A Young Man's Heart (10 page)

3

As they rounded a corner and entered
Bruselas
Street, Blair shut his eyes for a moment as though to recapture some long-lost dream. When he opened them the moon, like a beacon directly overhead, had strewn a lane of blue-white powder down the center of the glistening macadam roadway. A light behind a window was like the mouth of a ruddy furnace open to the street. For an instant one expected smoke to pour from it. And over there was a garden wall, that somehow he guessed, without knowing why, must be pink in the sunlight.

“This is the door, stop here.” And to Eleanor, “Wait for me, I’ll go in alone.”

From the doorway he turned to look back at the wall, but she and the carriage were in the way. Her feet were still up and she was smiling whimsically at him, as though to humor him were a deliciously amusing thing.

“Go ahead,” she encouraged, appropriating his hesitation to herself, “I’m not afraid to wait for you.” It hadn’t been on that account at all that he had paused.

So he went in, entering the house of seven years before with the thought that Eleanor should not have come here with him, that her presence stood ever so slightly between him and an elusive something that he was trying to recapture, what it was he did not exactly know. Some dream-effect most likely, some confirmation that there actually was such a place and he had been here before, that the scene he had been dimly remembering all these years was not imaginary but really existed after all. And Eleanor, by being with him, by waiting for him just outside in a carriage, with her feet up before her and a knowing smile on her face and the air of a great city vividly stamped all over her, made the something he was searching for elude him, made it as though it had never been, made it as far out of reach as before. He might just as well have not come at all. Now it was like any other house on any other street. Thoughts like these were dishonorable, he knew. They were his first treachery toward her. And yet he could not shake the impression off. She jarred. She was an anachronism. She held him firmly in the present, and he was trying to find the past. Certainly it had nothing to do with his seeing Giraldy again. Giraldy was only a shadowy excuse for coming near here at all. His father was less to him now than most of the friends he had made in New York, and whose names he was already beginning to forget one by one. In all these years only one letter had passed between them, a letter from Blair to which there had never been an answer, a letter two weeks after his departure, parts of which he could still recall, it had seemed so important to him then:

“The boat docked here for two days, and as the purser told me the rest of the passage money would be returned to me at the steamship office, I stayed here to try and talk to Sasha if I can find out where she is . . .”

Inside, the patio had not changed. The same plants as before, unless perhaps one had died and been replaced in kind. (But plants seldom died in this land, they grew old and flourished, and outlived the people that had planted them.) And on the patio floor the same depression that he remembered, centered about a mildewed iron drain, to carry off the rain-water.

He rang for admittance, and presently a South American negress shuffled languidly as far as the patio gate and stood regarding him, her sleek forearms tucked across her stomach.

“You are the owner here?”

“I work for the Gomez,” she answered.

“How long have they occupied this house?”

She rolled her china-white eyes upward toward the sky, as though seeking inspiration, and began laboriously whispering the names of the months. When he had overheard her repeat each name a second time, she triumphantly announced the result:

“Two years.”

A woman thrust her disheveled head out of the door to Estelle’s old bedroom and exclaimed, “Who is out there, Serafina?”

“An Englishman looking for someone,” the negress replied patronizingly.

Her mistress, drawn by curiosity and perhaps expecting to see a monocle and a kilt, stepped outside of the door to look for herself. She wore a slovenly wrapper in conjunction with a pair of diamond earrings, and to judge by her figure seemed to have reached a critical stage of overindulgence in eating chocolates. She was fanning herself slowly as she stared.

“I am simply looking for someone who lived here before you,” Blair said to her, annoyed at being considered something of a freak. “A man named Giraldy. Can you tell me where he moved?”

The matron appeared to ponder, never once forgetting to keep her fan going. Her attitude seemed to imply not whether or no she could answer the question but whether he had any right to expect her to answer it. Finally she said to the servant, “Ask my old man, he may know something about it.”

The black woman shuffled back into the house and Blair, to break the awkward wait, said, “Pardon the annoyance.”

She seemed to agree that it was indeed an annoyance and sighed resignedly.

The servant returned and delivered her message in the style of a six-year-old child committing something to memory: “He said to tell you to tell the Englishman that another Englishman lived here before us, and when he went away, the other Englishman, he said he was going to the opal mines of Queretaro to do some business, and he took his wife with him.”

“I remember,” said the lady fanning herself, “she was that Frenchwoman with the little poodle dog.”

“She taught you how to do your hair,” added the negress conversationally.

“No,” her mistress corrected her, “I always knew how to do it. She gave me some advice, that was all.”

“Thank you,” interrupted Blair, “Good night,” and left the house. He hardly knew whether to laugh or swear at them.

As he came out of the house he put forth a hand, as though to steady himself, and touched the wall. It was a gesture of farewell to the place.

Eleanor looked very beautiful sitting there in the moonlight. It made her face and arms even whiter than they were and her dress very black, it sprinkled silver dust on her light hair. She gathered her skirt and made room for him beside her in the carriage.

