MR EVENING
‘You were asking the other day, Pearl, what that very tall young Mr Evening – the one who goes past the house so often – does for a living, and I think I’ve found out for you,’ Mrs Owens addressed her younger sister from her chair loaded with hand-sewn cushions.
Mrs Owens continued to gaze out the big front window, its heavy shutter pulled back now in daylight to allow her a full view of the street.
She had paused long enough to allow Pearl’s curiosity to whet itself while her own attention strayed to the faces of passersby. Indeed Mrs Owens’s only two occupations now were correcting the endless inventory of her heirlooms and observing those who passed her window, protected from the street by massive wrought-iron bars.
‘Mr Evening is in and out of his rooming house frequently enough to be up to a good deal, if you ask me, Grace,’ Pearl finally broke through her sister’s silence.
Coming out of her reverie, Mrs Owens smiled. ‘We’ve always known he was busy, of course.’ She took a piece of newsprint from her lap, and closed her eyes briefly in the descending rays of the January sun. ‘But now at last we know what he’s busy at.’ She waved the clipping gently.
‘Ah, don’t start so, child.’ Mrs Owens almost laughed. ‘Pray look at this, would you,’ and she handed the younger woman a somewhat lengthy ‘notice’ clipped neatly from the Wall Street Journal.
While Pearl put on thick glasses to study the fine print, Mrs Owens went on as much for herself as her sister: ‘Mr Evening has always given me a special feeling.’ She touched her lavaliere. ‘He’s far too young to be as idle as he looks, and on the other hand, as you’ve pointed out, he’s clearly busier than those who make a profession of daily responsibility.’
‘It’s means, Grace,’ Pearl said, blinking over her reading, but making no comment on it, which was a kind of desperate plea, it turned out, for information concerning a certain scarce china cup, circa 1910. ‘He has means,’ Pearl repeated.
‘Means?’ Mrs Owens showed annoyance. ‘Well, I should hope he has, in his predicament.’ She hinted at even further knowledge concerning him, but with a note of displeasure creeping into her tone at Pearl’s somewhat offhand, bored manner.
‘I’ve telephoned him to appear, of course.’ Mrs Owens had decided against any further “preparation” for her sister, and threw the whole completed plan at her now in one fling. ‘On Thursday, naturally.’
Putting down the ‘notice’ Pearl waited for Mrs Owens to make some elaboration on so unusual a decision, but no elaboration came.
‘But you’ve never sold anything, let alone shown to anybody!’ Pearl cried, after some moments of deeply troubled cogitation.
‘Who spoke of selling!’ Mrs Owens tightened an earring. ‘And as to showing, as you say, I haven’t thought that far . . . But don’t you see, poor darling’ – here Mrs Owens’s voice boomed in what was perhaps less self-defense than self-explanation – ‘I’ve not met anybody in half a century who wants heirlooms so bad as he.’ She tapped the clipping. ‘He’s worded everything here with one thought only in mind – my seeing it.’
Pearl withdrew into incomprehension.
‘Don’t you see this has to be the case!’ Here she touched the ‘notice’ with her fingers again. ‘Who else has the things he’s enumerated here? He’s obviously investigated what I have, and he could have inserted this in the want ads only in the hope it would catch my eye.’
‘But you’re certainly not going to invite someone to the house who merely wants what you have!’ Pearl found herself for the first time in her life not only going against her sister in opinion, but voicing something akin to disapproval.
‘Why, you yourself said only the other night that what we needed was company!’ Mrs Owens put these words adroitly now in her sister’s mouth, where they could never have been.
‘But Mr Evening!’ Pearl protested against his coming, ignoring or forgetting the fact she had been quoted as having said something she never in the first place had thought.
‘Don’t we need somebody to tell us about heirlooms! I mean our heirlooms, of course. Haven’t you said as much yourself time after time?’
Mrs Owens was trying to get her sister to go along with her, to admit complicity, so to speak, in what she herself had brought about, and now she found that Pearl put her mind and temper against even consideration.
‘Someone told me only recently’ – Pearl now hinted at a side to her own life perhaps unknown to Mrs Owens – ‘that the young man you speak of, Mr Evening, can hardly carry on a conversation.’
Mrs Owens paused. She had not been inactive in making her own investigations concerning their caller-to-be, and one of the things she had discovered, in addition to his being a Southerner, was that he did not or would not ‘talk’ very much.
‘We don’t need a conversationalist – at least not about them,’ Mrs Owens nearly snapped, by them meaning the heirlooms. ‘What we need is an appreciator, and the muter the better, say I.’
‘But if that’s all you want him for!’ – Pearl refused to be won – ‘why, he’ll smell out your plan. He’ll see you’re only showing him what he can never hope to buy or have.’
A look of deep disappointment tinged with spleen crossed Mrs Owens’s still-beautiful face.
