Bad Characters Page 14

  “No, no! Control yourself! We’d better not try to talk any more now—you call me when you can.”

  The parlor door opened, revealing Uncle Francis with a glass of sherry in his hand.

  “Wait, Mary! Don’t hang up!” Polly cried. There was a facetious air about her uncle; there was something smug. “I’ll get the sleeper from Denver tonight,” she said.

  When she hung up, her uncle opened the door wider to welcome her to bad brown sherry; they had not turned on the lights, and Aunt Jane, in the twilight, sat in her accustomed place.

  “Poor angel,” said Uncle Francis.

  “I am so sorry, so very sorry,” said Aunt Jane.

  When Polly said nothing but simply stared at their impassive faces, Uncle Francis said, “I think I’d better call up Wilder. You ought to have a sedative and go straight to bed.”

  “I’m going straight to Boston,” said Polly.

  “But why?” said Aunt Jane.

  “Because he’s there. I love him and he’s there.”

  They tried to detain her; they tried to force the sherry down her throat; they told her she must be calm and they asked her to remember that at times like this one needed the love and the support of one’s blood kin.

  “I am going straight to Boston,” she repeated, and turned and went quickly up the stairs. They stood at the bottom calling to her: “You haven’t settled your affairs. What about the bank?” “Polly, get hold of yourself! It’s terrible, I’m heartbroken for you, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  She packed nothing; she wanted nothing here—not even the new clothes she had bought in which to be a bride. She put on a coat and a hat and gloves and a scarf and put all the money she had in her purse and went downstairs again. Stricken but diehard, they were beside the front door.

  “Don’t go!” implored Aunt Jane.

  “You need us now more than ever!” her uncle cried.

  “And we need you. Does that make no impression on you, Polly? Is your heart that cold?”

  She paid no attention to them at all and pushed them aside and left the house. She ran to the station to get the last train to Denver, and once she had boarded it, she allowed her grief to overwhelm her. She felt chewed and mauled by the niggling hypochondriacs she had left behind, who had fussily tried to appropriate even her own tragedy. She felt sullied by their disrespect and greed.

  How lonely I have been, she thought. And then, not fully knowing what she meant by it but believing in it faithfully, she said half aloud, “I am not lonely now.”

  The Captain’s Gift

  Though it is wartime, it is spring, so there are boys down in the street playing catch. Babies and dogs are sunning in the square and here and there among them, on green iron benches under the trees, rabbis sit reading newspapers. Some stout women and some thin little girls have brought crusts of bread in paper bags and are casting crumbs to the pigeons. There is a fire in one of the wire trash baskets and bits of black ash fly upward, but there is no wind at all to carry them off and they slowly descend again. Out of the windows of the maternity hospital, new mothers, convalescent, wearing flowered wrappers, lean to call to their friends who stand in little clumps on the sidewalk, waving their arms and shouting up pleasantries and private jokes in Yiddish. They are loath to end the visit, but finally they must, for unseen nurses speak to the women at the windows and they retire, crying good-humoured farewells and naming each friend by name: Goodbye, Uncle Nathan! Goodbye, Mama! Goodbye, Isabel! Goodbye, Mrs. Leibowitz! Goodbye! In the pushcarts at the curbstone are lilacs and mountain laurel, pots of grape hyacinth and petunias for window-boxes; between sales the venders rearrange their buckets and talk with the superintendents of the apartment buildings who idle, smoking, in the cellar entries where they lean against the tall ash cans. Six blocks away, the clock at St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie strikes four.

  Mrs. Chester Ramsey, the widow of the general, has one of the very few private houses in the neighborhood. At the window of her drawing room on the second floor, she is writing letters at a little desk that looks like a spinet. Now and then, pausing for a word, she glances through the marquisette curtains that blur the scene below and impart to it a quality she cannot name but which bewitches her at this time of day, especially in the spring. It separates her while it does not take her quite away; she becomes of and not of the spectacle. And then, too, it makes her nostalgic for the days, long ago, when young matrons, her friends, strolled through the square under their parasols, when trim French nursemaids wheeled babies, whose names she knew, in English prams; and little girls in sailor hats walked briskly with their governesses to confirmation class; when she herself was well-known there and was greeted and detained innumerable times in her passage through the flower-lined walks.

