Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault
with their lives, and to elderly women whose sagging flesh was held up by elaborate corsets. Since her own mother was slender, Vivian had never seen women’s bodies compressed and thrust up, and when these women took a long time to feel cloth between their fingers, or to decide for or against a ruffle or pleat, or to turn around and around again, in gowns and negligees, before the triple mirrors, their contemplation and deliberation seemed to her so futile. The war was not their concern; their anxiety was for their reflection in the long mirrors in the dressing room, whether they grew old like queens, as if age were an accretion of power, or sweetly, to placate the inevitable, or grew old retaliatively, as if everyone were cheating them of life. Among these elderly ones she felt a species apart, herself the only one of her kind, never to grow old and never to die.
In this gilded room with claret carpet and chairs of ocher velvet and rows of gowns on black velvet hangers, in this room fragrant with cologne sprayed into the air, where she was visible from the street and the lobby, she underwent a constant shifting of emotions. Her curiosity about the men who passed through the lobby or who came into the shop to buy gifts for women was chastened by her own need for fidelity, a yearning for her husband, and this shifting itself was exciting, a constant tremor of the heart.
She felt, at this time, estranged from her son. She had hired a woman to take care of him, and the woman, Olga, lived with them—a spindly, aging woman with gray and orange hair and dark grape lipstick, who, because of an intolerance for racket, could not work in the shipyards, one among a few women, as she said of herself, not making a fortune sorting rivets and counting bolts. With no husband around who was generous with the child, as George had been, Vivian lacked the example. With no husband around to devote herself to, she had no desire to devote herself to anyone. She was with David only an hour or so in the morning and in the evening, and the impatience with him that had always been present now declared itself only as an uneasy deafness to his small, complaining voice and his screams of joy; since she was not so bound to him, she no longer felt so impatient with him.
She began to stay away evenings, serving as hostess at a U.S.O. center for soldiers and sailors. She enjoyed dancing with them, the change of bodies against hers, the many strange bodies responding to the strangeness of hers. Some of the men were appealing to her, the appeal of the few made stronger by the presence of the many. Teresa, her cousin, whose husband was also in England, took men home with her, but, for Vivian, taking a strange man to bed for one night was like taking a first step into that freedom which she preferred to titillate herself with rather than experience. Every day she wrote her letter or added to an unfinished letter. She wrote that she loved him, and she was sure that she did, but as she wrote her words of love, she imagined all the things he would condemn her for if she did them.
She was asked to supper one evening by her father’s mistress, Adele, who had telephoned her at work, and, on entering the apartment, saw a young sailor stand up from the couch. The lamps, as usual, were dim, and in a moment’s time she took a dislike to the laxness of his body, to the lazing pleasure the body took in its attractiveness. When he shifted weight, at her approach, from one foot to the other, an ungainliness in his legs, an overgrownness of his body, revealed him as Paul. Adele, sitting on the floor, her legs crossed, hugging an ankle with one hand and holding a wine glass with the other, jokingly introduced them as if they had never met, and they laughed with embarrassment, their laughter and voices sounding to Vivian like that of a couple who have always wanted to meet. Although, after he had left her, she had not known anyone who had meant as much to her, there was now no desire for him, only a superficial excitement. Adele served a feast despite the rationing, telling them it was done with mirrors and spices, and presided with a wide-gesturing charm that declared this young man her favorite brother and that denied she had ever ranted against him for his abandonment of his wife and child. He dawdled his fingers over the linen cloth, the arm of his chair, the silverware, as if his sense of touch had become more acute now that he was in the perceptive presence of two women who called for sensitivity; it was flattery done with gestures. He told them of his tribulations in New York; he had got a small part in a musical and found his legs rather heavy to dance around on; and with the closing of that show he had spent a year in Nassau as a companion for a very old and very wealthy man, but he had tired, he said, of reading his employer Alice in Wonderland every night, and then he laughed, apparently realizing Vivian was no longer naïve, that she might even have become more worldly than he and that his leaving her had contributed to her awakening.
David always came to her bed in the morning, while she reclined against the pillows and read the newspaper, and, with his legs under the covers, he ate his toast and sipped coffee and cream from her saucer and played with odd bits of broken jewelry and with a few small toys he carried in with him. Scrutinizing his features, the morning after her supper with Paul and Adele, she was pleased to find only a minimal resemblance to his father. She had known all along that the resemblance was only an undertone, but felt a desire to reassure herself about it. At four, his beauty combined the best features of her family. His hair, although resembling his father’s in its thickness and its arcs of curls like the hair of Renaissance angels, was a darker brown, with a cast of amber red, like her mother’s hair, a color she had always envied, for her own was the common light brown of her father’s family and had always to be bleached. David’s eyes were blue, but darker than his father’s, and there was a broadness across his eyes that Paul lacked, and a narrowing toward the chin. Under her scrutiny, he appeared to be more perfect than ever and more her own than ever, wholly her own and not the father’s, who had inquired about him with his glance slipping away as if to inquire was to confess a crime. But, though he seemed more than ever her own, the elusiveness of his father, which had contrived to make the son her own, became the son’s possession also. Although she nurtured him now and sustained him, his life was to be his own, even as his father and his stepfather appeared to belong to nobody but themselves, their lives their own though they were herded into regiments and battalions, into staffs and corps, onto transports, onto tremendous gray ships, and into battles.
When George was killed at St. Vith, she forgot his faults and remembered only his virtues. It seemed to her that his jealousy had indicated not a lack of understanding of her but a greater understanding than her own. He had prized her—that was the reason for his jealousy—and, prizing her, he must have known her essential self, the innocent self, and had struggled with her other self, the heedless, all-desirous self, as if it were his deadly enemy as well as hers. Nobody else would ever love her as much and understand her as well and join with her against the enemy within herself.
5
A few months after the news reached her of her husband’s death, she went up, one evening, to the room of an air corps captain who had bought a lacy slip for his wife back in Boston. In the shop he had chatted with her about the two cities, comparing this point and that, and then had invited her to dinner. In a quick breath, nervously, he told her he had some Scotch in his room and asked her to come up before dinner so they could work up an appetite. Up in his room, after the Scotch had eased his nervousness, he was able to look at her for a long moment with his eyes unclouded by his fear of her personal life.
“You got a husband?” he asked her, like a doctor who has been told that psychologizing with the patient helps in the cure. He sat on the foot of the bed and she in the chair. “Ah, somewhere?” he asked.
She saw him glancing at her legs and wished that silk stockings were still available—the rayon kind weren’t so flattering. “He’s dead,” she said, her mouth wanting the captain’s mouth. She saw that his little blue eyes were surprised. “At St. Vith. He was a doctor, he was a captain with the second division. They gave him a silver star, he has a silver star,” she said, tears slipping down her face.
“Ah, that’s too bad,” he said, alarmed, suddenly turning his head to see what was behind him. “You want to come over here and lie down?”
She lay on her back, weeping with her face exposed as if had just received the news from this man. He lay down beside her, jolting the bed in an awkward attempt to lie down tenderly, and put his arm across her, and she wanted to relate every detail of her life to him because he had laid his arm across her comfortingly like a man who was to love her and protect her for the rest of her life. She turned her head at his prompting to enable him to wipe her face