Beautiful Girl Read online

  She had always thought Horace was too mean to die, and as she cleans up the lunch dishes and starts to sprinkle the dry sheets for ironing, she still wonders: Is Horace dead?

  She tries to imagine an open casket, full of Horace, dead. His finicky little moustache and his long, strong fingers folded together on his chest. But the casket floats off into the recesses of her mind and what she sees is Horace, alive and terrifying.

  A familiar dry smell tells her that she has scorched a sheet, and tears begin to roll slowly down her face.

  “When I went into the kitchen to see how she was, she was standing there with tears rolling down her face,” Jessica reports to Tom—and then is appalled at what she hears as satisfaction in her own voice.

  “I find that hardly surprising,” Tom says, with a questioning raise of his eyebrows.

  Aware that she has lost his attention, Jessica goes on. (Where is he—with whom?) “I just meant, it seems awful to feel a sort of relief when she cries. As though I thought that’s what she ought to do. Maybe she didn’t really care for Horace. He hasn’t been around for years, after all.” (As usual she is making things worse: it is apparent that Tom can barely listen.)

  She says, “I think I’ll take the index cards back to my desk,” and she manages not to cry.

  Picking up the sheets to take upstairs to the linen closet, Verlie decides that she won’t tell Clifton about Horace; dimly she thinks that if she tells anyone, especially Clifton, it won’t be true: Horace, alive, will be waiting for her at her house, as almost every night she is afraid that he will be.

  Sitting at her desk, unseeingly Jessica looks out across the deep valley, where the creek winds down toward the sea, to the further hills that are bright green with spring. Despair slowly fills her blood so that it seems heavy in her veins, and thick, and there is a heavy pressure in her head.

  And she dreams for a moment, as she has sometimes before, of a friend to whom she could say, “I can’t stand anything about my life. My husband either is untrue to me or would like to be—constantly. It comes to the same thing, didn’t St. Paul say that? My daughter’s eyes are beginning to go cold against me, and my son is terrified of everyone. Of me.” But there is no one to whom she could say a word of this; she is known among her friends for dignity and restraint. (Only sometimes her mind explodes, and she breaks out screaming—at Tom, at one of her children, once at Verlie—leaving them all sick and shocked, especially herself sick and shocked, and further apart than ever.)

  Now Verlie comes through the room with an armful of fresh, folded sheets, and for an instant, looking at her, Jessica has the thought that Verlie could be that friend, that listener. That Verlie could understand.

  She dismisses the impulse almost as quickly as it came.

  Lately she has spent a lot of time remembering college, those distant happy years, among friends. Her successes of that time. The two years when she directed the Greek play, on May Day weekend (really better than being in the May Court). Her senior year, elected president of the secret honor society. (And the springs of wisteria, heavily flowering, scented, lavender and white, the heavy vines everywhere.)

  From those college days she still has two friends, to whom she writes, and visits at rarer intervals. Elizabeth, who is visibly happily married to handsome and successful Jackson Stuart (although he is, to Jessica, a shocking racial bigot). And Mary John James, who teaches Latin in a girls’ school, in Richmond—who has never married. Neither of them could be her imagined friend (any more than Verlie could).

  Not wanting to see Jessica’s sad eyes again (the sorrow in that woman’s face, the mourning!), Verlie puts the sheets in the linen closet and goes down the back stairs. She is halfway down, walking slow, when she feels a sudden coolness in her blood, as though from a breeze. She stops, she listens to nothing and then she is flooded with the certain knowledge that Horace is dead, is at that very moment laid away in Memphis (wherever Memphis is). Standing there alone, by the halfway window that looks out to the giant rhododendron, she begins to smile, peacefully and slowly—an interior, pervasive smile.

  Then she goes on down the stairs, through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  Clifton is there.

  Her smile changes; her face becomes brighter and more animated, although she doesn’t say anything—not quite trusting herself not to say everything, as she has promised herself.

  “You looking perky,” Clifton says, by way of a question. He is standing at the sink with a drink of water.

  Her smile broadens, and she lies. “Thinking about the social at the church. Just studying if or not I ought to go.”