‘Let him smell out our plan, then, as you put it,’ Mrs Owens chided in the wake of her sister’s opposition, ‘we won’t care! If he can’t talk, don’t you see, so much the better. We’ll have a session of “looking” from him, and his “appreciation” will perk us up. We’ll see him taking in everything, dear love, and it will review our own lifelong success . . . Don’t be so down on it now . . . And mind you, we won’t be here quite forever,’ she ended, and a certain hard majestical note in her voice was not lost on the younger woman. ‘The fact,’ Mrs Owens summed it all up, ‘that we’ve nothing to give him needn’t spoil for us the probability he’s got something to give us.’
Pearl said no more then, and Mrs Owens spoke under her breath: ‘I haven’t a particle of a doubt that I’m in the right about him, and if it should turn out I’m wrong, I’ll shoulder all the blame.’
Whatever particle of a doubt there may have been in Mrs Owens’s own mind, there was considerably more of doubt and apprehension in Mr Evening’s as he weighed, in his rooming house, the rash decision he had made to visit formidable Mrs Owens in – one could not say her business establishment, since she had none – but her background of accumulation of heirlooms, which vague world was, he could only admit, also his own. Because he had never known or understood people well, and he was the most insignificant of ‘collectors’, he was at a loss as to why Mrs Owens should feel he had anything to give her, and since her ‘legend’ was too well known to him, he knew she, likewise, had nothing at all to give him, except, and this was why he was going, the ‘look-in’ which his visit would give him. Whatever risk there was in going to see her, and there appeared to be some, he felt, from ‘warnings’ of a queer kind from those who had dealt with her, it was worth something just to get inside, even though again he had been informed by those in the business it would be doubtful if he would be allowed to mention ‘purchase’ and in the end it was also doubtful he would be allowed even a close peek.
On the other hand, if Mrs Owens wanted him to tell her something – this crossed his mind as he went toward her huge pillared house, though he could not imagine even vaguely what he could have to tell her, and if she was mad enough to think him capable of entertaining her, for after all she was a lonely ancient lady on the threshold of death, he would disabuse her of all such expectations almost as soon as they had met. He was uneasy with old women, he supposed, though in his work he spent more time with them than with other people, and he wanted, he finally said out loud to himself, that hand-painted china cup, 1910, no matter what it might cost him. He fancied she might yield it to him at some atrocious illegal price. It was no more improbable, after all, than that she had invited him in the first place. Mrs Owens never invited anybody, that is, from the outside, and the inside people in her life had all died or were incapacitated from paying calls. Yes, he had been summoned, and he could hope at least therefore that what everybody else told him was at least thinkable – purchase, and if that was not in store for him, then the other improbable thing, ‘viewing.’
But Mr Evening could not pretend. If his getting the piece of china or even more improbably other larger heirlooms, kept from daylight as well as human eyes, locked away in the floors above her living room, if possession meant long hours of currying favor, talking and laughing and dining and killing the evening, then no thank you, never. His inability to pretend, he supposed, had kept him from rising in the antique trade, for although he had a kind of business of his own here in Brooklyn, his own private income was what kept him afloat, and what he owned in heirlooms, though remarkable for a young dealer, did not make him a figure in the trade. His inconspicuous position in the business made his being summoned by Mrs Owens all the more inexplicable and even astonishing. Mr Evening was, however, too unversed both in people and the niceties of his own profession to be either sufficiently impressed or frightened.
Meanwhile Pearl, moments before Mr Evening’s arrival gazing out of the corner of her eye at her sister, saw with final and uncomfortable consternation the telltale look of anticipation on the older woman’s face which demonstrated that she ‘wanted’ Mr Evening with almost the same inexplicable maniacal whim which she had once long ago demonstrated toward a certain impossible-to-find Spanish medieval chair, and how she had got hold of the latter still remained a mystery to the world of dealers.
‘Shall we without further ado, then, strike a bargain?’ Mrs Owens intoned, looking past Mr Evening, who had arrived on a bad snowy January night.
He had been reduced to more than his customary kind of silent social incommunicativeness by finally seeing Mrs Owens in the flesh, a woman who while reputed to be so old, looked unaccountably beautiful, whose clothes were floral in their charm, wafting sachets of woody scent to his nostrils, and whose voice sounded like fine chimes.
‘Of course I don’t mean there’s to be a sale! Even youthful you couldn’t have come here thinking that.’ She dismissed at once any business with a pronounced flourish of white hands. ‘Nothing’s for sale, and won’t be even should we die.’ She faced him with a lessening of defiance, but he stirred uncomfortably.
‘Whatever you may think, whatever you may have been told’ – she went now to deal with the improbable fact of their meeting, – ‘let me say that I can’t resist their being admired’ (she meant the heirlooms, of course). She unfolded the piece of newsprint of his ‘notice’. ‘I could tell immediately by your way of putting things’ – she touched the paper – ‘that you knew all about them. Or better, I knew you knew all about them by the way you left things undescribed. I knew you could admire, without stint or reservation.’ She finished with a kind of low bow.
