah liked the heat of the studio, and the smell of the tea perpetually brewing on an electric grill, and the sight of the enormous world of hills and trees and farms and rivers through the enormous windows, and she liked the quiet, which was broken only once or twice in the course of the hour’s sitting by an exchange of a casual question and answer between Mr. Fowler and her mother, half the time about her hair. “It must never be cut,” said the painter one day. “Not a single strand of it.” After the sitting was over and Hannah and her mother had changed back into their regular clothes, Mr. Fowler drew the burlap curtains at the windows and turned on the soft lamps. Then he and her mother sat back in two scuffed leather armchairs drinking whiskey and talking in a leisurely way, as if all the rest of the time in the world were theirs to enjoy in this relaxed geniality. Hannah did not listen to them. With her cup of mild, lemony tea, she sat on a high stool before a blackboard at the opposite end of the room and drew spider webs with a nubbin of pink chalk. Mr. Fowler and her mother never raised their voices or threw things at each other or stormed out of the room, banging doors, and Hannah was sorry when it was time to go home where that kind of thing went on all the time, horrifying the housemaids, who never stayed longer than two months at the most, although the cook, who had a vicious tongue herself, had been with them ever since Johnny could remember.

  The picture, when it was finished, was going to hang in the drawing room over an heirloom lowboy, where now there hung a pair of crossed épées, used by Hannah’s father and his adversary in a jaunty, bloody Studentenmensur at Freiburg the year he went abroad to learn German. The lilac scar from the duel was a half moon on his round right cheek.

  * * *

  Now the picture would never be finished, since Hannah’s corn-tassel hair was gone, and the sunny hour at the start of the day and the teatime one at the end were gone with it.

  Hannah, sitting on the attic stairs, began to cry again as she thought of the closed circle of her days. Even her sister’s and her brothers’ return from school was not the fun it had been before; her haircut had become a household issue over which all of them squabbled, taking sides belligerently. Janie and Andy maintained it did not matter; all right, they said, what if the baby did look silly? After all, she didn’t go to school and nobody saw her. Johnny and Hughie and the cook and the maids said that it did matter, and Johnny, the spokesman for that camp, railed at his father behind his back and called him a dastard. But all the same, no one paid any attention to Hannah; when they spoke of “the baby,” they might have been speaking of the car or a piece of furniture; one would never have known that she was in the room, for even when they looked directly at her, their eyes seemed to take in something other than Hannah. She felt that she was already shrinking and fading, that all her rights of being seen and listened to and caressed were ebbing away. Chilled and exposed as she was, she was becoming, nonetheless, invisible.

  The tears came less fast now, and she heard her mother say, “How can I help looking at it closely? I shall eventually have to go to an analyst, as you perfectly well know, if I am to continue this marriage until the children are reasonably grown. But in the meantime, until I get my doctor, who can I talk to but you? I wouldn’t talk to you if you weren’t my sister, because I don’t think you’re discreet at all.” Sad, in her covert, Hannah saw that her mother was now sitting up straight against the headboard and was smoking a cigarette in long, meditative puffs; the smoke befogged her frowning forehead.

  “Forget it, darling,” she continued. “I know you are a tomb of silence. Look, do let me spill the beans and get it over with. It will put me into a swivet, I daresay, and I’ll have to have a drink in my bath, but the way I feel, after these nights I’ve had, that’s in the cards anyhow.… Oh, Christ, Louise, don’t preach to me!”

  Briefly, she put down the telephone and dragged Nephew to her side. Then she resumed, “Excuse me. I was adjusting my cat. Now, dear, right now, you can forget my ‘charitable construction’ because, of course, that’s rot. At this juncture, neither one of us does anything by accident. I cannot believe that criminals are any more ingenious than wives and husbands when their marriages are turning sour. Do you remember how fiendish the Irelands were?

  “Well, the night before the haircutting, we had a row that lasted until four, starting with Rob and going on from him to all the other men I know—he thinks it’s bad form (and that’s exactly how he puts it) that I still speak fondly of old beaux. He suspects me of the direst things with that poor pansy the decorators sent out to do the carpets on the stairs, and he’s got it firmly rooted in his mind that Rob and I are in the middle of a red-hot affair. He doesn’t know the meaning of friendship. He’s got a sand dune for a soul. He suggested loathsomely that Rob and I were using Hannah as a blind—oh, his implications were too cynical to repeat.

