A shooting star, p.5
A Shooting Star, page 5
“Na, na. I’ve noticed it especially since I came back. Don’t tell me she’s thinking clearly when she stands looking at you and moving her lips and trying to remember what she started to say.”
“That’s just her tongue,” Helen said. “She can’t always make it say what she wants it to, and her lips tremble that way. But her head is perfectly clear. Her memory is incredible, and she has a marvelous sense of humor, she sees the joke in everything.”
The speckled eyes watched her steadily, the firmly cut lips were turned up a little. She was glad he had not been around much to have his eye on her while she was learning the ropes and wooing Mrs. Hutchens away from her grumpiness over the departure of Mrs. Brill. He said finally, “You’re very loyal.”
“I hope so.”
“You’re well paid to be.”
Just for an instant she gave him her uncareful eyes to look at. “Yes,” she said, “but that’s not the reason.”
He made a wet footprint on the cement and studied it. His eyebrows were fair and bushy and New Englandy like his mother’s. Then abruptly he was looking upward at her again from under them. “How about all these food fads?”
“That’s Doctor Sanders. Since she had that little stroke he’s had her on a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet.”
“If she hadn’t been able to talk him into prescribing it she’d have found it in some magazine,” Oliver said. “Yoghurt, and stone-ground flour, and soy bean oil, and blackstrap molasses, and wheat germ. She eats what my kids feed their rabbits and bantam hens. And those Goddamned eye exercises. Every swami and buttermilk drinker in California must bless the day she was born.”
Helen hesitated, uncertain how to meet what seemed so outright an attack on his own mother. She laughed a little, and said, “Really, her diet isn’t just a fad. Maybe it’s keeping her alive and healthy. And the exercises give her something to do. She doesn’t have much, except what she calls her regimen. She’s almost shut in.”
“How many swamis have called on her this week?”
“Not a single swami,” she said, and tried to divert his aggressiveness with a smile.
He would not be diverted. “Quacks, I don’t care what kind. Quakers, Communists, members of committees, jigaboos working up to a pitch. They’re like yellowjackets around a fig tree. Her name is on every God-damned sucker list there is.”
“No, honestly, you exaggerate. I see them all. If they’re obviously crazy or out to exploit her I don’t let them in.”
“I sure hope you don’t.”
“I don’t. But a lot of them are perfectly honest, only a little hipped on something. She’s interested in them; it’s almost the only personal life she has. The Symphony and the Palace of the Legion of Honor and things like that don’t ever seem to have been her particular interest, even when she was active. Now she’s nearly shut in, she needs something. The only one who comes that you could call a swami is Krishna Lal, and he’s just a pleasant spiritual sort of man preaching non-violence. He can’t hurt her.”
“He can bleed money out of her.”
“I can’t remember that he’s asked for anything since I’ve been here.”
“Listen, I pay you the compliment of thinking you’re not stupid. You know why people like that hang around an old lady with a lot of money and no judgment.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that. She’s perfectly all right, only frail and with arthritis in her hands and feet.”
He was slapping a light pattery rhythm on his thighs with his flat hands. As if he had just decided something about which he had been uncertain, he clapped his hands to his legs and held them there. “Look—in this job you’re going to be pretty deep in the family. I want to know whenever Mother has some big charitable notion that she isn’t willing to route through Collier at the bank. Okay?”
“She does go through him,” Helen said. “She gives these little nominal gifts—” The word made her laugh. “At least they’re nominal for her. But anything bigger is always referred to Mr. Collier. Like when she wanted to give something to Stanford for their library building fund.”
“I remember that very clearly,” Oliver said. “She was going to give fifty thousand dollars.” He grinned at her wolfishly, an exaggeratedly greedy leer. “By diligent and timely effort Collier and I cut it in half.”
“Yes,” she said. She had the strong feeling that this was getting altogether too confidential; she did not want to be involved in arguments between Oliver and his mother. But when she stood up to go, he squinted up at the high sun and made a staying motion with one hand.