‘I’m relieved’ – he began to look about the large high room – ‘that you’re not curious then to know who I am, to know about me, that is, as I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to satisfy your curiosity on that score. That is to say, there’s almost nothing to tell about me, and you already know what my vocation is.’
She allowed this speech to die in silence, as she did with an occasional intruding sound of traffic which unaccountably reached her parlor, but then at his helpless sinking look, she said in an attempt, perhaps, to comfort, ‘I don’t have to be curious about anything that holds me, Mr Evening. It always unfolds itself, in any case.
‘For instance,’ she went on, her face taking on a mock-wrathful look, ‘people sometimes try to remind me that I was once a famous actress, which though being a fact, is irrelevant, and, more, now meaningless, for even in those remote days, when let’s say I was on the stage, even then, Mr Evening, these’ – and she indicated with a flourish of those commanding white hands the munificent surroundings – ‘these were everything!’
‘One is really only strictly curious about people one never intends to meet, I think, Mr Evening,’ Mrs Owens said.
She now rose and stood for a moment, so that the imposition of her height over him, seated in his low easy chair, was emphasized, then walking over to a tiny beautiful peachwood table, she looked at something on it. His own attention, still occupied with her presence, did not move for a moment to what she was bestowing a long, calm glance on. She made no motion to touch the object on the table before her. Though his vision clouded a bit, he looked directly at it now, and saw what it was, and saw there could be no mistake about it. It was the pale rose shell-like 1910 hand-painted china cup.
‘You don’t need to bring it to me!’ he cried, and even she was startled by such an outburst. Mr Evening had gone as white as chalk.
He searched in vain in his pockets for a handkerchief, and noting his distress, Mrs Owens handed him one from the folds of her own dress.
‘I won’t ever beg of you,’ he said, wiping his brow with the handkerchief. ‘I would offer anything for the cup, of course, but I can’t beg.’
‘What will you do then, Mr Evening?’ She came to within a few inches of him.
He sat before her, his head slightly tilted forward, his palms upturned like one who wishes to determine if rain is beginning.
‘Don’t answer’ – she spoke in loud, gay tones – ‘for nobody expects you to do anything, beg, bargain, implore, steal. Whatever you are, or were, Mr Evening – I catch from your accent you are Southern – you were never an actor, thank fortune. It’s one of the reasons you’re here, you are so much yourself.’
‘Now, mark me.’ Mrs Owens strode past his chair to a heavy gold-brocaded curtain, her voice almost menacing in its depth of resonance. ‘I’ve not allowed you to look at this cup in order to tempt you. I merely wanted you to know I’d read your “notice”, which you wrote, in any case, only for me. Furthermore, as you know, I’m not bargaining with you in any received sense of the word. You and I are beyond bargaining with one another. Money will never be mentioned between us, papers, or signatures – all that goes without saying. But I do want something,’ and she turned from the curtain and directed her luminous gray eyes to his face. ‘You’re not like anybody else, Mr Evening, and it’s this quality of yours which has, I won’t say won me, you’re beyond winning anybody, but which has brought an essential part of myself back to me by your being just what you are and wanting so deeply what you want!’
Holding her handkerchief entirely over his face now so that he spoke to her as from under a sheet, he mumbled, ‘I don’t like company, Mrs Owens.’ His interruption had the effect of freezing her to the curtain before her. ‘And company, I’m afraid, includes you and your sister. I can’t come and talk, and I don’t like supper parties. If I did, if I liked them, that is, I’d prefer you.’
‘What extraordinary candor!’ Mrs Owens was at a loss where to walk, at what to look. ‘And how gloriously rude!’ She considered everything quickly. ‘Good, very good, Mr Evening . . . But good won’t carry us far enough!’ she cried, and her voice rose in a great swell of volume until she saw with satisfaction that he moved under her strength. The handkerchief fell away, and his face, very flushed, but with the eyes closed, bent in her direction.
‘You don’t have to talk’ – Mrs Owens dismissed this as if with loathing of that idea that he might – ‘and you don’t have to listen. You can snore in your chair if you like. But if you come, say, once a week, that will more than do for a start. You could consider this house as a kind of waiting room, let’s say, for a day that’s sure and bound to come for all, and especially us . . . You’d wait here, say, on Thursday, and we could offer you the room where you are now, and food, which you would be entitled to spurn, and all you would need do is let time pass. I could allow you to see, very gradually’ – she looked hurriedly in the direction of the cup – ‘a few things here and there, not many at a visit, of course, it might easily unhinge you in your expectant state’ – she laughed – ‘and certainly I could show you nothing for quite a while from up there,’ and she moved her head toward the floors above. ‘But in the end, if you kept it up, the visits, I mean, I can assure you your waiting would “pay off”, as they say out there . . . I can’t be any more specific.’ She brought her explanation of the bargain to an abrupt close, and indicated with a sweeping gesture he might stand and depart.
