In Search of Love and Beauty (30 page)

She heard a car drive up down below and was glad of the excuse to go to the window and see. It was a sleek, long, black sedan; and the man who got out—she saw him foreshortened from above, could look down on his modeled gray hair—was also sleek and city-bred, in a pale and perfect suit. Kent had
come up behind her, and at the sight of the stranger, he turned from the window without a word and went out of the room. Natasha could hear him say from midway down the stairs: “What are you doing here? Who asked you to come?” And the man said: “I had to.” The unlived-in, impersonal house had become charged, electric.

They went into the room on the left (the dining room), and Kent shut the door. Natasha followed them downstairs. She could hear their voices—principally the other man's—but they were low and intense, and she would not have been able to make out the words even if she had wanted to, which she did not. By the time she had reached the bottom of the stairs, the man's voice had risen. She still could not distinguish the words, but now there was something in the tone that she recognized only too well. For it was the same she had heard, or rather overheard, in some of Mark's telephone conversations: high-pitched, even shrill, and one would have said feminine if at the same time it hadn't been fraught with more force, more physical strength than could have come out of a woman's body. She sat down on the lowest step, stubbornly; and stubbornly, she did not cover her ears but made herself be present to hear and know. More than anything, she was indignant. She felt that Mark's house was being desecrated by these strangers before he had even had a chance to live in it.

But as she sat there and listened, her feelings began to change. She still didn't know what was going on—in the same way as she had not known the details when she had overheard Mark on the telephone: but as on those occasions, here too a point was reached when she felt she had to intervene. Mark had always been furious when she came in and stood by him while he shrieked down the phone. But it had made him put down the receiver, and after a while he did not seem to mind her presence while he sat holding his head in his hands, trying to hide his tears. He never said so, but maybe he even felt good to have another person there, though a silent one.
Moved by the same instinct as had moved her then, the same inability to stand another person's pain, she got up from the step and went toward the front room. She didn't have to overcome her acute shyness, it just disappeared. Kent stood towering, fierce and gigantic, by the fireplace; the other man was kneeling on the floor, with his arms clasped around Kent's knees and his face laid against them.

When Kent saw Natasha, he gave the other's shoulder a slight push. The man raised his face and looked toward her and then quickly looked away again. He got up; he kept his face averted from her and wiped at it with his handkerchief. Kent remained standing by the fireplace, angry and awkward and not knowing what to do; Natasha was also helpless, and there was a profound and terrible silence in the newly painted, newly furnished, carefully restored dining room while they waited for the other to collect himself. Maybe
he
would know what to do.

And strangely he did-at any rate, he knew to put on a better face than either of them. When he felt sufficiently recovered to turn around toward them, he managed to take charge. This may have been because he was so much older and more experienced than they were. He even managed to smile as he advanced toward Natasha, holding out his hand and introducing himself by name. She saw that his eyes were washed and dimmed not only by these recent tears but by days and nights and years of them.

By the time Marietta came to collect her to take her to the Academy, Louise had so many packages that they had to call the doorman up to help carry them to the car. Before starting off, Marietta phoned Eric to tell him to have Regi ready, so that when they got to her apartment house, Eric had her down there sitting in the marble lobby, and he and Regi's doorman helped her get in the back of the car with Louise. Louise hugged and kissed her for her birthday and
pointed out all the parcels and the enormous box holding the birthday cake; and Regi seemed well-pleased—at any rate, she had no complaint. Her only anxiety was for the safety of the birthday cake, until Eric, up front with Marietta, took it on his lap and kept it sitting there the entire way.

The beginning of their journey was dull—getting out of the city, out of traffic snarls, and through decaying areas full of empty, littered lots and broken buildings with ornate fire escapes. All the windows were boarded up except here and there where a furniture maker or other trader going out of business had put his stock on sale. It hadn't started snowing yet in the city, but the sky looked grim. People huddled in their coats and walked with their heads down against the wind, which churned up litter from the sidewalks. The river was choppy and ugly brown, and the pleasure cruiser, which still stood on it, looked incongruous with its smart white paint and little colored flags. But Louise, snug in the back of the heated car with Regi, looked out at everything with excitement and pleasure; and so did Eric who loved a ride.

Then they left the last thinning part of the city and began to strike out into suburbs and scenery. The highway turned into a parkway, and Marietta drove more and more smoothly over better roads: till at last for miles on end there were only trees and little woods to see, and sometimes a field rising to a hill with one house on top. Once, they passed over a bridge and water stretching clear and far on either side; and shortly after that Louise leaned forward in her seat and then she cried: “Look, Regilein,
snow!
” But Regi was asleep and only grunted; what a pity—except that rest was always good—for Regi too had loved snow and winter sports.

As they drove farther north, they came into a landscape that was already white, with snow hardening and still falling. Wherever there was water, it had turned to ice; and once Eric looked around at the two of them in the back to point out a little stream that, in falling down a precipice, had frozen midway
into icicles. “Oh, they're both asleep,” he then said to Marietta. Louise heard him, and she wanted to cry out, “No, I'm not!” But she didn't—was she really asleep? But how could that be, when she was so excited with the snow, and their outing to the Academy, and Regi's birthday. Too excited perhaps: she couldn't take that much anymore, and it was exhaustion, not sleep, that had overcome her. She opened her eyes for a moment, but they fell shut again almost at once; and really, perhaps she didn't need to keep them open—she could see within herself all the snow and all the ice she had ever experienced, and all the fun they had had in it. Louise had been a very good ice skater: not fast and dazzling and swooping like some of the others, but slow and stately as a swan.

