The Theoretical Foot (12 page)

v

The little tool room at the back of the house was cool and dim. And Nan loved to work there. It was almost like hiding. When she looked out of the windows and into the roots of lilies and well grass, she felt like a small silent animal peering from its burrow and she wondered why all rooms were not built halfway into earth like this one.

Nobody ever came here aside from François, of course, and Timothy and Sara, for hoes and twine when they gardened, and often the quiet man who tended to the vines. But there was never anyone when Nan Garton fixed the flowers. Perhaps she'd become invisible. Perhaps she had fern seeds in her shoes.

She hummed almost silently as she stood back to look at the last flower in the last vase, a spray of wine-colored nicotiana rising from the tassel of petunia, pink as store-bought strawberry ice cream, but something was wrong. She regarded the colors dreamily for several minutes, her face intent and as blank as a child's. She was thinking: I am almost completely absorbed, she thought, as much as I can ever be, because I'm almost not thinking about anything in the world aside from color and the shapes of flowers and their petals. I'm not thinking about what they will say and feel when they see my beautiful flowers and I'm hardly thinking about myself or what they think of me, so I am really as selfless at this moment as I am capable of being, although people say at certain times, like the peak of copulation or the moment of a sneeze, you almost stop thinking about
yourself, the way I am now, not thinking about anything hardly, except this flower and its color and what to do.

She pulled a thick gold zinnia from the intricate pattern of another vase and with slow care wove it down among the stems of the poisonous pink flowers and hid it almost at the base of the tall upward-sweeping nicotiana.

There, she thought contentedly, there is an arrangement that I am sincerely and absolutely irrevocably sure would never win first prize even for originality at the annual show of the Garden Club. Thank you, dear ladies, for ignoring me. Thank you, you sweet-faced old hags, for forgetting just this once that I am Anne Garton Temple, the author of zubzubzub, the widow of zub, member of zubzub and zub. Thank you, daughters of the finest families with black ribbons holding up your waddles, for not knowing as much about flowers and how they grow and what they say as I do happen to know in the smallest of my tiny, clever, well-born fingers.

She stood for several more minutes looking at the vases that covered the tabletop and sat riotously on the cold floor. They were more beautiful than any others she had ever done. She thought so every time but now she was sure. The flowers were wild and passionate, staid, demure, in a language that spoke only for Nan herself, with epigrams, with small practical jokes, with now-and-then malicious undertones. She knew where every one of them would go and whether other people understood as she looked at them upon their mantles and their desks and dressing tables, and Nan cared not at all. She, in her own room, would be saying many things in every room in the house, unsuspected, silently, with amusement, with cold intelligence, with love.

She closed the door of the tool room behind her and shivered suddenly in the warmth that rose from the path. Inside the cold walls and floors had made the petunias send out their first sweet smell of twilight. Outside it was still midafternoon.

She leaned in as she passed the kitchen window and saw by the clock on the stove that there was a half hour before she had to start for tea. She ran up the path again and hurried across the tiny
meadow that lay between the house and the vineyard to the shadow of a gnarled cherry tree.

There, Nan threw herself down onto the thick grass that lay beneath her silkily and rose high on every side of her like a mighty forest. I am hidden, she thought. I am safe. Nothing can see me here.

Above her the twisted branches of this old tree curved protectively. She could see sky through their leaves and, if she raised her head a little from the steep slope on which she lay, the blue waters of the lake.

       
Bow down, thou sweet cherry tree,

       
And give my mother some . . .

       
Then the top bow of the cherry tree

       
Bent down to her knee,

       
And so you see, Joseph,

       
There are cherries for me,

       
And so you see, Joseph,

       
There are cherries for three.

It should seem strange, Nan thought while the stiff music of the song ran in her head, that I've been so rude to my poor friend. It should seem strange that I am not ashamed. How does it happen that after so many years of being sweet and gentle and thoughtful and caring terribly what people thought of me, I have suddenly grown resolute? Will she cease to love me? I think not. She says I love only my brother. Is that wrong? She says so, but she loves only me. Perhaps that is because I am the only thing she has. But is Timothy the only thing I have? Yes, yes, he is! He's all I want.

A bee blundered low. Nan looked up at it with wide and staring eyes and saw its soft brown belly in the silver blur of wings at its sides.