Thursday, then, set aside by Mrs Owens for Mr Evening to begin attendance on the heirlooms, loomed up for the two of them as a kind of fateful, even direful, mark on the calendar; in fact, both the mistress of the heirlooms and her viewer were ill with anticipation. Mr Evening’s dislike of company and being entertained vied with his passion for ‘viewing’. On the other hand, Mrs Owens, watched over by a saddened and anguished Pearl, felt the hours and days speed precipitously to an encounter which she now could not understand her ever having arranged or wanted. Never had she lived through such a week, and her fingers, usually white and still as they rested on her satin cushions, were almost raw from a violent pulling on and off of her rings.
At last Thursday, 8:30 p.m., came, finding Mrs Owens with one glass of wine – all she ever allowed herself, with barely a teaspoon of it tasted. Nine-thirty struck, ten, no Mr Evening. Her lips, barely touched with an uncommon kind of rouge, moved in a bitter self-deprecatory smile. She rose and walked deliberately to a small ebony cabinet, and took out her smelling bottle, which she had not touched for months. Opening it, she found it had considerably weakened in strength, but she took it with her back to her chair, sniffing its dilute fumes from time to time.
Then about a quarter past eleven, when she had finished with hope, having struck the silk and mohair of her chair several castigating blows, the miracle, Mr Evening, ushered in by Giles (who rare for him showed some animation), appeared in his heavy black country coat. Mrs Owens, not so much frosty from his lateness as incredulous that she was seeing him, barely nodded. Having refused her supper, she had opened a large gilt book of Flaxman etchings, and was occupying herself with these, while Pearl, seated at a little table of her own in the furthest reaches of the room, was dining on some tender bits of fish soaked in a sauce into which she dipped a muffin.
Mr Evening, ignored by both ladies, had sat down. He had not been drinking, Mrs Owens’s first impression, but his cheeks were beet-red from cold, and he looked, she saw with uneasy observation, more handsome and much younger than on his first call.
‘I hate snow intensely.’ Mrs Owens studied his pants cuffs heavy with flakes. ‘Yet going south somewhere’ – it was not clear to whom she was speaking from this time on – ‘that would be now too much in the way of preparation merely to avoid winter wet . . . At one time traveling itself was home to me, of course,’ she continued, and her hands fell on a massive yellowed ivory paper-opener with a larger than customary blade. ‘One was put up in those days, not hurled over landscape like an electric particle. One wore clothes, one “appeared” at dinner, which was an occasion, one conversed, listened, or merely sat with eyes averted, one rose, was looked after, watched over, if you will, one was often more at home going in those days than when one remained home, or reached one’s destination.’
Mrs Owens stopped, mortified by a yawn from Mr Evening. Reduced to a kind of quivering dumbness, Mrs Owens could only restrain herself, remembering the ‘agreement’.
A butler appeared wearing green goggles and at a nearly imperceptible nod from Mrs Owens picked up a minuscule marble-topped gold inlaid table, and placed it within a comfortable arm’s reach of Mr Evening. Later, another servant brought something steaming under silver receptacles from the kitchen.
‘Unlike the flock of crows in flight today’ – Mrs Owens’s voice seemed to come across footlights – ‘I can remember all my traveling.’ She turned the pages of Flaxman with critical quickness. ‘And that means in my case the globe, all of it, when it was largely inaccessible, and certainly infrequently commented or written upon by tradespeople and typists.’ She concentrated a moment in silence as if remembering perhaps how old she was and how far off her travel had been. ‘I didn’t miss a country, however unrecommended or unlisted by some guide or hotel bursar. There’s no point in going now or leaving one’s front door when every dot on the map has been ground to dust by somebody’s heavy foot. When everybody is en route, stay home! . . . Pearl, my dear, you’re not looking at your plate!’
Pearl, who had finished her fish, was touching with nearsighted uncertainty the linen tablecloth with a gleaming fork. ‘Wear your glasses, dear child, for heaven’s sweet sake, or you’ll stab yourself!’
Mr Evening had closed his eyes. He appeared like one who must impress upon himself not to touch food in a strange house. But the china on his table was stunning, though obviously brand-new and therefore not ‘anything’. At last, however, against his better judgment, he lifted one of the cups, then set it down noiselessly. Immediately the butler poured him coffee. Against his will, he drank a tablespoon or so, for after the wet and cold he needed at least a taste of something hot. It was an unbelievable brew, heady, clear, fresh. Mrs Owens immediately noted the pleasure on his face, and a kind of shiver ran through her. Her table, ever nonpareil, might win him, she saw, where nothing in her other ‘offerings’ tonight had reached him.