  But there is no bitterness at all in her reflection; indeed, she enjoys the lazy turmoil of the anonymous crowd below. Often, on a nice day like this if no one is coming in to tea, she goes out to sit on one of the benches, and it is always thrillingly strange to her that no one notices her, even though she wears the sort of clothes her mother might have done when she was an old lady: a black taffeta dress with a long skirt and a tightly buttoned, high-necked jacket with a garnet brooch at the throat, a small velvet hat, black silk gloves. She is not in the least unconscious of her appearance, but she does not hope to be greeted with a flurry of surprise; rather, its absence is what she looks forward to, and she is like a child, who, dressed in her mother’s clothes, is accepted as a grown-up. She is no more eccentric than the bearded rabbis or the brown gypsy women who occasionally waddle along the paths with their greasy striped skirts and their waist-long strings of beads. Sometimes, sitting there, she feels that she is invisible. Surely, she thinks, the people would remark on her if they could see her; they would certainly realize that in her reside memories of this square and this neighborhood older than some of the plane trees. She is surprised and not resentful that none of them knows that she alone belongs here.

  The lady’s friends and relatives, who live uptown, year after year try to dislodge her from her old and inconvenient house. It is, they feel nervously, much too close to Third Avenue with its swarming, staggering riffraff, and living alone as she does with only two faithful maids (one of whom is deaf) and a choreman, she would be quite defenceless if burglars came. Moreover, the fire department has condemned her house as well as many others in the block, and they shudder to think of Mrs. Ramsey’s being trapped in her bedroom at the back of the second floor, far from help. There is no question about it: she would be burned in her bed. But she baffles them with what they say is a paradox. She says, “I have never liked change, and now I am too old for it.” They protest, unable sometimes to keep the note of exasperation out of their voices, that change is exactly what they want to preserve her from. They predict, with statistics to back them up, that the neighborhood will go still further downhill and soon will be another Delancey Street. She returns that while she is touched by their solicitude, she has no wish to move. She is, she thanks them, quite at home. Finally they have to give up and when they have accepted defeat with a sigh, they begin to admire her stubbornness all over again, and to say it is really heroic the way she has refused to acknowledge the death of the past. The ivory tower in which she lives is impregnable to the ill-smelling, rude-sounding, squalid-looking world which through the years has moved in closer and closer and now surrounds her on all sides. Incredibly, she has not been swallowed up. She has not gone out of her way to keep the streets in their place, but the streets have simply not dared to encroach upon her dignity. Take the matter of the smells, for example. Her visitors, stepping out of their taxis before her door, are almost overpowered by the rank, unidentifiable emanations from cellars and open windows: food smells (these people think of nothing but food) that are so strong and so foreign and so sickening that they call to mind the worst quarters of the worst Near Eastern cities. And yet, the moment the door of Mrs. Ramsey’s house closes upon them, shutting out the lad
en atmosphere, they have forgotten the stink which a moment before they had thought unforgettable, and are aware only of aged pot-pourri, of lemon oil, and of desiccated lavender in linen closets.

  Despite her refusal to leave her inaccessible slums, Mrs. Ramsey passes hardly a day without at least one caller for she remains altogether charming, preserving the grace of manner and the wit that marked her at her first Assembly almost sixty years ago. She has not, that is, kept even a suggestion of her beauty. The flesh has worn away from her crooked bones and her white hair is yellowish and rather thin; she has a filmy cataract over one eye and in her skinny little face, her large nose has an Hebraic look. Indeed, though she was famous for her looks, no one on first meeting her ever says, “She must have been a beauty in her day.” It is quite impossible to reconstruct her as she might have been since there is nothing to go on; the skeleton seems quite a badly botched job, and the face has no reminder in it of a single good feature. One supposes, in the end, that she was one of those girls whose details are not independently beautiful, but who are, nevertheless, a lovely composition. General Ramsey, on the other hand, five years dead, was a handsome man at the very end of his life, and the portrait painted just before his final illness, shows him to be keen-eyed, imposing, with a long aristocratic head on a pair of military shoulders, heavily adorned.