  “You do right to go,” he says. And then, “You be surprise, you find me there?”

  (They have never arranged any meeting before, much less in another place, at night; they have always pretended that they were in the same place in the yard or orchard by accident.)

  She laughs. “You never find the way.”

  He grins at her, his face brighter than any face that she has ever seen. “I be there,” he says to her.

  A long, hot summer, extending into fall. A hot October, and then there is sudden cold. Splinters of frost on the red clay erosions in the fields. Ice in the shallow edges of the creek.

  For Verlie it has been the happiest summer of her life, but no one of the Todds has remarked on this, nor been consciously aware of unusual feelings, near at hand. They all have preoccupations of their own.

  Clifton has been working for the Macombers, friends and neighbors of the Todds, and it is Irene Macomber who telephones to tell Jessica the sad news that he had a kind of seizure (a hemorrhage) and that when they finally got him to the Negro hospital (twelve miles away) it was too late, and he died.

  Depressing news, on that dark November day. Jessica supposes that the first thing is to tell Verlie. (After all, she and Clifton were friends, and Verlie might know of relatives.)

  She is not prepared for Verlie’s reaction.

  A wail—“Aieeeee”—that goes on and on, from Verlie’s wide mouth, and her wide, wild eyes. “Aieee—”

  Then it stops abruptly, as Verlie claps her hands over her mouth, and bends over and blindly reaches for a chair, her rocker. She pulls herself toward the chair, she falls into it, she bends over double and begins to cough, deep and wrackingly.

  Poor shocked Jessica has no notion what to do. To go over to Verlie and embrace her, to press her own sorrowing face to Verlie’s face? To creep shyly and sadly from the room?

  This last is what she does—is all, perhaps, that she is able to do.

  “You know,” says Tom Todd (seriously) to Irene McGinnis, in one of their rare lapses from the steady demands of unconsummated love, “I believe those two people had a real affection for each other.”

  • • •

  Verlie is sick for a week and more after that, with what is called “misery in the chest.” (No one mentions her heart.)

  Thinking to amuse her children (she is clearly at a loss without Verlie, and she knows this), Jessica takes them for a long walk, on the hard, narrow, white roads that lead up into the hills, the heavy, thick, dark woods of fall, smelling of leaves and earth and woodsmoke. But a melancholy mood settles over them all; it is cold and the children are tired, and Jessica finds that she is thinking of Verlie and Clifton. (Is it possible that they were lovers? She uncomfortably shrugs off this possibility.)

  Dark comes early, and there is a raw, red sunset at the black edge of the horizon, as finally they reach home.

  Verlie comes back the next day, to everyone’s relief. But there is a grayish tinge to the color of her skin that does not go away.

  But on that rare spring day months earlier (the day Horace is dead and laid away in Memphis) Verlie walks the miles home with an exceptional lightness of heart, smiling to herself at all the colors of the bright new flowers, and at the smells of spring, the promises.

  THE TODDS

  Are You in Love?

  “But I absolutely can�
��t understand Mr. Auden,” says Jessica Todd, curiously flirtatious. She is speaking to Linton Wheeler, a much younger man, a student and himself a poet. They are in Jessica’s bookstore, in a small university town: Hilton, in the middle South. She is seated behind her desk. Small and plump, with little shape, sad, not aging well, Jessica usually thinks of herself (she feels herself) in terms of defects (pores and sags), but today she is aware only of her eyes, which are large and dark brown. Even Tom, her husband, has said that they are beautiful. She and Linton are communicating through their eyes, hers to his wide-spaced hazel. Eyes and somewhat similar voices—both are from Virginia.

  “Or Delmore Schwartz or T. S. Eliot either,” says Jessica, with an exaggerated sigh.

  Serious Linton begins to explain. William Empson, Brooks and Warren. He mentions Donne and the Metaphysicals. Jacobean drama. Pound?

  “You know I can’t read Ezra Pound.”