‘After travel was lost to me,’ Mrs Owens went on in the manner of someone who is dictating memoirs to a machine, ‘the church failed likewise to hold me. Even then’ (one felt she referred to the early years of another century), ‘they had let in every kind of speaker. The church had begun to offer thought and problems instead of merging and repose . . . So it went out of my life along with going abroad . . . Then my eyes are not, well, not so bad as Pearl’s, who is blind without glasses, but reading tires me more and more, though I see the natural world of objects better perhaps now than ever before. Besides, I’ve read more than most, for I’ve had nothing in life but time. I’ve read, in sum, everything, and if there’s a real author, I’ve been through him often more than twice.’
Mr Evening now tried a slice of baked Alaska, and it won him. His beginning the meal backwards was hardly intentional, but he had looked so snowy the butler had poured the coffee first, and the coffee had suggested to the kitchen the dessert course instead of the entrée.
Noting that Mr Evening did not touch his wine, Mrs Owens thought a moment, then began again, ‘Drinking has never been a consolation to me either. Life might have been more endurable, perhaps, especially in this epoch,’ and she looked at her glass, down scarcely two ounces. ‘Therefore spirits hardly needed to join travel in the things I’ve eliminated . . .’ Gazing upwards, she brought out, ‘The human face, perhaps strangely enough, is really all that has been left to me,’ and after a moment’s consultation with herself, she looked obliquely at Mr Evening, who halted conveying his fork, full of meringue, to his mouth. ‘I need the human face, let’s say.’ She talked into the thick pages of the Flaxman drawings. ‘I can’t stare at my servants, though outsiders have praised their fetching appeal. (I can’t look at what I’ve acquired, I’ve memorized it too well.) No, I’m talking about the unnegotiable human face. Somebody,’ she said, looking nowhere now in particular, ‘has that, of course, while, on the other hand, I have what he wants badly, and so shall we say we are, if not a match, confederates of a sort.’
Time had passed, if not swiftly, steadily. Morning itself was advancing. Mr Evening, during the entire visit, having opened his mouth chiefly to partake of food whose taste alone invited him, since he had already dined, took up his napkin, wiped his handsome red lips on it, though it was, he saw, an indignity to soil such a piece of linen, and rose. Both Mrs Owens and her sister had long since dozed or pretended to doze by the carefully tended log fire. He said good night therefore to stone ears, and went out the door.
It was the fifth Thursday of his visits to Mrs Owens that the change which he had feared and suspected from the start, and which he was somehow incapable of averting, came about.
Mrs Owens and her sister had ignored him more and more on the occasion of his ‘calls’, and an onlooker, not in on the agreement, might have thought his presence was either distasteful to the ladies, or that he was too insignificant – an impecunious relative, perhaps – to merit the bestowal of a glance or word.
The spell of the pretense of indifference, of not recognizing one another, ended haphazardly one hour when Pearl, without any preface of warning, said in a loud voice that strong light was being allowed to reach and ruin the ingrain carpet on the third floor.
Before Mrs Owens could take in the information or issue a command as to what might be done, if she intended indeed to do anything about protecting the carpet from light, she heard a certain flurry from the direction of the visitor, and turning saw what the mention of this special carpet had done to the face of Mr Evening. He bore an expression of greed, passionate covetousness, one might even say a deranged, demented wish for immediate ownership. Indeed his countenance was so arresting in its eloquence that Mrs Owens found herself, going against her own protocol, saying, ‘Are you quite all right, sir?’ But before she had the words out of her mouth he had come over to her chair without waiting her permission.
‘Did you say ingrain carpet?’ he asked with great abruptness.
When Mrs Owens, too astonished at his tone and movement, did not reply, she heard Mr Evening’s peremptory: ‘Show it to me at once!’
‘If you have not taken leave of your senses, Mr Evening,’ Mrs Owens began, bringing forth from the folds of her red cashmere dress an enormous gold chain, which she pressed, ‘would you be so kind, I might even say, so decent, as to remember our agreement, if you cannot remember who I am, and in whose house you are visiting.’
Then, quickly, in a voice of annihilating anger, loud enough to be heard on a passing steamship: ‘You’ve not waited long enough, spoilsport!’
Standing before her, jaws apart, an expression close to that of an idiot who has been slapped into brief attention, he could only stutter something inaudible.
Alarmed by her own outburst, Mrs Owens hastened to add, ‘It’s not ready to be shown, my dear, special friend.’
Mrs Owens took his hands now in hers, and kissed them gently.
Kneeling before her, not letting go her chill handclasp, looking up into her furrowed rouged cheeks, ‘Allow me one glimpse,’ he beseeched.
She extricated her hands from his and touched his forehead.
‘Quite out of the question.’ She seemed almost to flirt now, and her voice had gone up an octave. ‘But the day will come’ – she motioned for him to seat himself again – ‘before one perhaps is expecting it. You have only hope ahead of you, dear Mr Evening.’
