My Sister's Hand in Mine (59 page)

“Well,” he said. “You change. Sometimes you say you
would
like to go.”

It was true. She did change. Sometimes she would run to him with bright eyes. “Let's go,” she would say. “Let's go into the desert.” But she never did this if she was sober.

There was something wistful in his voice, and she had to remind herself that she wanted to feel cranky rather than heartbroken. In order to go on talking she said: “Sometimes I feel like going, but it's always when I've had something to drink. When I've had nothing to drink I'm afraid.” She turned to face him, and he saw that she was beginning to have her hunted expression.

“Do you think I
ought
to go?” she asked him.

“Go where?”

“To the desert. To live in an oasis.” She was pronouncing her words slowly. “Maybe that's what I should do, since I'm your wife.”

“You must do what you really want to do,” he said. He had been trying to teach her this for twelve years.

“What I really want.… Well, if you'd be happy in an oasis, maybe I'd really want to do that.” She spoke hesitantly, and there was a note of doubt in her voice.

“What?” He shook his head as if he had run into a spiderweb. “What is it?”

“I meant that maybe if you were happy in an oasis I would be, too. Wives get pleasure out of making their husbands happy. They really do, quite aside from its being moral.”

He did not smile. He was in too bad a humor. “You'd go to an oasis because you wanted to escape from Western civilization.”

“My friends and I don't feel there's any
way
of escaping it. It's not interesting to sit around talking about industrialization.”

“What friends?” He liked her to feel isolated.

“Our friends.” Most of them she had not seen in many years. She turned to him with a certain violence. “I think you come to these countries so you can complain. I'm tired of hearing the word
civilization.
It has no meaning. Or I've forgotten what it meant, anyway.”

The moment when they might have felt tenderness had passed, and secretly they both rejoiced. Since he did not answer her, she went on. “I think it's uninteresting. To sit and watch costumes disappear, one by one. It's uninteresting even to mention it.”

“They are not costumes,” he said distinctly. “They're simply the clothes people wear.”

She was as bitter as he about the changes, but she felt it would be indelicate for them both to reflect the same sorrow. It would happen some day, surely. A serious grief would silence their argument. They would share it and not be able to look into each other's eyes. But as long as she could she would hold off that moment.

Lila and Frank

Frank pulled hard on the front door and opened it with a jerk, so that the pane of glass shook in its frame. It was his sister's custom never to go to the door and open it for him. She had an instinctive respect for his secretive nature.

He hung his coat on a hook in the hall and walked into the parlor, where he was certain he would find his sister. She was seated as usual in her armchair. Next to her was a heavy round table of an awkward height which made it useful for neither eating nor writing, although it was large enough for either purpose. Even in the morning Lila always wore a silk dress, stockings, and well-shined shoes. In fact, at all times of the day she was fully dressed to go into the town, although she seldom ventured from the house. Her hair was not very neat, but she took the trouble to rouge her lips.

“How were the men at the Coffee Pot tonight?” she asked when her brother entered the room. There was no variety in the inflection of her voice. It was apparent that, like him, she had never tried, either by emphasis or coloring of tone, to influence or charm a listener.

Frank sat down and rested for a while without speaking.

“How were the men at the Coffee Pot?” she said again with no change of expression.

“The same as they always are.”

“You mean by that, hungry and noisy.” For an outsider it would have been hard to say whether she was being critical of the men at the Coffee Pot or sincerely asking for information. This was a question she had asked him many times, and he had various ways of answering, depending upon his mood. On this particular night he was uncommunicative. “They go to the Coffee Pot for a bite to eat,” he said.

She looked at him. The depths of her dark eyes held neither warmth nor comfort. “Was it crowded?” she asked.

He considered this for a moment while she watched him attentively. He was near the lamp and his face was raspberry-colored, an even deeper red than it would have been otherwise.

“It was.”

“Then it must have been noisy.” The dropping of her voice at the end of a sentence gave her listener, if he was a stranger, the impression that she did not intend to continue with the conversation. Her brother of course knew this was not the case, and he was not surprised at all when a minute later she went on. “Did you speak with anyone?”

“No, I didn't.” He jumped up from his chair and went over to a glass bookcase in the corner. “I don't usually, do I?”

“That doesn't mean that you won't, does it?” she said calmly.

“I wouldn't change my habits from one night to the next,” he said. “Not sitting at the Coffee Pot.”

“Why not?”

“It's not human nature to do that, is it?”

“I know nothing about human nature at all,” she said. “Nor do you, for that matter. I don't know why you'd refer to it. I do suspect, though, that I at least might change very suddenly.” Her voice remained indifferent, as though the subject were not one which was close to her. “It's a feeling that's always present with me … here.” She touched her breast.

Although he wandered around the room for a moment feigning to have lost interest in the conversation, she knew this was not so. Since they lied to each other in different ways, the excitement they felt in conversing together was very great.

“Tell me,” she said. “If you don't expect to experience anything new at the Coffee Pot, why do you continue to go there?” This too she had often asked him in the past weeks, but the repetition of things added to rather than detracting from the excitement.

“I don't like to talk to anybody. But I like to go out,” he said. “I may not like other men, but I like the world.”

“I should think you'd go and hike in the woods, instead of sitting at the Coffee Pot. Men who don't like other men usually take to nature, I've heard.”

“I'm not interested in nature, beyond the ordinary amount.”

They settled into silence for a while. Then she began to question him again. “Don't you feel uneasy, knowing that most likely you're the only man at the Coffee Pot who feels so estranged from his fellows?”

He seated himself near the window and half smiled. “No,” he said. “I think I like it.”

“Why do you like it?”