“Who’s been putting the finger on her this week? Who would like an appointment to discuss an important matter confidentially?”
Now she could let her mouth bend in a smile. “You’re much too suspicious. There’s not a single appointment on her calendar.”
“Great.” He stretched all his muscles like a cat or a dog, first his upper body, then his legs, feet, toes. The water had dried on his brown skin, his wet footprints were almost gone from the pavement. “I’m telling you this for a reason,” he said, and suddenly his squinting stare was as hard for her to meet as his near-nakedness. “You’re in a confidential position. I want you to keep track of what goes on. Mother has to be protected from her own foolishness. Plainly, she’s a sucker. She’s quite capable of writing a will that leaves everything she owns to Mister Krishna Lal to stamp out violence from the world. Or if she’s on a cultural kick we might find when she dies that what was once a tidy little estate is now part of somebody’s endowment, and we’re selling off the lower forty to meet taxes. I don’t care if it’s the best cause in the world, I don’t aim to let her make a fool of herself.”
At least he was frank. Helen said only, “I don’t think you need to worry. Her mind isn’t failing. She’s as bright as you are, and a lot brighter than me.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Because you seem pretty bright.” Abruptly he rose, and the muscular surge of his body and the way his speckled eyes now looked down at her instead of up from under his eyebrows gave her a wincing feeling of weakness. It occurred to her to wonder if he fancied himself that way—if he went around full of arrogant notions like a hawk over a chickenyard. “Okay,” he said. “Tonight I’ll come over with projectors and slides and movies and we’ll have a happy hour of family records. I’ve got the whole works from forty years back.”
“It will please your mother very much.” She started to move away, but his hand took her solidly by the arm.
“I want you to do me a favor. If anybody dangerous gets her ear, let me know. I don’t mean old Krishna Lal. I’ve had my eye on him for a long time. I love him, in fact. He writes letters to the papers protesting income taxes because they go for implements of war. Except for his half-assed reasons I couldn’t be more in agreement with him. But you know the kind I mean. Steer them to me or Collier and they’ll evaporate. Will you do that?”
“Certainly, if I think she’s in danger of being taken in.”
“Fine,” he said ironically. “I trust your judgment. How long have you been here now?”
“Nearly six months.”
“Like it?”
“Very much.”
“I forget. You trained as a nurse?”
“No. Only secretary.”
“College girl?”
“Wisconsin. You don’t remember many details, do you?”
“I was a little pressed, about the time I interviewed you. As I remember, I took you sight unseen, on a week’s trial. I should have paid more attention.”
The smile was still curling his lips; he still had hold of her arm.
“I must say,” he said, “you’re an improvement over what poor old Mother had before.”
“Thank you.” She said to herself again, “Remember who he is!”
“Don’t thank me. It’s no trouble for me to be quite nice when I’m so inclined.”
The smile curved higher; she noted his very even teeth, like the capped teeth of a movie hero. He pulled her wrist, pulled her against him, folded his other arm around her. She neither resisted nor yielded. For a moment he bent, looking into her eyes with his speckled hazel gaze, and then he kissed her. His kiss was instantly and hotly sexual; he was as direct as a billy goat.
After a swamped and breathless interval Helen drew herself away. Her eyes did not let themselves be put down. She said steadily, “Now I must go.”
She knew that his eyes followed her out the gate. She knew he was smiling broadly. But all the way across the lawn and up the avenue of espaliered fruit trees she went with her jaw locked, sure that if she relaxed it her teeth would chatter like a porcupine’s. The only thing she could think of was an old dirty joke that used to be told around school, about a hen that had been run over by a Volkswagen. The hen, the story said, had pulled herself groggily together and remarked that he was a rough son of a bitch, but he hadn’t gotten anything.
CHAPTER 4
GROPING along the shoe shelf for something to wear, Sabrina came upon the squaw boots. For a moment she stood frowning, caught in the past as a woman is caught who steps into a grating with a spike heel.
