The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (13 page)

Even when Lois said, “Danny will be so glad to hear,” she did not connect the two experiences.

“Thank him for me, Lois.”

She had completely separated cause and effect. She was safe. The world had been outmaneuvered again.

That night she slept fitfully, uncomfortable because of the spasmodic bleeding. She dreamed that she was dancing, but not here at Vernon. She was dancing at home in the glass house and there was an entire company dancing with her and the green draperies had turned to sparkling red and the company was gone and she was alone with Mother and Father and she swept back the red material (still dancing) and the walls were not transparent glass but gave back her reflection and (still dancing) she tried to peer around the reflected girl and see outside but there was no clear glass at all, it was one great window and wherever she turned she saw her reflection and behind that, caught trembling in the mirrors, her mother and father, and somehow she knew it was a dream and she knew as well that there was something she had to do to wake up and she began to turn broad
tour jetés
, turning round and round so many of her in the glass turning round and round and (still dancing) she flung herself into the glass mirror-wall and it shattered with a crash and she was outside (still dancing) and bleeding from cuts and scratches on her arms and legs, but free and clear (still dancing) and she woke, forgetting for the moment where she was, thinking it was home, but who was that breathing so close? And then she remembered and was terrified of having a baby and then realized she wasn’t going to. Toward morning she fell into a dreamless sleep.

Three days later the bleeding eased off and a week after that she was not only taking classes but dancing again. The concert drew closer and so did examinations. She prepared vigorously for one and did her best to forget the existence of the other. The remembrance of her return appointment with the doctor never even crossed her mind.

Less than a week before the concert, Lois was called to the office of the dean. Standing before the wide desk, she was vaguely frightened, although she had done nothing wrong.

“Has your roommate, Elizabeth Kaufman, been in any trouble recently?” And as Lois hesitated, the dean added, “We already know about it, Lois. The doctor notified us, so there’s nothing to be gained by trying to cover up for Elizabeth.”

Lois told all she knew, which was nothing more or less than the doctor had already written in his report, adding only the success of the abortion.

“Thank you very much, Lois. And please don’t tell her. We’re not going to, either. It’s a matter for her family to handle. Her parents will be notified.”

“Will she—will she be expelled?”

“No. We’ll let her family withdraw her from Vernon. It’s near the end of the term, anyway. It’s only a question of her not enrolling for the new semester. You won’t say a word, of course, to anyone about this.”

Lois’ first reaction was a terrible sadness at what had happened to Elly. After a while, however, a certain guilty relief crept into her consciousness. Elly had begun to frighten her. Later that day she began to think about whom she would ask to room with her next semester.

Max Kaufman sat on the dirty green bench at the Vernon station, his short fat body slumping a little against the rear slats of the bench. His expensive gray striped suit was rumpled from the train ride and in spite of the chilly breeze his coat was piled next to him, on top of the suitcase he had hastily packed the evening before. If ever he had wanted to fly, it had been last night. But even under such stress he could not bring himself to step into a plane. The train ride had been tiring and he was sitting a while to regain his energy before proceeding to his hotel and then to the college.

He looked about him at the little station, the road dotted with a few crawling cars, the few stubble-covered fields which separated the station from the slow, sleepy town. So what’s so different? he thought. So what’s the big change from Colchester, that she had to come here away from us and have this happen? He must control himself. He did not want to cry. Last night had been the most difficult. As far as Rose was concerned he was only going to see Elly dance and bring her home for the Christmas vacation. He couldn’t tell her what had happened, she being so sick and all. He had no idea what it would do to her. He mustn’t think over and over again in that crazy way, Why? Why? Why had it happened? It happened, that’s all, and we have to continue living. The taste of tears was sour in his throat but he did not cry. She would come home with him after she danced and he would enroll her at Crofts College and they would live, that was all.

After settling himself at the hotel and changing his suit he went to see his daughter, determined, suddenly, not to say a word about it until after the concert. Maybe if she was too upset she wouldn’t be able to dance. The dean’s letter had been very polite:
We feel it best for the parents to inform the student that we know about her trouble.

Elly ran into his arms as if she had been lost and was now found.

