SHE stayed for three days. Nobody seemed to care where she was, and she seemed more waif-like than ever. I had never seen her for such a sustained period, and I found her a little nerve-wracking to have around the house. She never announced herself; she would get up, fling her book aside, and disappear into the streets for two hours, and never bother to mention where she had been. She was likely to play the piano in the middle of the night or come to the dinner table in her pajamas. I could tell that Wimpole was trying to decide whether to put her in line or not, and she clearly gave Boothy the jumps.
“My God,” Boothy said the second evening, when Val had flung herself out into the snow at about nine o’clock. “It isn’t a child, it’s a jack-in-the-box.”
Wimpole smiled over her radio. “She’ll teach us patience.”
Val reappeared in about ten minutes with a paper carton.
“I thought maybe we’d like some black raspberry ice cream,” she said.
“Just what I’ve been sitting here craving,” Boothy said. “How did you know?”
“Shall I get four plates?” Val asked. Boothy’s humor sometimes evaded her.
“Oh, you kids,” Boothy groaned. “Take it in the corner where I don’t have to look at it.”
“We’re full of dinner, dear.” Wimpole extracted a tube and looked at it perplexedly. “Thank you anyway.”
I got plates and Val and I sat under the tree and ate it, spooning it up hungrily.
“I think I’ll go home tomorrow, Wimpole,” Val said.
“Well, I love having you, dear, but your mother probably wants you to come home.”
“I don’t know if she...” She put down her spoon. “Oh, probably she does by now. She was getting tired of having me around the house all the time. She isn’t used to having a daughter around, especially one like me. It’ll be okay when I go back.” Nobody said anything, and Boothy glanced up from her book. “Isabel’s funny,” Val went on, picking needles off the tree. “She seems snappy, and she has her faults, but she’s rather a good egg when you get to know her. And she’s been trying so hard to be a real mother. She’s given up so much time to me since she’s been here...shopping and stuff...” Her voice died away, and she looked at the three of us. None of us said anything still, and she went on bravely, however. “If only all this stuff hadn’t happened...all the stuff I told you about. I’ve just botched things up...I want to go back, but I’m almost afraid to. I feel as though she gave me the chance to get along with her, and be good, and I’ve made a mess of it.”
Boothy sighed and shook her head, turning a page. “You do seem to walk into mud puddles,” she said.
“Well, it isn’t that exactly,” said Val, though she had just said that it was. Wimpole leaned back in her chair, and Boothy closed the book, listening. Val lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling. “Braintree says I subconsciously attract traumatic experiences,” she said gloomily. “Even though I think I want to just toodle along like everybody else, my whole trouble is that my subconscious is just seething with horrible desires to get into trouble.”
“So is everybody’s,” Boothy said. “I’ve been analyzed.”
“But things just happen to Val,” I said. “They don’t to other people, in the same way.” I looked at her. There was a faint smile on her face, which often came when she was the center of attention and people were talking about her.
“Do you want to know what I think?” Wimpole asked. “I think that for one thing, you’re full of music, and if you don’t play and compose, you’ll never be happy. For another thing, you’ll have to grow up before you can find your kind of people, the kind who appreciate you for what you are and who play violins to your piano. You belong in a small and special world, Val: a world of artists and thinkers, composers and highly strung people. That’s what you are. It’s a question of finding your niche, and until then, being patient.”
“Isn’t she wonderful?” Boothy said to me. “Oh, the clarity of mind that comes from never going near psychiatrists.”
“You have a trust,” Wimpole went on. “You have a pack of talent, and the Lord is trusting you to do something with it. The finger has been laid on you. Develop yourself; learn everything you can; play till your fingers are sore. Your life is unfortunate. Make the best of it till you’re old enough to do something about it. Your way is lonely and hard, but if you have the guts I think you do, you’ll make it.”
Val looked at her. “Do you really think so?”
“Of course.”
“How about my neuroses?” Val demanded. “How about my weaknesses?”
“Do what Dr. Braintree says, Val. She understands the ins and outs of your mind more than anybody. Take the treatment, and cure the cold.”
“You and your mother,” Val said, looking at me, “make things sound so easy.”
“I’ve lived a long time,” Wimpole said, “and I know a little more about life than you do.”
“You’ve never been analyzed.”
“Val, are you afraid to go home?” Wimpole asked, clearly trying to avoid an argument.
“Well, sort of. You might laugh, Wimpole, but Isabel is jealous of Henry.”