The boots were the gift of a god—a god of eighteen, a Dartmouth freshman from a Boston family, sent out to work through the summer as a copy boy at the Chronicle, and told, for old acquaintance’s sake, to call Sabrina’s mother. He had called, being both dutiful and good-natured. He had come to dinner, he had made good use of the swimming pool, he had gone sailing with Oliver in the bay. That was the only thing she knew against him, that he appeared to like Oliver. For the rest, she had worshiped him around the jambs of doors and across rooms, had refused to go swimming when he was around because in a bathing suit it was clear she was not quite yet a woman. And also, if she gave evasive reasons for not swimming, he might deduce interestingly female explanations.
Once, in the City, she had escaped the driver who had her in charge, and hurried down onto Mission Street, and there, shuddering back from frequent Skid Row bums, she had waited across the street from the Chronicle for more than an hour, hoping to see him come out so that she could feed on his unconscious loveliness. Her mother had been terribly upset, and been going to fire the driver, who was pretty upset himself. How had that all worked out? Some explanation suspiciously half-believed; a bribe to the driver to salve his injured feelings.
Oh, but Larry Keams! Though he had never come out of the Chronicle entrance into her sight, he did now and then notice her. She felt that she puzzled him, and once she remembered telling him, when he had been kidding her as if she were some infant sister of his friend Oliver’s, that he had better learn how to treat women. That astonished him, and before he could laugh she went dignifiedly up to her room and lay on the bed and brooded, and kicked pillows around.
Why wouldn’t he have laughed? And yet he saw something in her. She knew he did. Probably most of the time she was a skinny thirteen-year-old who was always hanging around, staring soberly across rooms or hanging indifferently on the wire of the tennis court while he and Oliver played, but once or twice there was more. He had not disappointed her. Going back at the end of the summer, he must have looked around him in the drive and said, “Where’s Sabrina?” For she had fled, unable to watch them callously loading him into the car with his bags and his golf clubs and his tennis racket. So rather than go away without saying good-by he had come hunting her, and found her in the tearoom peeking at a tree through the telescope. “Hey,” he said, “are you ducking out on me?”
“Oh,” she said, “I thought you’d gone,” and screwed her eye deeper into the brass eyepiece. He dug her out of there and held her by the shoulders and laughed at her. He had a gift for laughter; in him it was neither light-witted nor hysterical as it was in so many. Then he put out his hand and with his knuckles touched the damp spot on her left cheek. “You’re a funny one,” he said. “And you’re going to be a heart-breaker. Will you wait for me?”
The very idea made them both laugh. He gave her a quick hug and was gone, and furiously, furiously, she scoured upstairs to watch from a window as they drove him away. Four days later, postmarked from Albuquerque and packed in a box labeled Fred Harvey, had come the squaw boots, pure white deerskin hung with tiny silver bells, and with the boots a card she could imagine him scrawling on the cleared edge of a counter: “For a girl nobody knows.”
Dead center. He could not have said more plainly what she had always thought herself. And when she put on the boots and drifted softly tinkling past the mirror door of her dressing room, she felt how they transformed her, or revealed her. She became in fact the sulky-eyed child that till then only Speicher had seen. With her hand on an imagined shoulder she waltzed shut-eyed, and the sound she made filled her with such delight—the thought that they were from him was so thrilling—that she spun twice and flew downstairs to the door of the tearoom. They must have heard her coming like Santa Claus outside a Christmas Eve church, and then she materialized in the doorway with her smile coming and going on her face. The four women in the room turned toward the door; she saw how they sat as if all had caught a quick breath. Her mother, with the teapot raised to pour, stared with a stricken face, set the pot down on a cup’s edge and spilled it, and still stared. Her underlip was bitten harshly up under her teeth.