Obeying her, he seated himself again, and his look of crestfallen abject submissiveness, coupled with fear, comforted and strengthened Mrs Owens so that she was able to smile tentatively.
‘No one who does not live here, you see, can see the carpet.’ She was almost apologetic for her tirade, certainly she was consoling.
He bent his head.
Then they heard the wind from the northeast, and felt the huge shutter on the front of the house struggle as if for life. The snow followed soon after, hard as hail.
Tenting him to the quick, Mrs Owens studied Mr Evening’s incipient immobility, and after waiting to see whether it would pass, and as she suspected, noted that it did not, she rang for the night servant, gave the latter cursory instructions, and then sat studying her guest until the servant returned with a tiny decanter and a sliver of handsome glass, setting these by Mr Evening, who lightly caressed both vessels.
‘Alas, Mr Evening, they’re only new,’ Mrs Owens said.
He did not remember more until someone put a lap robe over his knees, and he knew the night had advanced into the glimmerings of dawn, and that he therefore must have slept upright in the chair all those hours, fortified by nips from the brandy, which, unlike the glass that contained it, was ancient.
When morning had well advanced, he found he could not rise. A new attendant, with coal-black sideburns and ashen cheeks, assisted him to the bathroom, helped him bathe and then held him securely under the armpits while he urinated a stream largely blood. He stared into the bowl but regarded the crimson pool there without particular interest or alarm.
Then he was back in the chair again, the snow still pelted the shutters, and the east wind raved like lunatics helpless without sedation.
Although he was certain Mrs Owens passed from time to time in the adjoining room – who could fail to recognize her tread, as dominating and certain as her resonant voice – she did not enter that day either to look at him or inquire. Occasionally he heard, to his acute distress, dishes being moved and, so it seemed, placed in straw.
Once or twice he thought he heard her clap her hands, an anachronism so imperial he found himself giggling convulsively. He also heard a parrot screech, and then almost immediately caught the sound of its cage being taken up and the cries of the bird retreating further and further into total silence.
Some time later he was served food so highly seasoned, so copiously sprinkled with herbs and spices that added to his disinclination to partake of food, he could not identify a morsel of what he tasted.
Then Giles reappeared, with a sterling-silver basin, a gleaming tray of verbena soap, and improbably enough, looking up at him, his own straight razor, for if it was one thing in the world of manhood he had mastered, it was to shave beautifully with a razor, an accomplishment he had learned from his captain in military school.
‘How did they get my own things fetched here, Giles?’ he inquired, with no real interest in having his question answered.
‘We’ve had to bring everything, under the circumstances,’ Giles replied in a hollow vestryman’s voice.
Mr Evening lay back then, while he felt the servant’s hands tuck a blanket about his slippers and thighs.
‘Mrs Owens thinks it’s because your blood is thinner than we Northerners that the snow affects you in this way.’ Giles offered a tentative explanation of the young man’s plight.
Suddenly from directly overhead, Mr Evening heard carpenters, loud as if in the room with him, sawing and hammering. He stirred uncomfortably in his stocking feet.
In the hall directly in line with his chair, though separated by a kind of heavy partition, Mrs Owens and two gentlemen of vaguely familiar voices were doing a loud inventory of ‘effects’.
Preparations for an auction must be in progress, Mr Evening decided. He now heard with incipient unease and at the same time a kind of feeble ecstasy the names of every rare heirloom in the trade, but these great objects’ names were loudly hawked, checked, callously enumerated, and the whole proceedings were carried off with a kind of rage and contempt in the voice of the auctioneer so that one had the impression the most priceless and rarest treasures worthy finally of finding a home only in the Louvre were being noted here prior to their being carted out in boxes and tossed into the bonfire. At one point in the inventory he let out a great cry of ‘Stop it!’
The partition in the wall opened, and Mrs Owens stood staring at him from about ten feet away; then after a look of what was meant perhaps to be total unrecognition or bilious displeasure, she closed the sliding panel fast, and the inventory was again in progress, louder, if anything, than before, the tone of the hawker’s voice more rasping and vicious.
Following a long nap, he remembered two strangers, dressed in overalls, enter with a gleaming gold tape; they stooped down, grunting and querulous, and made meticulous if furtive movements of measuring him from head to toe, his sitting posture requiring them, evidently, to check their results more than once.
Was it now Friday night, or had the weekend already passed, and were we arrived at Monday?
The snow had continued unabated, so far as his memory served, though the wind was weaker, or more fitful, and the shutters nearly silent. He supposed all kinds of people had called on him at his lodgings. Then Giles appeared again, after Mr Evening had passed more indistinct hours in his chair, and the servant helped him into the toilet, where he passed thick clots of blood, and on his return to his chair, Mr Evening found himself face to face with his own large steamer trunk and a pair of valises.