Oh, Timothy, she cried, you are all I want, your love and compassion. Why do I feel so, why am I a slave to my little brother, my child brother walking beside me on the long streets, standing close
beside me in dancing school, lying wasted and sad at my house after the war? Where are you now? Why do I break my good friend's heart staying here, when I see that you no longer need me? Lucy needs me and I hate her for it. You do not as you have Sara. But I stay on here. I
must
stay.

All this summer I have never felt stronger inside. Why? Is something happening to me to make me see you more clearly? Soon, now, soon I shall know. But know what? What do I want to know? Will all my sadness end? How do I know this? Inside me. Yes, I simply feel this is so.

She thought with a strange dispassionate bitterness of years behind her. Work had filled them, but they were empty. Would work make her happy now? Would love? Would religion?

Since she was twenty-two or twenty-three—it seemed too long ago to count one year either way—she had worked numbly, resolutely. She had studied the writing of other than her own people and had learned new tongues. She twisted the words in her mind into a trillion meanings and had put some of this on paper. And her people, the other humans around her, had heard in her verses some sound of truth. They had lapped up the crumbs of comfort from the dishes brewed for her own hunger.

Yes, for too many years now she had injected into others that fine needle of her own spiritual narcosis. It made them feel less of their secret agonies. And she knew herself not their benefactor, but their evildoer.

I doped, she said sternly to herself beneath the cherry tree, because I was doped myself. Work is no cure-all. Work can absorb one, like a blotting pad or Pantopon, or like a creeping cancer behind the Pantopon. But what is the cancer? Why have I had to work so hard for so long? Am I afraid to stop? Have all these years of research, of best sellers, of ships' reporters and press photographs, been dragged on because I was afraid to stop?

Is it my love, my little brother, that has pushed me? Is it because I have nothing else that I try to hide behind this ghastly curtain of literary importance? Oh, Timothy, why did we have to grow up?
Why could we not stay small and loving, meeting only each other without question, without cavil?

But I have stopped. I
have
stopped work. And Timothy is still here. I see him all day long. I see him in the mirror even when he is not here. And yet I seem to be able to go on without him. If I should stop work today, or if I should write a book today, I could do it without asking him, without begging for his thoughts, his opinions, his most secret reactions. I could burn it in the fire without thinking, What will Timothy say? What would he have said? I am no longer afraid. I do not know why but I know now that if I write again it will be because I can see clearly, not because I am blind. Not yet, but soon.

And love? Oh, dear God—and Nan looked up through the immovable branches of the trees with amusement in her eyes—how much I have thought of love all these years! How much I have read of it! How much I have written! But I know nothing.

When Lucy Pendleton, so ostentatious as she safely spares me, leaping into my conversation with gallantry and thoughtfulness at the mere breathing of my husband's name when I let my voice falter then, lowering my eyes with the required hint of heartbreak, what do I remember really? Where is George Temple? Was he ever my bedfellow, that quiet little Wall Street magnate with his potbelly and his exhausted grateful eyes? Did we ever love each other? Did he ever see my aching womanhood?

And others? All the young men at literary teas and that boy who seized my hand in the harbor at Rio and pressed it against the hot satiny skin under his shirt and before that all the shy eligible dolts at teas and coming-out parties . . . Oh, you poor youths, how could you find what I really was behind all my walls of fright and mother-taught propriety? How could you dare look further than my stiff face and my archly fluttering fingers? How could you know that I was sweet and true and aching to be loved?

How could George Temple ever have known? Or had he? Did he know the dreadful fear and the hatred I felt for him, the scorn? Did he ever know, years later, the sad pity and all the yearning
tender love I felt when I saw him old before he should have been and suddenly weak and shy before me? Did he ever know how much I
liked
him, years too late?

Oh, Timothy, why did you never tell me all these things about love? When I was young and burdened with manners taught me by my elders? Why did you not tell me of their silliness? Why are you always there, so still and sympathetic? Was that your way of helping me? At Saturday-night circles you would dance with me so solemn and young in your white kid gloves and I would look at other girls whirling decorously on the arms of older men and love you passionately for making me look popular. I would long for the compliments of some perennial bachelor upon my proper girlish clothing, and when you told me I was beautiful I loved you for it. Why, why did you never tell me to just be calm and easy and not to care?