  “All this went on and on until I said that I would leave him. You know that old blind alley where any feint is useless because when five children are involved, one’s hands are tied. Unless one can be proved mad. If only I could be! I would give my eyes to be sent away for a while to some insane asylum like that one Elizabeth loved so.

  “It was hideous—the whole battle. We were so squalid with drink. We drink prodigiously these days. The ice ran out and we didn’t even take time to go get more, so we drank whiskey and tap water as if we were in a cheap hotel, and I kept thinking, How demeaning this is. But I couldn’t stop. This was the worst quarrel we’ve ever had—by far the most fundamental. The things we said! We could have killed each other. In the morning, not even our hangovers could bring us together. And let me tell you, they were shattering. If I hadn’t known it was a hangover, I would have sent for an ambulance without thinking twice. Hugh sidled around like a wounded land crab and swore he had fractured his skull. Fortunately, the children, all except the baby, had been asked to the Fosters’ to skate, so at least we didn’t have to put up appearances—we do that less and less as it is. But finally we began to pull ourselves together about noon with Bloody Marys, and when he proposed that he take Hannah into town and buy her lunch and some shoes, I almost forgave him everything, I was so delighted to have the house to myself. I would not rise to that bait about my neglecting the welfare of my children’s feet. All I could think of was just being alone.

  “I should have known. I think I might have sensed what was up if I hadn’t been so sick, because as they were about to leave, the baby asked why I hadn’t curled her hair and Hugh said, ‘You leave that to me today.’ Now, looking back on it, I can see that he rolled his eyes in that baleful, planning way of his and licked one corner of his mouth. But even if I had noticed, I still would never have dreamed he would be so vile.

  “It goes without saying that we have been at swords’ points ever since, and it doesn’t help matters to see the child so woebegone, wearing this look of ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ How can one explain it away as an accident to a child when one perfectly knows that accident is not involved? Her misery makes me feel guilty. I am as shy of her as if I had been an accessory. I can’t console her without spilling all the beans about Hugh. Besides, you can’t say to a child, ‘Darling, you are only a symbol. It was really my beautiful hair that was cut off, not yours.’…

  “Rob crushed? Oh, for God’s sake, no, not crushed—that�
�s not Rob’s style. He’s outraged. His reaction, as a matter of fact, annoys me terribly, for he takes the whole thing as a personal affront and says that if Hugh had wanted to make an issue of my afternoons in his studio, he should have challenged him to a duel with the Freiburg swords. His theory, you see, is that Hugh has been smoldering at the thought of these testimonials of his manliness being replaced by the portrait. Rob claims that Hugh hates art—as of course he does—and that it is the artist in him, Rob, not the potential rival, that he is attacking. Needless to say, this gives him a heaven-sent opportunity to berate me for living in the camp of the enemy. He was horrid on Monday. He called me an opportunist and a brood mare. It depresses me that Rob, who is so intuitive about most things, can’t see that I am the victim, that my values have been impugned. Today I hate all men.

  “What am I going to do? What can I do? I’m taking her this afternoon to Angelo to see what he can salvage out of the scraps that are left. I’ll get her a new doll—one with short hair. That’s all I can do now. The picture will never be finished, so the duelling swords will stay where they are. And I will stay where I am—Oh, there’s no end! Why on earth does one have children?”

  For a minute or two her mother was silent, leaning back with her eyes closed, listening to Aunt Louise. Hannah no longer envied the cat curled into her mother’s arm; she hated his smug white face and she hated her mother’s sorrowful smile. Hot and desolate and half suffocated, she wished she were one of the angry bees. If she were a bee, she would fly through the crack of the attic door and sting Nephew and her mother and her father and Janie and Andy and Mr. Fowler. “Zzzzzzz,” buzzed the child to herself.

  * * *

  After the telephone conversation was over and her mother had got up and gone to run her bath, Hannah let herself silently out the door into the hall and went downstairs to the kitchen. The cook was dicing onions, weeping. “There’s my baby,” she said as Hannah came to stand beside her, “my very own baby.” She put down her knife and wiped her hands and her eyes on her apron and scooped Hannah up in a bear hug.