While he kept his eyes averted from the phenomenal appearance of his luggage, Giles combed and cut his long chestnut hair, trimmed the shagginess of his eyebrows, and massaged the back of his neck. Mr Evening did not ask him if there was any reason or occasion for tonsorial attention, but at last he did inquire, more for breaking the lugubrious silence than for getting any pertinent answer, ‘What was the carpentering upstairs for, Giles?’
The servant hesitated, stammered, and in his confusion came near nipping Mr Evening’s ear with the barber’s shears, but at last answered the question in a loud whisper: ‘They’re remodeling the bed.’
The room in which he had sat these past days, however many, four, six, a fortnight, perhaps, the room which had been Mrs Owens’s and her sister’s on those first Thursday nights of his visits, was now only his alone, and the two women had passed on to other quarters in a house whose chambers were, like its heirlooms, difficult, perhaps impossible, to number.
Limited to a kind of speechless listlessness – he assumed he must be very ill, though he did not wonder why no doctor came – and passing several hours without attendance, suddenly, in pique at being neglected, he employed Mrs Owens’s own queer custom and clapped his hands peremptorily. A dark-skinned youth with severe bruises about his temples appeared and, without inquiry or greeting, adjusted Mr Evening’s feet on a stool, poured him a drink of something red with a bitter taste, and, while he waited for the sick man to drink, made a gesture of inquiry as to whether Mr Evening wished to relieve himself.
More indistinct hours swam slowly into blurred unremembrance. At last the hammering, pounding, moving of furniture, together with the suffocating fumes of turpentine and paint, all ceased to molest him.
Mrs Owens, improbably, appeared again, accompanied by Pearl.
‘I am glad to see you better, Mr Evening, needless to say,’ Mrs Owens began icily, and one could see at once that she appeared some years younger, perhaps strong sunlight – now pouring in – flattered her, or could it be, he wondered, she had had recourse to plastic surgery during his illness, at any rate, she was much younger, while her voice was harsher, harder, more actresslike than ever before.
‘Because of your splendid recovery, we are therefore ready to move you into your room,’ Mrs Owens went on, ‘where, I’m glad to report, you’ll find more than one ingrain carpet spread out for you to rest your eyes on . . . The bed,’ she added after a careful pause, ‘I do hope will meet with your approval’ (here he attempted to say something contradictory, but she indicated she would not allow it), ‘for its refashioning has cost all of us here some pains to make over.’ Here he felt she would have used the word heirloom, but prevented herself from doing so. She said only, in conclusion, ‘You’re over, do you realize, six foot six in your stocking feet!’
She studied him closely. ‘We couldn’t let you lie with your legs hanging out of the bedclothes!’
‘Now, sir’ – Mrs Owens folded her arms – ‘can you move, do you suppose, to the next floor, provided someone, of course, assists you?’
The next thing he remembered was being helped up the interminable winding staircase by a brace of servants, while Mrs Owens and Pearl brought up the rear, Mrs Owens talking away: ‘Those of us who are Northerners, Mr Evening, have of course the blood from birth to take these terribly snowy days, Boreas and his blasts, the sight of Orion climbing the winter night, but our friends of Southern birth must be more careful. That is why we take such good care of you. You should have come, in any case, from the beginning and not kept picking away at a mere Thursday call,’ she ended on a scolding note.
The servants deposited Mr Evening on a large horsehair sofa which in turn faced the longest bed he had ever set eyes on, counting any, he was certain, he had ever stared at in museums. And now it must be confessed that Mr Evening, for all the length of him, had never from early youth slept in the kind of bed that his height and build required, for after coming into his fortune, he had continued to live in lodging houses which did not provide anything adequate for his physical measurements. Here at Mrs Owens’s, where his living was all unchosen by him, he now saw the bed perfectly suited for his frame.
A tiny screen was thrown up around the horsehair sofa, and while Mrs Owens and Pearl waited as if for a performance to begin, Cole, a Norwegian, as it turned out, quietly got Mr Evening’s old business clothes off, and clad him in gleaming green and shell silk pajamas, and in a lightning single stride across the room carried the invalid to the bed, propped him up in a layer of cushions and pillows so that he looked as a matter of fact more seated now than when he had spent those days and nights in the big chair downstairs.
Although food had been brought for all of them, seated in different sections of the immense room, that is for Pearl, Mrs Owens, and Mr Evening, only Pearl partook of any. Mr Evening, sunk in cushions, looked nowhere in particular, certainly not at his food. Mrs Owens, ignoring her own repast (some sort of roast game), produced from the folds of her organdy gown a jewel-studded lorgnette, and began reading aloud in droning monotone a list of rare antiques, finally naming with emphasis a certain ormolu clock, which caused Mr Evening to cry out, ‘If you please, read no more while I am dining!’, although he had not touched a morsel.
Mrs Owens put down the paper, waved it against her like a fan, and having put away her lorgnette came over to the counterpane of the bed.