  Linton’s skin is very fair, even now, in midsummer; he dislikes the sun, stays indoors. His hair is a light sandy brown, worn longer than the fashion of that time (middle Thirties). There are Bacchus curls around his face. A wide mouth, with curiously flat lips. Jessica has sometimes imagined that the young Shelley looked like that. She spent her girlhood reading Shelley, and Byron and Keats and Wordsworth, but especially Shelley, and she has wondered if she married Tom Todd because he was—still is, in fact—writing a book on Shelley. (Not true: she married him because of passionate kisses—then.)

  “You really should try to read Brooks and Warren,” says gentle Linton, now.

  “Oh, Linton, I will, I really will.” And for no reason, but happily, she laughs.

  Earlier they have both been laughing at other customers who have been in and out, habitués of Jessica’s: Clarissa Noble, who can’t remember which mystery stories she’s already read; old Mrs. Vain, who only reads books on genealogy or gardening; Dr. Willingham, the filthy-minded botanist; Miss Phipps, a blond beautician, who likes love stories with nice endings.

  Good friends, Jessica and Linton, despite a gap in age, laughing together in the middle of a Summer afternoon.

  The store is a narrow, very high-ceilinged building, with windows up near the roof, through which now slanting downward come bright bars of light, moted with dust, in the otherwise dim and book-crowded room. Next door is the Presbyterian church, red brick, with a formal hedged green yard. Tom is, or was, a Presbyterian, but Jessica is an almost lapsed Episcopalian. (Not quite: those prayers and especially the General Confession linger in her mind and at odd times they surface.) She and Tom have never gone to church, to either church, and it seems an irony to Jessica that his church (of which she faintly disapproves: that dismal catechism) should be next door to her store.

  Linton smokes too much. He always smells of cigarettes; he leaves in his wake a drift of stale smoke. He blows smoke out, then leans back and inhales it, in a way that Jessica has never seen anyone inhale. A shy boy, from a very small town—a country crossroads—this way of smoking is perhaps his boldest gesture.

  He likes Jessica, or, rather, he does not not like her, as he does most older women. Of young ones, the coeds, he is simply and absolutely terrified.

  “I’ve always loved poetry,” says Jessica. “But these new things—it isn’t fair.” She feels curiously giddy.

  One of the things that Linton likes about Jessica is that she doesn’t dye her hair, as his mother does. At that moment he can hardly see her face, in that dim light, but a bar of sunlight has reached her head, turning white to gold. “Ma’am, you do have the prettiest hair,” says Linton shyly.

  “Why, Linton—” Tears rush toward her eyes—her heart might break. “Why, Linton, what a very sweet thing to say,” she barely gets out.

  Should he not have said that? Sensing strong emotion, which he imagines to be distress, Linton retreats to poetry. “And Seven Types of Ambiguity, that’s really something, ma’am,” he says, blushing. “I know you’d enjoy that one.”

  “I’ll try it.” Jessica speaks faintly, wishing he would go: she would like to be alone, to savor and to think.

  “My goodness, it’s almost five,” says Linton. “I’ve got to get to work.” He is a part-time waiter at the college cafeteria, Swain Hall, which is inevitably called Swine Hall. Linton is what is called a self-help student.

  He half smiles, and hurries out, banging the old door and letting in a wave of exhausted late-afternoon summer air. Leaving his stale Camel smell.

  Motionless, Jessica sits there smiling. She is almost dazzled by her sudden sharp (if narrow) glimpse of possibilities, a bright glimpse like a slit in the darkness of her usual melancholy. She is a woman not yet forty with beautiful eyes. And beautiful hair. Linton is not a possibility. (Is he?) But older women, especially literary women, sometimes have young men, Young Lovers. A woman desired is a woman not seen as herself, is a woman re-created—she is remembering Tom’s brief blind passion for her.

  To be loved by a much younger person is to be forgiven, forgiven for age. Did she read that somewhere? Did she make it up?

  Still smiling, she shakes her head, to shake off all of this. But she is aware of a rare mood of indulgence toward herself. She knows that it is silly, this imagining of young lovers, at her age. But on the other hand—why not? Is love restricted to people of a definite age, and a certain degree of beauty?

  (Yes, indeed it is, she is later to decide, and she is to feel, as she has felt before, that her own needs, insofar as they are sexual, are obscene. But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.)