Bruno had proposed to her one day after he had watched her skate on the frozen pond of the Gruenewald. She hadn't known he was there watching—she always went into a sort of trance when she was skating, she got so much enjoyment out of it. She was warm in her cloth coat with fur collar and hem, her head encased in a fur cap matching the muff that dangled from a string around her neck. She didn't keep her hands in it for she had her arms folded; she glided around on the ice with the same ease as she danced, not thinking of her feet at all. Her eyes were half shut so that the bright crystal sunlight came to her dimly, and so did the voices of the other skaters. She didn't notice Bruno till it was time to leave when, with her easy rhythmic glide, she went to the edge of the pond; and there he was, holding out a gloved hand to help her. He sat beside her while she took off her skates; she was aware that he was looking and looking at her, and it made her face glow more. Bruno was also wearing a fur-collared coat, and there were drops of snow melting in it and in his moustache, which was the same color as the fur.

He didn't propose to her there and then, but later in Schwamm's where he took her to warm her up with hot chocolate.
Actually, she didn't need warming up—she was glowing, as always after skating—but she noticed his hands were icy-cold when he drew off his gloves. They sat at a round table in a corner by a magnificent gold-framed mirror in which she could see that he was still looking and looking at her. She was glad she was wearing a dress he hadn't seen before—a green and rust plaid wool with a bolero and a big black bow; it had been finished a few days earlier by the old lady who came to sew for Louise's mother every Wednesday. When the chocolate arrived, it was very hot, but Louise had a trick of sucking it out from under the cool cream on top. The only thing was, one had to watch out for a chocolate-and-froth moustache; so she was surreptitiously doing that in the mirror and wiping off a faint trace from her upper lip with her tongue when Bruno began to propose to her. She wanted to get back to her drink—she loved it so—but desisted, for she realized this was a very solemn moment; so she made a solemn face and he talked—oh, so poetically! She was deeply stirred and thrilled and thought to herself it is forever, for life, for the whole of life. And that seemed to her the most beautiful phrase she had ever thought: the whole of life.

Before going on to the Academy for Regi's birthday party, Mark drove to his house. He was surprised to see a sleek black sedan standing in his driveway. “Whose is that?” he asked Natasha, who appeared on the front porch the moment she heard him drive up.

“Did Mother bring Grandma?” she asked.

“Yes, they must have arrived at Leo's. . . . Why aren't you there? Why are you here?”

With these questions they got inside the hall. Now Mark heard voices muffled from behind the dining-room door; but before he could go in, she drew him away into the opposite room.

“What's going on?” Mark said. “Who's in there with him?”

“It's someone called Anthony,” Natasha had to say at last.

“Oh, I see.” And Mark, looking grim, strode at once to the door.

Before he could open it, she had run in front of him and held on to the knob.

“Don't be ridiculous, Natasha.”

Still holding on to the door, she began to plead: “Let's go—I was waiting for you to drive me there—Grandma must be waiting. They're all waiting, Mark. They must have brought the cake. Regi's cake. Let's go. They'll want to cut it.” As she spoke, her eyes searched desperately over his face—as if she didn't know it already, better than any other in the world.

Instead of replying, he tried to pry her hand from the door. She knew she couldn't hold on much longer—he wasn't very strong, but at any rate he was stronger than she—and she tightened her grasp on it and became more pleading: “Drive me there, Mark. I want to go. Please drive me.” And then she let go of the handle and did something she had not done since their childhood: she flung her arms around his neck and clung to him, her face touching his. This contact, slight as it was—no more than a brushing of her cheek against his—filled her with a deep and poignant sensation; so that to feel him recoil at the same instant with what was at least distaste was correspondingly painful. But she willed herself to keep her hold on him; she even tightened her arms and said, “You're not to go in there.”

Then he fought back. He loosened her arms from his neck and flung her aside. There was a look of wild fury on his face; and when he spoke, his voice was shrill: “I think you've gone crazy! You really are crazy! A crazy hysterical woman!” But it was he who sounded liked one.

“No, don't!” she cried and again she tried to hold him, interposing herself between him and the door. And, “Don't,” she said again in a quieter voice as she looked into his pale and twitching face; and what she meant now was not only “Don't go in there” but also “Don't look like that. Don't be like that.” She wanted him calm, manly, himself.

But at that moment, to be himself was to get rid of her and go into the other room and deal with whatever was going on there. “Get out of the way,” he said, and he didn't scruple now to push her roughly. At that, all the fight went out of her. She knew she didn't have a chance. She moved aside, and he opened the door. She followed him into the hallway, and as he went toward the dining room, she went to the front door to let herself out. She didn't want to hear anything of what was going to happen.

However, just before opening the door to the dining room, he stopped short and looked after her and had second thoughts. He called to her, and when she didn't turn around, he went to her.

“I won't be long,” he said. “I'll take you in a moment. If you'll just be patient and wait.”

She had turned her face aside so he plucked at her hair as if he were ringing a bell; it was what he sometimes did when he wanted to attract her attention. But now she put up her hand and brushed his aside. “Hey!” he said. “What's with you?” And he looked into her face, which she tried to avert from him so that he wouldn't see how sad she was.

But he knew that very well; he knew it exactly. He stood there, torn between her and what was going on behind the dining-room door: but then a raised voice came from out of there, and at that he could not be held a moment longer. He murmured, “We'll talk later”—shamefacedly perhaps, but it was with determination that he left her and went straight into the dining room and let her go out of the house.

The dining room: the way Mark had furnished it was
almost an exact replica of what his paternal grandmother's had been. Yet only the candelabra, some of the Georgian silver, and the carving set on the sideboard had come to him from her, while the rest he had bought at auctions and from antiques dealers. On the other hand, the portraits on the walls really were his ancestors—the senator, the abolitionist, the sweet-faced general's wife who had died in childbirth—but they had been so carefully cleaned, so tastefully restored that they looked as impersonal as the rest of the furniture and might equally well have been bought in antiques shops.