“Of Henry!” I exploded.
“I mean it. She thinks Henry is standing between her and me.”
“Henry,” said Wimpole, “is at Carnegie Hall. You are at the Melton Arms Hotel. Mothers don’t get jealous when their daughters have crushes, Val.”
“But it’s different with me. It’s all tangled up with my subconscious...I’m compensating for what Isabel didn’t give me and that makes her mad.”
“The trouble with being analyzed is that you always start analyzing everybody else,” Boothy said.
“Did Dr. Braintree say that?” Wimpole asked Val.
“A hundred times.”
“Has she discussed it with your mother?” Wimpole kept using the word “mother,” probably because she wanted Val to.
“Yes,” Val said. “Over the phone. She’s never met Isabel. She doesn’t want to. She just kind of calls up and rattles off a report on me, and Isabel says yes-yes, and that’s that.”
“Are you really so in love with this Henry, Val?”
“Oh, Wimpole, he’s like a mosquito that buzzes and buzzes around my head. I try and swat him, but he comes back and buzzes in the other ear.” Boothy tried to suppress a smile. “At first I thought he’d go away, but it gets stronger and stronger. I never believed I had it in me...all the emotion, I mean.”
“You have emotion coming out of your ears,” Boothy said.
“But it’s all frustrated. Henry is the only thing I feel really generous toward. I’m selfish about everything else. So,” she wound up, “I feel as though I have to decide between Henry and Isabel.”
Wimpole almost laughed, but hid it. She sat looking at Val for a moment, then said thoughtfully:
“If I had powers of magic...” She stopped. “I forget how young you are,” she said, smiling. “How very, very young. If you were older, I would give you all sorts of astonishing advice...I’d tell you to run after Henry, and all the other Henrys, to leave this city and go to another, to wipe the slate and start again...you need room and free air.” Val looked at her as though she would at that moment rush to Grand Central and catch the next train to Chicago. “I would advise you to do all the things I never did, because I never had the courage, or any talent as an excuse,” she said softly. “I would tell you to follow your heart, and never make any compromises to it. Henry means the world you need, that’s all. In my own life, I saw it and let it go by; and in you, I see the chance all over again.”
No one said anything. Wimpole hardly ever mentioned her past life, and the reasons for her divorce were unknown to me; but for the first time I understood that she had made a choice because she thought she should, and not because she wanted to. I looked at her face, calm and slightly smiling, watching Val wistfully, and I had a fervent hope that somehow, some day, her chance would come again; slightly aged, perhaps, but still possible. Or was it too late? Boothy was watching her too, her mouth slightly open. Was Val to her, too, a signpost to the other, wilder road? In the expressions on their faces I had an alarming view of the narrowing end of the way, with mystery over the horizon. It will end, I thought. It won’t go on forever, like this. And every day is important, and the most important of all are the moments when you choose what to do next. I’ve never had one yet, but I will. I’ll do the best I can, and when the moments come, I’ll do what’s in my heart. I’ll run down the right way without any doubts, without bothering about the people watching me.
But when I looked at Val’s face, I knew that it would never be quite that simple.
I woke up early the next morning to see Val sitting on the end of my bed, fully dressed.
“I’m all packed,” she announced. I wondered what she could have packed, as she had been wearing my clothes and using my toothbrush for the past three days.
“Are you going home now?” I asked.
“Well, I was wondering. If I waited till this afternoon you could come with me. I could tell Isabel I’d invited you for tea.”
“You’re scared, aren’t you?”
“Fooey,” Val said, turning the other way. “I just would rather see her first with somebody else around, that’s all.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll have tea at the Melton Arms.” I got out of bed and stared at my ruffled head in the mirror. “Oh, how ghastly,” I said. “Nobody will ever neck with me.”
“In the dark it’ll never make any difference,” said Val, philosophically. We both giggled, she knowledgeably, I enviously. “Last night somebody was giving a dance or something up the street,” she said. “I saw lots of little girls going by in their evening dresses.”
“Probably Mrs. McGuire,” I said. “She has a daughter at Talbott.” Talbott was Norton’s arch-rival, a den of creeps, in our opinion.
“Ugh,” she said. “Gilbert, are you going to come out, and all that?”
“No,” I said firmly.
“I can’t decide,” she said.
“I thought Isabel was deciding for you.”
“Well, she would like it,” Val said mildly. “How do you get to know anybody if you don’t?”