  She puts the money from the cashbox into her purse, $5.73; she stands up and looks around. She walks determinedly toward the door, which she opens and closes and locks behind her.

  Her car, the old Chevy, is parked at the curb. For a wonder, it starts up easily. She drives down Main Street, turns left at the light and heads out of town, toward her own house.

  It is a lovely afternoon, and the town just now is at its greenest and loveliest. The lawns, the profuse shrubbery, the heavy green pine boughs against a barely fading pale-blue sky—all beautiful. Jessica drives down the long white concrete highway, the last hill leading home, with an obscure anticipation.

  Her own driveway leads to the back of the house, past the old terraced garden, the abandoned tennis court. Roses, just past their prime, climb the fence at the far edge of the garden, and the grape arbor is flowing with green vines. At the moment Jessica is in love with her house, the land, their garden.

  Beyond the side yard some woods begin, pines and maples, cedars, elms; through these trees is the path leading down to the swimming pool (Tom’s pride, built with his World War I bonus, and partly with his own hands). That is where Tom and the children will be. Probably with some company.

  Jessica goes inside the house, and upstairs to her room to change into her bathing suit. Undressing, she does not regard her body in the long mirror or think about it, as she sometimes does (unhappily). Humming something to herself, she puts on her dark wool suit, her flowered beige kimona, slippers, and she picks up her white rubber cap from the top of her chest of drawers, the mahogany chest that matches the broad double bed, which her parents slept in, in Virginia. Tom has moved into what was meant to be the guest room.

  She goes downstairs, still humming, through the living room and out the side door, down to the lawn. She smiles as she recognizes that the tune is an Easter hymn—“There Is a Green Hill Far Away”—Easter songs, in August? But something in the air that day has more of spring than summer in it, some fragrance, some suggestion.

  Should she invite Linton to come over for a swim sometime? Well, why not?

  At the edge of the woods, the top of the embedded slate steps that lead down to the pool, she pauses and listens, separating out voices. Tom’s—his laugh. The somewhat higher responding laugh of Harry McGinnis, there with his wife, Irene. And at the prospect of Irene, of watching Irene with Tom, Jessica’s breath tightens in a way that is drearily familiar to her, but then
she thinks a new thought: she thinks, So what?—for her an unfamiliar phrase. So what? Tom has a crush on Irene, and she on him. So what? Today, at this moment, her own heart is light and high. Is indestructible?

  She starts down the path, and halfway down, just past the giant maple in which her children have built a tree-house, she calls out, “Here I am! Hello?” She is unaware of sounding not quite like herself. As though she were a guest?

  She is answered by silence, a break in whatever they were laughing about, and then Tom’s voice: “Well, old dear, so at long last you’re home?”

  They are all there, as she descends to the clearing: Tom (her Tom), tall and slender, blue-eyed, censorious; Harry, dark and slight, neatly made; and pretty blond Irene, in a ruffled pink bathing suit. And children: her own thin two, dark Avery, and fairer Devlin, on a steamer rug, on the grass; and young Harry McGinnis, who lies tensely on the edge of the pool, in a space of sun. Harry is a golden boy, extremely handsome—almost beautiful, looking like neither Irene nor his father.

  For something to say, Jessica calls out, “Children, you look cold, you wrap up in your towels. Avery, Devlin.” They look at her with blank and patient faces, and then Avery turns toward young Harry, who has begun to do pushups, there beside the pool.

  Jessica says, “Why, Irene, what a pretty bathing suit. Can you really wear it into the water?”

  Before Irene can answer Tom breaks in, “That’s what she alleges, but we have yet to see a test of her claim, any proof of her alleged bathing suit.” He makes a gesture as though to throw her into the pool.

  And Irene turns from Jessica to Tom. “You wouldn’t!” she cries out. “You’re just a mean old tease, Tom Todd. Of course I can swim in this suit, it’s just that I’m feeling so warm, and so lazy.”

  “Tom, darling, I’m dying for a drink,” says Jessica. “What a perfect day for gin.” (Again she sounds like someone else, but who? Someone in a book?) “But first I’ll go in for a little dip,” she says. This is herself; it is what she always says, and does.