“Elly darling, how are you?”

“Fine, Daddy, fine. I’m so glad you came. Wait till you see me dance.”

“Are you nervous, baby?”

“No—well, a little. I’m a little scared, but that’s all right. Miss Matthews says everybody is nervous the first time, even Pavlova was.”

“Is everything all right, darling?” (Perhaps he could get her to tell him.)

“Just great. I love it here.”

He quickly changed the subject. “Have you eaten supper?”

“No. Let’s have a bite now, but I can’t have much. It’s only three hours to the concert and I don’t want to get sick. How’s Mom?”

“Oh, so-so. Headaches. You know.”

They ate in town and chatted about what was happening in Colchester and Elly described her routine and everything was kept, by Kaufman, light and gay, as a holiday should be. A dozen times he nearly told her she had to come with him for good, that she was not returning here to Vernon, but the words stuck in his throat.

Finally she went off to get dressed and he smoked a thoughtful cigarette with his coffee. Then he strolled over to the hall and picked up his ticket. In his seat, surrounded by hundreds of girls and their parents, he thought, Why couldn’t this be at home? This could be there, too. And, falling back on the strongest weapon he had: I could endow a dancing school at Crofts. If I’d have done it then—But that was foolish. She’d wanted to get away and she had and this was what had happened. He didn’t even want to know who the boy was, now that the immediate danger was past. Just to get her home.

When she stepped onto the stage and stood there, alone, poised and unafraid, Max did not breathe. The quiet sounds of strings that were emitted by the phonograph pushed her into movement, and Elly danced. She wore a brief, asymmetrical costume and her hair was loose and flying about her head and shoulders.

She’s so beautiful, Max thought. What can you do with her? She’s running around on a stage in front of all those people and what she’s done to herself—none of them would believe it. I’m glad I didn’t tell her I know yet. She wouldn’t have been able to dance. Or would she? She was so much stronger than he or Rose. His mind caught, like cloth on a jagged piece of metal, on the thought around which he had skirted for the last week. How could she, his Elly, only seventeen, have let a man touch her, use her, make her pregnant? He held his program before his face, in case he should erupt suddenly into tears. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself and embarrass Elly. What was he, sitting here at a dancing recital? Just a middle-aged Jew putting on too much weight and too much money. If he hadn’t made money he never could have afforded a college like this and she would have gone to school near home and none of this would have happened.

He watched her as the music grew louder and she crouched tensely at the corner of the stage before leaping forward. He watched her long hair flying, thinking what a stranger she was, how they had never spent time together the way a father and daughter should. He was always too busy. Had left her in Rose’s hands too much. Rose had never been very well, not the person for a child to be with all the time.

She bent over toward the audience and the low-cut leotard exposed something of her breast. Max looked away. What a terrible costume! He was glad Rose wasn’t there.

Someone in the row behind him murmured “How lovely!” and, forgetting for an instant all that had happened, he expanded with a prideful breath. He wanted to look at the person who had spoken but decided he had better not turn around.

There she was, seventeen years of his life, the cruel struggle, the steady groping toward something better, the terror of living with Rose. They had reached something better and for what? For the child, of course. And there she was, having people whisper “How lovely!” about her and dancing on a stage like a regular ballet dancer and none of it was any better, because she wasn’t happy, this daughter for whom all the struggling had been; she was unhappy enough to turn to a man. (He didn’t want to know who it had been. He couldn’t bear the idea of knowing of a specific person. It would have made it horribly real.)

The music was dying now and Elly knelt, hands cupped before her. Her lovely eyes were half closed and Max hardly breathed, feeling himself gross and dirty with his thoughts, all his infelicities mirrored in those half-shut eyes.

As the applause came and Elly bowed a little unsteadily, he allowed himself, under the cover of the program, to cry a little. Backstage he kissed her and she whispered exultantly, “Daddy, I’m going to be a dancer,” and he said, “Maybe, darling, it might be. Who knows?”