  A stranger, having heard of Mrs. Ramsey’s charm, thinks when he first sees her that it must lie in a tart wit since she looks too droll, too much like a piquant chipmunk, to have a more expansive feminine elegance. But while the wit is there, bright and Edwardian, this is not the chief of her gifts. Rather, it is her tenderness and pity, her delicate and imaginative love, her purity that makes her always say the right thing. She is so wise a husbandman, so economical, that her smallest dispensations and her briefest words are treasure. She has neither enemies nor critics, so that like an angel she is unendangered by brutality or by “difficult situations.” Even her sorrow at her husband’s death and her loneliness afterwards seemed only to make sweeter her sweet life. She is an innocent child of seventy-five.

  Among her friends, Mrs. Ramsey numbers many well-bred young men who, before the war, came to her house for tea or for lunch on Sunday. Now they are all in uniform and many of them are overseas, but they write to her frequently and she replies, in a wavy old-fashioned hand, on V-mail blanks. In spite of this substitution of the blanks for her own monogrammed letter paper, in spite of the military titles and the serial numbers which she copies down in the little box at the top of the page, in spite of the uniforms which she cannot help seeing in the square, and the newspapers and the War Bond drives, the blackout curtains at her windows and the buckets of sand in her fourth floor corridor and the ration books, Mrs. Ramsey is the one person, her friends say, to whom the cliché may accurately be applied: “She does not know there is a war on.” Her daughter, who is a Red Cross supervisor and who comes in uniform once a week to dine with her mother, says she is “too good to be true,” that she is a perfect asylum, that in her house one can quite delude oneself into believing that this tranquillity extends far beyond her doorstep, beyond the city, throughout the world itself, and that the catastrophes of our times are only hypothetical horrors. Her granddaughters, who are Waves, her grandson Ramsey who is an instructor in a pre-flight school, her son who manufactures precision instruments and has bought fifty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds, her son-in-law, the military attaché, her daughter-in-law who works at the blood bank, all say the same thing of her. They say they frightfully pity people who cannot have a holiday from the war in her house. She continues to speak of Paris as if the only reason she does not go there is that she is too old and her health is too unsteady; she hopes that one of her favorite young men, wounded at Anzio, will enjoy Easter in Italy and she assumes that he will go to Rome to hear the Pope. She speaks of Germany and Japan as if they were still nothing more than two foreign countries of which she has affectionate memories. It is true that at times her blandness becomes trying. For example, if someone speaks of the mistakes of Versailles, she quite genuinely believes he refers to the way the flower beds are laid out in the palace gardens and she agrees warmly that they could have been ever so much nicer. But one has no business to be annoyed with her. Since there are so few years left to her (and since there is now no danger of our being bombed) it would be an unkind and playful sacrilege to destroy her illusion that the world is still good and beautiful and harmonious in all its parts. She need never know how barbarically civilization has been betrayed.

  How refreshing must be her letters to the soldiers! She neither complains of their hardships nor gushes over their bravery. It must be marvelous, indeed, to know that there is someone across whose lips the phrase “the four freedoms” has never passed, someone whose vocabulary is innocent of “fascism,” someone who writes calm reminiscences in her letters (even so! on the printed V-mail form!) of summer band concerts in Saratoga Springs, of winter dinner parties at the Murray Hill which, in reality as fusty as an old trunk, she thinks is still the smartest hotel in town. Mothers of the soldiers are overjoyed: she is their link with the courtly past, she is Mrs. Wharton at first hand.