Sabrina shook the limp, half-soled, discolored moccasins, trying the tinkle of the past. More than twenty years ago, and yet a thing she remembered intensely. Here, against all probability, were the squaw boots that had given her a notion of who she was. Against all probability, for her mother had disliked them from the first as something unbecoming a young lady, and Sabrina had had to sneak them out in her handbag and change at the club or wherever she had got away to. And she had never left them lying around: so many things of which her mother disapproved had a habit of quietly disappearing. During the time when her mother was most at her about them, Sabrina had even slept in them. Appropriate, inappropriate, those words had nothing to do with her mother’s displeasure, she knew. Somehow, appearing in that doorway with her jingle and her smile, she had frightened her mother badly. The girl that only Speicher and Larry Keams knew was not a girl Deborah Hutchens wanted to know.
Groggy from the nembutal hangover, Sabrina stood in the closet with the moccasins in her hands, and then with a crooked smile she bent and slipped them on. She stamped her foot, and it jingled. Ah, ah! Girlhood restored, charm reasserted, confidence reassured. Well, Mother, here we go again, she said and, faintly tinkling, went on out and down the stairs. But she heard the music of her feet as thin and brittle as vanity itself light-wittedly dancing, and she would have gone back to put on something less troubling if Lizardo had not appeared in the hall.
“Ha-ha!” he said. “You hab good slip?”
“Oh, grand.”
Moving past him, she found in the drawing room the box of cigarettes that her mother, disapproving, kept there for callers. Lizardo’s lighter snapped before her face. “You like some fud now?”
“I don’t believe so, Lizardo.”
“You sick?”
“No.”
“You like orange juice, maybe? Coppee? Chicken sandwich?”
“Stop taking care of me. Where’s Mother?”
“Got company.”
“Where, library or tearoom?”
“Library. Miz Whiteside.”
She had started through the double doors when Lizardo said softly, “Doct’ Castro telepone.”
Sabrina had a sensation like secret nausea, as if a sickness that for social reasons she had tried to ignore had now arrived. She felt overtaken, and at the same time corroborated in an expectation; it was as if she said, Of course. Aloud she said, “He did? What did he want?”
“He want to know you here okay. I tell him you slip, everyt’ing pine.” From his eyes, which communicated something understanding, apologetic, and protective, she let her glance stray across the room—carved walnut and mahogany, lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl, an intricate rich footing of Bokhara carpets that should have been in a museum, all flooded with gray light from the battery of draped windows. Other rooms in the house had got most of the good pieces. Because this one was so big, and duplicated so exactly the drawing room of the Nahant house, all the ponderous Victorian junk had got piled in here. It was a room to make you feel three feet high and start you to talking in whispers, like a public library. Without looking back, Sabrina said, “Is he going to call again?”
“He don’t say. I s’pose.”
“Does Mother know I’m here?”
“I don’t tell her.”
“All right.”
The nausea lay under her breastbone, ready to rise in one irresistible rejection. She asked herself why Burke’s calling should double her guilt and depression, and then she asked angrily why he couldn’t let her alone at least for a day while she thought things out. And yet if he had not called she would have been even more upset; at least she had forced him to express concern.
For a few seconds a possibility, clear and definite, completely persuaded her. It said that Bernard, blinding and ecstatic as those ten days had been, had only been a catalyst whose function was to cure Burke of taking her for granted, and bring them together again. There was a flow of daydream in which she saw them, emancipated from the clinic, alone in some place exciting and remote—São Paolo, the Greek islands, Andorra—and they came out on a balcony flooded with morning sun and looked down on people driving donkeys loaded with fruit, wine casks, flowers.
But the face in the daydream became treacherously, even while she dreamed it, the darker one with the large warm liquid eyes and the lips that she wanted to put out a hand and touch. The ridiculous travel-poster notion had twisted itself incorrigibly into a reconstruction of Oaxaca, and she looked sharply at Lizardo to see if she could find among his wrinkles any sign that he was reading her mind. He looked only anxious. “I’ll be in the library if he calls again,” she said.