“Because I'm aware of the estrangement, as you call it, and they aren't.” This too he had answered many times before. But such was the faith they had in the depth of the mood they created between them that there were no dead sentences, no matter how often repeated.

“We don't feel the same about secrets,” she told him. “I don't consider a secret such a great pleasure. In fact, I should hesitate to name what my pleasure is. I simply know that I don't feel the lack of it.”

“Good night,” said Frank. He wanted to be by himself. Since he very seldom talked for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, she was not at all surprised.

She herself was far too excited for sleep at that moment. The excitement that stirred in her breast was familiar, and could be likened to what a traveler feels on the eve of his departure. All her life she had enjoyed it or suffered from it, for it was a sensation that lay between suffering and enjoyment, and it had a direct connection with her brother's lies. For the past weeks they had concerned the Coffee Pot, but this was of little importance, since he lied to her consistently and had done so since early childhood. Her excitement had its roots in the simultaneous rejection and acceptance of these lies, a state which might be compared to that of the dreamer when he is near to waking, and who knows then that he is moving in a dream country which at any second will vanish forever, and yet is unable to recall the existence of his own room. So Lila moved about in the vivid world of her brother's lies, with the full awareness always that just beyond them lay the amorphous and hidden world of reality. These lies which thrilled her heart seemed to cull their exciting quality from her never-failing consciousness of the true events they concealed. She had not changed at all since childhood, when to expose a statement of her brother's as a lie was as unthinkable to her as the denial of God's existence is to most children. This treatment of her brother, unbalanced though it was, contained within it both dignity and merit, and these were reflected faithfully in her voice and manner.

Friday

He sat at a little table in the Green Mountain Luncheonette apathetically studying the menu. Faithful to the established tradition of his rich New England family, he habitually chose the cheapest dish listed on the menu whenever it was not something he definitely abhorred. Today was Friday, and there were two cheap dishes listed, both of which he hated. One was haddock and the other fried New England smelts. The cheaper meat dishes had been omitted. Finally, with compressed lips, he decided on a steak. The waitress was barely able to hear his order.

“Did you say steak?” she asked him.

“Yes. There isn't anything else. Who eats haddock?”

“Nine tenths of the population.” She spoke without venom. “Look at Agnes.” She pointed to the table next to his.

Andrew looked up. He had noticed the girl before. She had a long freckled face with large, rather roughly sketched features. Her hair, almost the color of her skin, hung down to her shoulders. It was evident that her mustard-colored wool dress was homemade. It was decorated at the throat with a number of dark brown woollen balls. Over the dress she wore a man's lumber jacket. She was a large-boned girl. The lower half of her face was long and solid and insensitive-looking, but her eyes, Andrew noted, were luminous and starry.

Although it was bitterly cold outside, the lunch room was steaming hot and the front window had clouded over.

“Don't you like fish?” the girl said.

He shook his head. Out of the corner of his eye he had noticed that she was not eating her haddock. However, he had quickly looked away, in order not to be drawn into a conversation. The arrival of his steak obliged him to look up, and their eyes met. She was gazing at him with a rapt expression. It made him feel uncomfortable.

“My name is Agnes Leather,” she said in a hushed voice, as if she were sharing a delightful secret. “I've seen you eating in here before.”

He realized that there was no polite way of remaining silent, and so he said in an expressionless voice, “I ate here yesterday and the day before yesterday.”

“That's right.” She nodded. “I saw you both times. At noon yesterday, and then the day before a little later than that. At night I don't come here. I have a family. I eat home with them like everybody else in a small town.” Her smile was warm and intimate, as if she would like to include him in her good fortune.

He did not know what to say to this, and asked himself idly if she was going to eat her haddock.

“You're wondering why I don't touch my fish?” she said, catching his eye.

“You haven't eaten much of it, have you?” He coughed discreetly and cut into his little steak, hoping that she would soon occupy herself with her meal.

“I almost never feel like eating,” she said. “Even though I do live in a small town.”

“That's too bad.”

“Do you think it's too bad?”

She fixed her luminous eyes upon him intently, as if his face held the true meaning of his words, which might only have seemed banal.

He looked at the long horselike lower half of her face, and decided that she was unsubtle and strong-minded despite her crazy eyes. It occurred to him that women were getting entirely too big and bony. “Do I think what's too bad?” he asked her.

“That I don't care about eating.”

“Well, yes,” he said with a certain irritation. “It's always better to have an appetite. At least, that's what I thought.”

She did not answer this, but looked pensive, as if she were considering seriously whether or not to agree with him. Then she shook her head from side to side, indicating that the problem was insoluble.

“You'd understand if I could give you the whole picture,” she said. “This is just a glimpse. But I can't give you the whole picture in a lunchroom. I know it's a good thing to eat. I know.” And as if to prove this, she fell upon her haddock and finished it off with three stabs of her fork. It was a very small portion. But the serious look in her eye remained.

“I'm sorry if I startled you,” she said gently, wetting her lips. “I try not to do that. You can blame it on my being from a small town if you want, but it has nothing to do with that. It really hasn't. But it's just impossible for me to explain it all to you, so I might as well say I'm from a small town as to say my name is Agnes Leather.”

She began an odd nervous motion of pulling at her wrist, and to his surprise shouted for some hotcakes with maple syrup.

At that moment a waitress opened the door leading into the street, and put down a cast-iron cat to hold it back. The wind blew through the restaurant and the diners set up a clamor.

“Orders from the boss!” the waitress screamed. “Just hold your horses. We're clearing the air.” This airing occurred every day, and the shrieks of the customers were only in jest. As soon as the clouded glass shone clear, so that the words
GREEN MOUNTAIN LUNCHEONETTE
in reverse were once again visible, the waitress removed the iron cat and shut the door.