  * * *

  Mrs. Ramsey has written five letters to soldiers and sailors and a sixth is begun. But her eyes have started to burn and since it is anyhow nearly time for tea, she rises from her desk and prepares to go to her bedroom to freshen up for her guests who today will be one of her granddaughters and the fiancée of one of her young admirers. She looks down once more into the little park and thinks that it is the loveliest in the city. It reminds her of Bloomsbury Square. There she used to sit waiting for her husband while he copied out notes and lists of things in the British Museum whenever they visited London. One of his avocations, perhaps the mildest of them all, had been a study of English ballads and he kept notebooks full of their variants. Great as was her delight in his society, she was always glad when he stayed away a long time, for she loved sitting there alone, heedless of anything but the simple fact of her being there. Perhaps it is the memory of those days that now motivates her occasional afternoon in the square, for the atmosphere is just as foreign and her presence seems just as unusual as it used to be in London. The difference is that in London she had been a visitor from a distant country while here she is a visitor from a distant time. As she looks down she sees a little boy in a beret like a French sailor’s. He is carrying a string shopping bag with a long loaf of bread sticking out of it. He walks beside his enormous mother who wears a red snood over a bun of hair as big as the loaf of bread in the bag. Mrs. Ramsey, for no reason, thinks how dearly she loves Europe and how sorry she is that there is no time left for her to go abroad again. If she were just a few years younger, she would be envious of the boys to whom she has been writing her letters.

  She has just turned toward the door when she hears, far off, the bell at the street entrance and she makes a convulsive little gesture with her hand, afraid that the girls have come already and she is not prepared. She opens the door and waits beside it, listening, and then, hearing Elizabeth coming up the stairs alone, she steps out into the hall and calls down, “I am just going to dress, Elizabeth. Who was at the door?”

  The plump middle-aged maid is deaf and she has not heard. She comes into sight on the stairs; she is carrying a parcel and seeing her mistress, she says, “The special delivery man brought it, Mrs. Ramsey, and I thought you would like to have it at once since it comes from overseas.” She hands over the package, adding, “From Captain Cousins.”

  Mrs. Ramsey returns to the drawing room, saying to the maid, “Oh, I shan’t wait to open this! If I am late and don’t have time to dress, I am sure the young ladies won’t mind.” The maid beams, delighted with the look of pleasure in Mrs. Ramsey’s face, and retires quietly as though she were leaving a girl to read her sweetheart’s letter.

  The little old lady sits down on a yellow and pink striped love-seat, holding the box in her hands, but she does not immediately o
pen it. She sits remembering her grandson, Arthur Cousins, of all the young men, her favorite. He looks much as the General did as a youth and it is this resemblance, probably, that so endears him to her. She recalls him in exquisite detail and his image takes her breath away. He is as tall, as fair, as red-cheeked as a Swede. Before he went away, when he used to come to see her, he always seemed sudden and exotic, making her drawing room look dusky. Whenever she saw him and now whenever she thinks of him, she remembers, rapturously, the hot beaches of Naples, the blinding winter sun at Saint Moritz, the waves of heat rising from the gravel slope before the Pitti Palace. The sunlight he calls up is not parching but wonderfully rich and heady. His mind is as luminous as his skin and his hair; and he is so happy! She thinks of him leaning forward in his chair at a recital to watch a woman playing a lute, bending her head down to look at it with love, as if she were looking into a child’s face; his lips are parted and his eyes shine. She sees him sitting beside her in church and she remembers the days when he was an altar boy. The very package that she holds seems to give off a warmth of summertime and she touches it lightly here and there with her fingertips.

  Arthur, first in England, then in France and then in Italy has sent not only countless letters to his grandmother, but presents as well. Under the General’s portrait, in a Chinese chest to which she wears the key on a gold chain round her neck, the letters lie in ribbon-bound packets and so do the gifts, still in their tissue-paper wrappings. From London, he sent Irish linen handkerchiefs and heliotrope sachets and a small pink marble shepherdess; from Paris, gloves and a silver box for oddments; from Italy, a leather writing case and two paste-studded shell combs. His affectionate letters which she reads and re-reads through a magnifying glass on a mother-of-pearl handle, tell of his homesickness, of his unwillingness to be so far away from her. He writes that on his return, they must go again, as they did on the last day of his last furlough, round Central Park in a carriage. “Only with you, my darling Grandma, is this not just a stunt,” he writes. They must, he goes on, dine at the Lafayette where the moules marinières have been celebrated from her day until his; she must allow him to come every day to tea and must tell him stories of her girlhood. He knows that he will find her exactly the same as she was when he told her goodbye.