She was all packed and they stopped in, luggage and all, at a party Miss Matthews was giving for her dance class. With a smile and a nod he approved her sipping a cocktail, while he drank some eggnog. Max was pleased to see everyone make such a fuss over her. Then, increasingly frightened at the thought of telling her (he had decided that once they were on the train it would be all right), he had a few cocktails and then a couple more. By the time they were walking toward the station in the blue-black evening, their breath lighting a frosty path before them, he was a little high. Elly boarded the train, laughing at something her father had said, without a backward glance at the still campus, cold under the moonlight.

When he told her, she stared at him uncomprehendingly for a full moment, swallowed hard and said, “I see,” coldly, as if that had occurred which she had expected and she must not show surprise. She turned her head in a swift agonized movement, as Max licked his dry lips and thought of the next thing to say. She pressed her face to the glass, looking back hard, although the campus was now a dim blur beyond the barely visible station.

“I didn’t say good-by to anyone, not really,” she said quietly. There was no use fighting, she thought. Nothing could be won, now. “I didn’t even look at the campus or anything, not really,” she said.

Cry, damn you,
Max thought,
cry!
He put his hand lightly on her arm and said, “No one will know, Elly—especially not your mother,” realizing for the first time in a deep sense how afraid his daughter was of her mother and how much he wanted to assure her that she was at least safe from reprisal.

“Okay, Dad,” she said numbly, “okay,” as if the ethics of war forbade complaining, arguing or struggling once defeat was known to be a reality.

“She’s too sick. It would be terrible for her to know,” he added lamely.

She was silent, overcome now by an enormous fatigue, the backwash of the month of anxiety over her illness and of the tension of the concert and the knowledge of having experienced, to a certain extent conquered and lost, a world. As the train moved and stopped, moved and stopped, Elly fell asleep, waking, before the Pullman porter was to make up her bed in the compartment, to cry, holding tightly to her father, as if no years had intervened between the first time she had fallen down on the hard pavement, bruising her soft flesh, and now, the Pullman porter taking the place of the innumerable strangers who always watched one cry.

It must have been about four in the morning when she decided, after staring at the ceiling for a half hour. Listening to her father’s even breathing and waiting for a break in the regularity, she carefully dressed. Her desire to do something was vague and unfocused and she knew whatever it was to be would be only temporary. Yet she would do it anyway. She would go to Uncle Alec in California. The last money order received from home hadn’t even been cashed as yet. There was enough there for her to fly. She could probably be there the following day. She had no idea to what point in the trip the train was carrying them through the black night which seemed pasted on the compartment window. The only thing to do was to wear her dressing gown over her clothes and wait for the train’s next stop, wherever it might be.

She stood near the door, ready to open it, hearing her father mumble in his sleep and shift a little uneasily. Oh my God! she thought. She knew suddenly that if he were to talk in his sleep, to say anything at all, no matter how meaningless or delirious, she could not go. But Max subsided into soft snores again and Elly slipped silently out. She took none of her luggage.

After a moment she returned and, finding a pencil in her father’s jacket, scribbled a note telling him where she had gone. That way there would be no police or anything, and she would still have a few days.

She had never known a train made so much noise. It screeched to a stop and she stepped down into the murmurous darkness, for a moment or a day, free.

T
ALL AND SLENDER, ALEC MOVED
among the chairs and the table like a dancer, quite light on his feet, vigorously polishing a glass. He moved, humming, into the living room where, from a large console, there dribbled the sounds of a cocktail-style pianist. He almost tripped and bent a moment to rearrange the carpet. Squatting there, he saw for a moment the house as he had not seen it before. A stranger (and he was a stranger to it himself, he and Annette having rented it for three months, only two weeks ago) might find it at first sight rather impressive. A small two-story house, it possessed a large sunken living room, fireplace and a lively assortment of old and modern pieces. From two large picture windows he could see, in the blue haze of early evening, the beginning of the long, lonely beach. And it was all costing him only ninety-five a month—no, he caught himself, not
him
—costing Annette and Max ninety-five a month. He walked to the impromptu bar set up shakily on a bridge table, no longer humming. The pianist on the radio had been joined by an orchestra. He popped a few cherries into his mouth and felt a wave of focusless unhappiness start from his stomach.