“He’s gone, they don’t know where.”

“Oh,” she mourned, properly sympathetic, “I’m so sorry.”

The carriage moved, the wall slipped past, and with it went his long-spun dreams a second time.

4

At nine each Saturday evening practically everybody in the hotel had gone to their rooms to prepare for the function that was to take place that night. The patio and the corridors were deserted. Only waiters moved about, rearranging chairs and replacing exhausted lights with fresh ones here and there. These gloomy Saturday night dances continued to be, as in Blair’s childhood, a feature of hotel-life in the little city. They broke the monotony of routine existence for the permanent guests, creating little oases of gossip, mild flirtation and sartorial comparison in the arid tenor of hotel-bound lives. The hapless wives of electrical engineers, petroleum experts, representatives of foreign banks and what not, exiled here for five and ten years of their lives, dared to wear the same gowns only a certain number of times in succession, and then by makeshift alterations that fooled nobody, must try to make them appear as something quite different again. There were women residing in the hotel who had entire genealogies of their friends’ dresses down pat, and whom it was useless to attempt
to
mislead on that point. They were looked upon, and rightly, as authorities in the matter. And some were base enough at times to try to entrap their victims into false admissions and misrepresentations, going up to them smilingly and saying, “What a lovely dress you have on! It’s new, isn’t it? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it before.” But woe betide her who swallowed the bait and attempted to deceive these experts. Within an hour her dress antecedents were common knowledge throughout the hotel, and the various transfigurations it had gone through had been outlined in detail.

“I knew it the minute I laid eyes on it. She’s taken the yoke out and moved the flowers around to the side.”

These women were in no sense hostile, that is, not deeply hostile. They bore no grudges. But they consistently refused to be imposed upon and delighted in exposing their friends’ subterfuges. Stifling with boredom, cooped up in an alien setting, they reverted to the provincial, made great matters out of small ones. And Eleanor, three weeks out of New York, was still suffering from the delusion that after sundown a woman should dress to draw the favorable notice of men!

At almost ten o’clock Blair and she were still in their room, having learned the week previous that it made one feel conspicuous to exhibit oneself in the patio before at least the third dance, and preferably the fourth. At about that time almost everyone appeared at once, as though by a common signal, and the pitiful little affair was under way. And a peculiar sidelight on the invariable dullness and chaste decorum of these dances was the fact that a bar adjoining the dining room was open all evening until eleven-thirty, as on every other evening in the week, without it occurring to anyone to go in there. Ices and orangeade were called for, and an occasional Benedictine if a lady had forgotten her shawl and the evening grew chilly. Neither Blair nor Eleanor drank liquor and yet, fresh from a place where it had been nearly the sole topic of discussion for the past five years, expressed their surprise to one another, and mentioning the name of some mutual acquaintance, would smile knowingly and say, “So and so should be here, we would always know where to look for him.”

Eleanor was in orange. A fortnight after her arrival she was still wearing the only long skirts in the city. Not even the frantic lengthening of hems on the part of almost everyone that had immediately taken place following her first appearance could overtake hers. She had too much of a start. The older women, it is true, refrained. “Long dresses are only for young girls like Mrs. Giraldy,” they confided to one another. “I’d feel too self-conscious in them, wouldn’t you?”

Blair had stepped out on the balcony. All she could see was his back, with a little white line where his collar showed above his jacket. He was looking overhead. She came up behind him and tilted her own head too, to see if she could make out what he was looking at. But there was no ascension-balloon visible, no lighted kite, no rocket, nothing there at all. Only some stars.

“Every once in awhile you come out here by yourself,” she said. “What are you always looking at up there?”

“I was waiting for you to be ready,” he answered. “The room gets so full of powder.”

“Listen—isn’t that the room-phone ringing?
You’d
better go, it may be in Spanish.”

She remained on the balcony, inhaling by turns the natural fragrance of the night and the more pungent sweetness buried in her handkerchief.

When he returned to her he said, quite simply and quite pleasantly, “It was Serrano, asking if he might have your first dance.”

In the middle distance a church bell began tolling with a sort of throaty contralto sweetness. She lifted a warning finger, as though it must not be disturbed, as though it was capable of stopping at the mere sound of their voices. Evidently she was counting the strokes. Yet a watch was within easy reach, on Blair’s wrist. He found himself commenting a second time on the great attraction all things inconsequential seemed to hold for her.

“Ten!” said Eleanor, breaking the spell of her own accord. “Let’s go downstairs.” She faced about and leaned against the balcony rail, her arms spread far apart. “Who is Serrano?”

“Don’t bend over like that, you worry me. I introduced him to you two nights ago just as we were getting into the carriage. You dropped your handkerchief on the stairs and he came after us to give it back to you. Don’t you recall?”

“Oh, yes, my handkerchief,” she said.

“I suppose he’d already had me placed as the husband for quite some time. At any rate, he’d been making himself agreeable to me all week before that. I felt I knew him well enough, as far as things go in a place like this. He’s secretary to the Argentine minister, or something.”