Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault
kitchen tossed the game down. She was standing across the table from her son and saw his face was flushed from the cold, his eyes narrowed by the intense excitement of the day, and it seemed to her that the span of years between him and the others, the men, had disappeared.
They stayed late around the table after a supper of roast lamb, of fruit preserves—the figs and plums of the hot summer—drinking brandies and smoking, talking about the division of Germany, and Russell about his experiences in the war in Europe, and Max about his entertaining the troops. David stayed with them in the parlor until midnight, listening and recalling at every chance everything about the hunt as if they had not accompanied him and were eager to hear, and when at last he fell asleep on the parlor rug, she roused him and went up with him. He fell onto his cot, too weary to undress, and she pulled off his shoes and waked him enough to undress himself, and he was asleep again the moment he lay down under the covers. As she lay in her bed, hearing below her the considerately low voices of the men in the parlor, their presence below her like depths to float upon, the sense of the loss of her son to the men seemed not so alarming, instead seemed desirable, for the presence of the men in the house, among them David, was to release her into a sleep that was like the expectation of a reward. The men came up quietly, their footsteps on the stairs a sound that in her half-sleep seemed to go on forever. She heard them in their rooms around her, the murmur of their voices, the scrape of a chair, and their number verified their strength. In each was the strength of all three and their strength was in David also, in his cot way up in the attic’s vast reaches.
11
Russell unlocked the door of the nightclub, fumbled on a light, and escorted her down red-carpeted stairs to a large, cold cellar where numerous little tables and chairs were scattered around a stage. The cellar ran under a restaurant and a bar, and the pipes along the ceiling were covered with a false sky—a black cloth painted with many gold moons, both crescent and round, and festooned with gilded gauze. The seepage and the dampness had been taken care of first, he told her; everything was as dry as a bone. The sign above the door—THE CARNIVAL—would be lit next Friday night, when the gossip columnists and some local big names would be wined and dined and entertained by a stripteaser and by a comedian and by a jazz trio who were to appear for the opening weeks. He himself, he said, and her father and the other owner had nothing to do with the details—everything from the plumbing to the entertainers was taken care of by the manager, but the whole works, he said, fascinated him. He did a jig step up on the stage, then stooped down to pick up a wire, and stood gazing upward to trace the origin of the trailing wire in his hand.
Later in the evening, in a quiet bar, he told her that he had been married twice, the first time when he was twenty. His second marriage had ended in the death of his wife, Anna. She had been a very unhappy person, weeping over slights that nobody else, he said, would even think to call slights, and, for days, brooding and miserable for reasons unknown to him. After a year she had decided to have a child because she might, she had said, feel necessary to somebody. But the child, a girl, had failed to bring that certainty to her and she had grown worse, calling herself foul names and wandering away, leaving the child alone in the house. She saw a psychiatrist almost every day, and every night took sedatives to sleep. She slept alone. The child slept in a bedroom of her own and he slept on the couch in the den. One night he was wakened by the smell of smoke and had time only to run into the child’s room and rescue her. That part of the house where his wife slept was already in flames. Under the soft light of the bar lamps, he removed his coat, loosened a cuff link, and pushed up his shirtsleeve to show her the long, heavy scar down his arm.
The rest of the evening he brought up a hundred other topics, his way of apologizing for the story that had checked her vivacity. There was something unlikable about him after the story. She was afraid to be close with someone who had suffered the death of a wife under those circumstances. That he had been on the other side of the burning door, that he had been unable to break through, made it impossible for her to look into his eyes. She felt that he had been marked for that catastrophe and might be marked for others, and that there was nothing he could do to prevent them, even as he could not prevent his wife dying on the other side of the burning door. Yet, later in the night, lying with him in his apartment, she kissed the long scar on his arm, wondering if her dislike of him, earlier, had been fear of another dimension of reality. Waking in the middle of the night, she drank his brandy and laughed with him over a joke. When he sat up on the edge of the bed, she got up on her knees and kissed the back of his head and his shoulders, unwilling to let him go from her even for a moment, desiring to transform him, with her kissing, into a man who could avert any catastrophe.
The wedding, in the rectory of the church her mother attended, with only Russell’s aunt and her parents and David present, seemed to her the wisest occasion of her life. Her parents liked him. He was a more responsive son, a more companionable son than their own; in addition, he was, at last, a son-in-law as affluent as they were, and perhaps more so.
They moved into a home he owned near Twin Peaks, on a wide avenue of white stucco homes of early California architecture. The lawn was perfect and so was the patio with its pink hydrangea bushes and granite birdbaths. The three of them, Russell and herself and David, each contributed, she felt, an admirable self to the pleasure of the marriage. At the beginning there appeared to be an easy compatibility between David and his stepfather, and their evenings together were always pleasant, with cocktails before supper and a special grenadine cocktail for David, and the gourmet suppers she cooked for them and for their frequent guests, Russell’s friends, who were loan-company executives and bank officials, and their wives. They went on trips together in their red convertible to Lake Tahoe and to the mountains to fish and up into Sun Valley to ski, and always she was aware of the picture they made of the elegant family, climbing into or springing from their car and entering the lobby of the hotel, the father or the mother resting an arm on the boy’s shoulder.
Neither she nor Russell had any desire to bring his daughter, Maria, to live with them, and, even had they wanted to, the girl would have chosen to remain with her maternal grandmother, a vigorous women with a daughter of seventeen, whom Maria idolized. They sometimes, however, took her along on their trips, and they sometimes had her over for a weekend, but her presence among them was, to Vivian, like a flaw in the picture. She was a year younger than David, a slight, colorless girl with enormous smoky blue eyes that seldom lifted. She was a reminder of the tragedy because it seemed to have shocked her from her normal pace of growth. When Russell brought the girl from her grandmother’s, he hustled and bustled around to entertain her, to entertain them all. His eyes were tired when he came in the door with her, tired of the visit before it began, and afraid of the child he performed for. Around the girl he was a man making extravagant amends, a weary buffoon. In the last minutes of the girl’s visits, with everybody collecting her possessions, gifts and hats and gloves and candy, Maria joined in with them, gave up sitting and being done unto, and, with her participation in the search, implied that she was both gratified and sorry her visit had roused them all to such a pitch of expiation.
After the girl’s visits, when Vivian was left alone in the house with her son, there was always a time of relief, in which she felt the bond between herself and David, the bond of mother and son, to be stronger than that between herself and Russell. If Russell remained away, visiting with Marie’s grandmother and, afterward, drinking at the nightclub, and David was asleep, she would go in and watch the boy while he slept.
In the light of lamp he lay on his back as if flung there, sometimes clear of the blankets from the waist up, his pajama top twisted upward, exposing his pale, tender stomach. He was, at these times, like an old friend. If her husband was not that, then her son was that. If marriage was not a resolving, then some compensation, or more than that, some answer, was to be found in the existence of her son. One night she bent and kissed him above the navel, pleased by the warm, resilient flesh, knowing that he would not wake up from the kiss because he slept so soundly and in the morning always came up fathoms out of sleep.
12
Some land that Russell had inherited south of the city, near the ocean, sold to a tract developer, and almost every week, or so it seemed to her, he sold at a great profit an old apartment building or a small hotel that he had bought only a few months before with a loan and had remodeled with