“Look at the creeps you get to know if you do,” I said disgustedly. “I’m disappointed. I didn’t think you liked that sort of stuff.”
“What’s the point? I don’t want to spend my life sitting around chewing my nails.”
“There are other ways to meet people. Nice people.” I had a dim vision of organizing a literary salon in a few years, sitting around on a divan with intellectuals at my feet. “Smart people. Debutantes are such ninnies.”
“But you have to know the ninnies before you can meet the smart ones,” Val said with an odd burst of insight. I had an uncomfortable feeling that she was right, so I changed the subject.
“Let’s do something exciting today,” I said.
“Okay. What?”
We thought for a while, but nothing seemed particularly interesting. It was the first time this had happened, and my heart sank. Too much has gone on, I thought. There must be something left. She can’t have left me behind already...me and Henry.
“Why don’t we go and see some of our old friends?” I suggested. “We could go to Liberty’s. Or the lampshade shop, and take some lunch up to Mike and Davy. Or Morningside Park.”
“Okay,” said Val, not visibly enthusiastic. I wasn’t either, but I made a mighty effort.
We spent an hour or so in Liberty’s, playing Henry’s music, but our salesman friend was busy that morning and couldn’t sit in the booth with us, as he often did. We took the bus to Morningside Park, and looked vainly for our oboist, but he was nowhere to be seen.
“Maybe he’s gone down to Central Park with the upper crust,” Val suggested.
We went to a delicatessen and got salami and potato salad, and went to the lampshade shop. Mike and Davy greeted us with their usual ephemeral enthusiasm, and gobbled up the lunch eagerly, but for the first time I was bored and rather revolted by them. Davy started putting the lampshades on his head and imitating what he called “Park Avenue Matrons,” and Mike, for obscure reasons, began to sulk. A squabble ensued, Mike accusing Davy of being a show-off, and they forgot us completely, so we left. We stood in the middle of the street, looking at each other.
“It’s only two,” Val said. “Let’s go to a movie.”
That proved the greatest success, and when we came out, it was four-thirty.
“Well, old girl,” I said, “shall we trot off to tea?”
She looked at me gloomily, nodded, and we took a subway back downtown.
“I hope she’s out,” Val said nervously, as we took the elevator upstairs. We walked along the hallway and Val opened the door quietly. The apartment was silent and beautiful. We went into the living room and took off our things. Val called room service and ordered tea and sandwiches.
“I’m starved,” she said. “I got hardly any lunch.”
Tea arrived, and we sat down, after putting some Bartók on the Victrola. We began to relax, and talked about school for a while. Then, just as we were laughing wildly about something Lilian Kafritz had said, a key grated in the lock.
“Oh, my God,” whispered Val, sitting bolt upright. “Gilbert, don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t,” I said, but my stomach was twisted into a knot.
There were footsteps in the hall, and Isabel walked in.
“Well, well,” she said. “So the prodigal daughter is home.”
Neither of us said anything, just sat and watched her. She was wearing a black dress and fur coat, and she dumped the coat on a chair, along with a couple of packages she had been carrying. Slowly and meaningfully she pulled off her long gloves, jerking each finger out with great concentration. Then she looked over at Val.
“Have you finished camping on Mrs. Gilbert’s doorstep?” she asked shortly.
Val tried to laugh, but it came out quavering. “She’s used to me by now,” she said.
“She must be,” Isabel said. “You seem to spend your life there.” She sat down opposite us. “Pour me a cup of tea. No sugar.” Val did so, the pot shaking slightly in her hand. She handed the cup to her mother, spilling tea into the saucer. There was a long, terrible silence while Isabel crossed her knees gratingly, moved the sofa cushion, took a sip of tea, put down the cup, straightened her hair, and closed her eyes for a moment.
“If I’d thought you didn’t want me to stay at Gilbert’s,” Val said finally, in a brave voice, “I would have come home.”
“You know damn well what I think,” said Isabel.
“You didn’t seem to care.”
“You know damn well I care where you are. My God, what I’ve given up for you since we’ve been here. I haven’t seen half of my friends. I had that Christmas Eve party for you, with the people I thought you’d like best.” She opened her eyes. “I’ve never told you this, but we’ve lost a lot of money because of you. We’re supposed to be in Cairo, right now.”
“Cairo!” exclaimed Val politely.