Why did I have to learn for myself when I'm sure you knew all the time? You could've told me about poor George Temple and those young men everywhere and not being stiff and frightened of them. You knew. And all these years I have been waiting to learn. Now it may be too late. You are gone. I am past those clumsy fumblings of the boy in Rio but I feel no disgust for them, no impatience now, that kind of love, and the love I have waited for from you, are past me now. I'm ready for something. I am waiting. I am no longer sad.

Is it religion then? When I was eleven and again when I was seventeen, I knelt upon a prie-dieu, waiting for a vision. I felt wings about me and I yearned to be holy. Now, sometimes, going into a dim church, hearing the music that beats out about the clerestory and underneath the arches of the chancel, smelling the dark overtones of incense and feeling the brush of the priest's robes past my closed hands and my down-bent head, I still think I have a vocation, that
this
is my life. But later I know that that is the beauty, the sensual ecstasy that sweeps me toward faith. I am not a true believer, unquestioning. The crucifix above my bed I leave there because it is a pure example of the fifteenth-century German carving, not because it is for me a symbol of the body of Jesus Christ, my Lord. I
am not religious, though at times I long to be. I long to kneel with Timothy in the little chapel in San Marco and see tears creep down between his fingers, past his ring of amethyst.

All this is wrong. I do not need a Lucy to tell me. I need no one. No one.

Nan sat up. She was almost gasping and felt herself to be on the verge of some great and terrible discovery. She looked wildly about her at the swing, grasses that bent over her, and at the close curving branches of the cherry tree and at the far lake. What instinct had she brushed? Where had she wandered in her thoughts?

She felt excited. But she knew, surely, that there was nothing more. She must wait.

She stood up, rather stiffly, and slid down the little bank to the terrace. It must be time for tea.

As she walked toward a rendezvous with Lucy and Honor, she felt as small and secret as an amoeba. They cannot even see me, she thought scornfully. They do not know me. They think I'm there, loving them and needing them, and I am really here, within myself, waiting.

vi

Tea was good. Nan ate avidly. She heard the hard crust of bread beneath her teeth with pure delight and felt the tea flow hotly down her throat. She'd been
hungry.

Lucy sat opposite her talking quickly, obviously happy that Honor was not there too.

All I have to do, Nan thought with a certain amount of complacent cunning, is to be wide-eyed and funny. All I have to do is say, Oh yes! and open my eyes wide and pretend to need people. That makes them feel important. I've always known this. I knew it when I was six and Father with his silky beard would tell me how he wanted to protect me. I know it now when Daniel dances with me as if I were made of porcelain. I know it when poor Lucy scolds me.

She is not scolding me now except in her own way. I have made her happy by talking of concerts we have heard together, pictures we have seen, people we have laughed at. She knows nothing about me.

Timothy is the only one who knows anything about me. He's the only one I love. It's because he stands alone, I think. He is not like Father or young Dan or Lucy and all the others, taken in by my cringing will to be loved, my need to be needed.

Oh, hurry, hurry, she prayed, her face smiling vaguely. Something is getting ready. Something is forming, slowly, surely, through all this strange summer. I am learning. But what is it?

She stood up. Lucy had begun to sob and Nan stood looking down at her, seeing the straggly brown hair, the fat hands clenched
over the face, and beyond them—and more importantly—the blue waters of the ageless lake.

What is she crying about? Tea was good. I was good. What does it matter that Joe and his Sue are not married, if my own Timothy is not married to his love, if Daniel and his quiet sister Honor are not married, even? All that is immaterial. I am not shocked by Susan. I am not jealous of Sara. I am but faintly interested in the gawky Tennants. Lucy, this poor harried weeping wreck, is not much more than an interruption. I do not care anymore, ever, if I wound her sensitive feelings.

“I'm sorry, Lucy,” she heard herself saying. She listened to her own warm sympathetic voice with a terrible glee. “I must stay with him,” she heard herself say. “He may need me.”

Poor stupid blind woman, she thought. You hear me talking of my brother. You think I love him, perhaps incestuously. Do you not know that I'm waiting for something else? You must think I stay here in this place you hate with such a venomous jealousy because I am held by an unnatural love for Timothy. You can never see that it is my love for him that is freeing me.

They walked on without speaking. Behind them the little terrace of the café settled into silence and a striped cat leapt up on their table and licked at the plates where a butter pat had been.