She bent over him like a physician and he closed his eyes. The scent which came from her bosom was altogether like that of a garden by the sea.
‘Our whole life together, certainly,’ she began, like one talking in her sleep, ‘was to have been an enumeration of effects. I construed it so at any rate . . . I had thought,’ she went on, ‘that you would be attentive . . . I procured these special glasses’ – she touched the lorgnette briefly – ‘and if I may be allowed an explanation, I thought I would read to you since I no longer read to myself, and may I confess it, while I lifted my eyes occasionally from the paper, I hoped to rest them by letting them light on your fine features . . . If you are to deprive me of that pleasure, dear Mr Evening, say so, and new arrangements and new preparations can be made.’
She pressed her hand now on the bed, as if to test its quality.
‘I do not think even so poor an observer and so indifferent a guest as yourself can be unaware of the stupendous animation, movement, preparation, the entire metamorphosis indeed which your coming here has entailed. Mark me, I am willing to do more for you, but if I am to be deprived of the simple and may I say sole pleasure left to me, reading a list of precious heirlooms and at the same time resting my eyes from time to time on you, then say so, then excuse me, pray, and allow me to depart from my own house.’
Never one endowed with power over language, Mr Evening, at this, the most dramatic moment in his life, could only seize Mrs Owens’s pliant bejeweled hand in his rough, chapped one, hold her finger to his face, and cry, ‘No!’
‘No what?’ she said, withdrawing her hand, a tiny indication of pleasure, however, moving her lips.
Raising himself up from the hillock of cushions, he got out, ‘What about the things I was doing out there,’ and he pointed haphazardly in the direction of where he thought his shop might possibly lie.
Mrs Owens shook her head. ‘Whatever you did out there, Mr Evening’ – she looked down at him – ‘or, rather, amend that, sir, to this; you are now doing whatever and more than you could have ever done elsewhere . . . This is your home!’ she cried, and as if beside herself, ‘Your work is here, and only here!’
‘Am I as ill as everything points to?’ He turned to Pearl, who continued to dine.
Pearl looked to her sister for instructions.
‘I don’t know how you could be so self-centered as to talk about a minor upset of the urinary tract as illness’ – Mrs Owens raised her voice – ‘especially when we have prepared a list like this’ – she tapped with her lorgnette on the inventory of antiques – ‘which you can’t be ass enough not to know will one day be yours!’
Mrs Owens stood up and fixed him with her gaze.
Mr Evening’s eyes fell then like dropping balls to the floor, where the unobtainable ingrain carpets, unobserved by him till then, rested beneath them like live breathing things. He wept shamelessly and Mrs Owens restrained what might have been a grin.
He dried his eyes slowly on the napkin which she had proffered him.
‘If you would have at least the decency to pretend to drink your coffee, you would see your cup,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ she sighed, as she studied Mr Evening’s disoriented features as he now caught sight of the 1910 hand-painted cup within his very fingertip, unobserved by him earlier, as had been the ingrain carpets. ‘Yes,’ Mrs Owens continued, ‘while I have gained back my eyesight, as it were’ – she raised her lorgnette briefly – ‘others are to all practical purposes sand-blind . . . Pearl’ – she turned to her sister – ‘you may be excused from the room.’
‘My dear Mr Evening,’ Mrs Owens said, her voice materially altered once Pearl had disappeared.
He had put down the 1910 cup, perhaps because it seemed unthinkable to drink out of anything so irreplaceable, and so delicate that a mere touch of his lips might snap it.
‘You can’t possibly now go out of my life.’ Mrs Owens half-stretched out her hand to him.
He supposed she had false teeth, they were too splendid for real, yet all of her suddenly was splendid, and from her person again came a succession of wild fragrance, honeysuckle, jasmine, flowers without names, one perfume succeeding another in enervating succession, as various as all her priceless heirlooms.
‘Winter, even to a Southerner, dear Mr Evening, can offer some tender recompense, and for me, whose blood, if I may be allowed to mention it again, is incapable of thinning.’ Here she turned down the bedclothes clear to his feet. The length of his feet and the beautiful architecture of his bare instep caused her for a moment to hesitate.
‘I’m certain,’ she kept her words steady, placing an icy hand under the top of his pajamas, and letting it rest, as if in permanent location on his breast, ‘that you are handsome to the eye all over.’
His teeth chattered briefly, as he felt her head come down on him so precipitously, but she seemed content merely to rest on his bare chest. He supposed he would catch an awful cold from it all, but he did not move, hearing her say, ‘And after I’m gone, all – all of it will be yours, and all I ask in return, Mr Evening, is that all days be Thursday from now on.’
He lay there without understanding how it had occurred, whether a servant had entered or her hands with the quickness of hummingbirds had done the trick, but there he was naked as he had come into the world, stretched out in the bed that was his exact length at last and which allowed him to see just what an unusually tall young man he was indeed.