“Your father gave up a big deal that only he could have swung, so we could stay in New York with you for the holidays. You have no concept of the sacrifices we make for you.” She looked over at me. “Don’t we make sacrifices?”
“Oh, yes,” I said hastily.
“And then she runs off and I don’t know where she is, for days at a time. Are you staying?”
“Me?” I asked.
“Yes, you.”
Val glanced at me quickly, and I said, “Val asked me for tea.”
“Oh, well, we mustn’t interrupt that. You might as well hear what I’m going to say, anyway. She tells you more than she tells us.” She closed her eyes again, and Val and I sat on the edge of the sofa in fright. Val had been right; she knew Isabel far better than I thought.
“More tea, Mother?” Val asked, in what I thought was a disgustingly placating voice. Why was she being so nice?
“I was horrified and revolted,” said Isabel finally, “by what I read in that book of yours the other night.”
“Oh, the Bible,” said Val, laughing nervously. “Silly, isn’t it?”
“Not silly at all. Quite shocking, as a matter of fact. It made me realize what you’ve been up to in New York, while your father and I were earning money to put you in good schools. It was a blow to me, as a mother, to realize how little you’ve learned about decency and good behavior, not to say morals.”
Val was looking at her, puzzled. “Oh now, Mother, it isn’t that bad.”
“Isn’t that bad! Isn’t that bad!” She sat up and stared at her angrily. “Then what is bad, if you please?” She lit a cigarette hastily. “I haven’t told your father anything about this,” she said. “It would kill him, simply kill him. I’m a little tougher about these things.”
“But, Mother, everybody gets crushes on...”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s all the thing at Norton.” She leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “My God, what a school! You’re being transferred immediately. And I’ll tell everybody I know what I think of it.” She sighed. “And I suppose Emma Hambler didn’t care, either, with her psychiatry books and her dedicated little husband. That’s another thing. You’re not going back to that place. I’m making some changes around here.”
“Mother!” cried Val. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Emma hasn’t done anything!”
“Oh, nothing at all. Just let you run haywire around New York City, and never asking what you’ve been up to. That’s just what you love...never to be responsible to anybody. That’s just what’s going to stop.” She crushed the cigarette in an ash tray. “I might as well tell you,” she said. “I’ve talked to your Mr. Orient.”
Val looked as though she had been struck. All at once, it burst on both of us, the full horror of what Isabel thought, and what she had done. Val blushed a deep red, and I stared at Isabel, who was watching Val closely.
“I phoned him,” she went on, “and we arranged to meet and have a drink and talk about it. He’s an odd creature, but not as bad as I expected. I didn’t want to be the outraged matron with him, so I just told him quietly how old you are, which he, of course, didn’t know. Naturally, he denied knowing anything about it, and said he’d never heard of you. I pleaded with him, Val. I threw away my pride for you, and pleaded with him. I said you were too young to know what you were doing. I said I was sorry if you’d bothered him, and the damn man said he hadn’t minded at all.” To my fascination, she suppressed a smile, which Val apparently didn’t see. “He’s much too old for you, Val. I hope you realize that. However, he isn’t as vile as I thought he would be. Hardly a seducer of little girls.”
“Mother,” Val shouted, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never met him. I’ve never...”
“Oh, my God, do you have to start lying? It’s a horrible trait, and you must get over it. Of course you’ve met him; he admitted it himself, having the grace, however, to laugh at himself as he said so. Now, I hate to drag out dirty linen, so I won’t ask you how far it went—maybe he never seduced you at all.”
“Well, that’s more like it!” Val exclaimed, still red in the face. “But the fact remains you chased him and bothered him, and wrote it all down in that incredible book. You needn’t look so injured-innocent, Val. I know perfectly well what you’re capable of. I know what went on in Joe Bird’s apartment, too.”
“Nothing went on in Joe Bird’s apartment!” I exclaimed, before I could stop myself. Isabel eyed me.
“Were you there?” she asked.
“Well, no. I...”
“Then keep out of it. I discussed it with Joe as we read your book, Val. He said you went to lunch with him—bad enough, he’s old enough to be your father—and that you let him kiss you. Well?”
Val said nothing, and I looked at her in astonishment. So she had, after all!
“I’ve never met Henry Orient,” Val said stubbornly. “Believe it or not. If you think I’m lying, I can’t help it.”
“Do you deny that you’re in love with him, or some such nonsense?”
Val’s eyes dropped. “No, I don’t deny that,” she said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear her.
Isabel began to laugh, a horrible laugh. “What do you expect me to believe? You lie about Joe, you lie about Henry Orient. You tell me you’re having lunch with a friend, you tell Emma you’re going to see Gilbert. I can’t trust you, Val. I know you don’t tell the truth, and Braintree knows it. How about you, Marian? Does she lie or doesn’t she?”
“She doesn’t...” I stopped. Val was full of small deceits; no one knew better than I. But I couldn’t even bring myself to lie in her stead. If there was one thing I believed in passionately, it was honesty; and it seemed dead wrong to add a lie to hundreds of others, when it could do nothing but turn Isabel against me too. “She never tells big lies,” I said, weakly.
“You see?” said Isabel triumphantly. “Your best friend, a sworn witness. You have black marks on your record, Val, and it’s hard to erase them. If I could have faith in your word, that would be one thing. But I don’t.” She got up and walked across the room.
I looked over at Val, crouched in the corner of the sofa. She didn’t look at me, whether from hatred or embarrassment, I didn’t know. She couldn’t hate me for telling the truth; she couldn’t be that desperate.
“Val,” I said softly, “tell her the truth. Make her believe it.”
“She doesn’t know how,” Isabel said from across the room. She was looking out the window, her back to us. Val looked up at me, her face blotchy and terrified.
“How can I say I’ve never met Henry?” she asked in an odd little whisper. “How can I say I don’t know him? I’ve met him every day, since that concert. He follows me down the street. He isn’t out of my mind for a moment...”
“Oh, Val, this is no time to be a boob!” I snapped. “You’ve never seen him in the flesh. Say it! Go on, say it!”
“I’ve never seen him in the flesh, Mother,” Val said.
“Just in clothes,” snapped Isabel. “I’m so happy to hear it. You’ve still made a fool of yourself.” Val’s lip began to tremble. “Oh, my God, the schools, the psychiatrists, the money, the time, everything! For what? Now we have to start all over, from scratch, just as though she were brand new. Has none of it done any good?” Her voice was getting hysterical. “Your father...everything down the drain in Cairo. Just this once...this once I persuaded him we were going to have a home, and make a life for you, just for these holidays! And now this! What will your father think of me? He’ll think I’ve ruined you, do you understand? And then God knows what he’ll do. Dump me out in the street, I suppose, and you too. He doesn’t know about Joe Bird...he’d kill me, for letting you out of my sight. We had it all planned. We were going to make a home...Braintree suggested it, she said you needed home life, and God knows your father and I do, too. So we tried, and you spoiled it, with all your lying and deceit! You spoiled it!”
She stood in the middle of the room, trembling, and Val looked up at her.
“Arthur doesn’t care about me,” she said slowly, “and you know it. He doesn’t care about anything but money. You’ve been trying to use me as a foil to hold him.” Her voice was grim, and it frightened me. Did she know how Isabel had gotten Arthur...that she had been used as a foil even before she was born? Isabel was glaring at her. If I had ever seen hatred between two women, I saw it then.
“You’re an unnatural child,” Isabel said, her voice shaking, “to even know such things, or say them. Right now it even horrifies me that I bore you, in pain and anguish, at the risk of my life. Perhaps it would have been better if I had died then. But I have lived to watch what you’ve turned into. I wonder often if they got the babies mixed in that hospital room. You aren’t mine. I don’t know where you came from.” She snatched up her gloves and began to put them on, clearly because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. “You’re full of things I don’t understand...full of strange ideas and strange ways. You always have been. There’s nothing complicated about me, nothing at all. Or your father. But you...” She wheeled around, and I saw that she was on the verge of crying. I had an odd, oblique pity for her, as I had had Christmas Eve; not a pity for her situation, but pity for her total inability to understand Val. It was almost pity for all the world, and for all the people who would never understand her.
“Val...” I began.
“You’d better go and lie down, Mother,” Val said, in the same curious voice. “You’re upset.”
“You’re damn right I’m upset! Everything, everything, out the window!”
“It isn’t that bad,” said Val. “He isn’t going to leave you. As long as you don’t....” She stopped, and Isabel stared at her.
“As long as I don’t what? As long as I don’t what?” Val said nothing, and she screamed, “My own child! My God, oh my God!” and turned and ran out of the room. We heard the bedroom door slam, and then silence. Val got up and walked to the door, looking after her.
“Poor Isabel,” she said. “She’s so damn neurotic.”