“My dear Augie, was that Mrs. Fenchel you were sitting with?” said Mrs. Renling. “She hasn’t done anything but watch the sprinkler all month, so I thought she was screwloose. Did you speak to her first?”
“Well, I just happened to be sitting by her.”
I got a good mark for this; she was pleased. But the next thing to be thought of was my purpose, and this she immediately and roughly found out. “It’s the girls, isn’t it! Well, they are very beautiful, aren’t they? Especially the black-haired one. Gorgeous. And mischievous, full of the devil she looks. But remember, Augie, you’re with me; I’m responsible for your behavior. And the girl is not a waitress, and you better not think you-know-what. My dear boy, you’re very clever and good, and I want to see you get ahead. I’ll see that you do. Naturally, with this girl, you haven’t got a chance. Of course, rich girls can sometimes be little whores too, and have the same itch as common ones and sometimes even worse. But not these girls. You don’t know what German upbringing is.”
So to speak, reserved for the brass, the Fenchel heiresses. But Mrs. Renling wasn’t infallible, and had already made one mistake, that of thinking it was Thea rather than Esther Fenchel I was in love with. Also, she had no notion how much in love I was, down to the poetic threat of death. I didn’t want her to have any notion either, though I would have been happy to tell someone. I did not like what I foresaw Mrs. Renling would make of it, and so I was satisfied to let her think it was Thea, the kinky-haired but also glorious-looking sister I carried the torch for, and I used some deceit. It didn’t take much, as it was pleasing to Mrs. Renling’s pride to think she had guessed, quick and infallible, what was bothering me.
As a matter of fact Thea Fenchel was better than merely pleasant to me, and I was fishing after her uncle, who was in a bad mood, surly and difficult, one morning, when she asked me whether I played tennis. I had to say, and though it was a bad moment for me, smiling, that riding was my sport; and I desperately thought that I must get a racket and go at once to the public courts in Benton Harbor to learn. Not that I had been born to the saddle either; but it covered my origins somewhat to say that I was a horseman and had a pretty creditable clang.
“My partner hasn’t come,” said Thea, “and Esther’s on the beach.”
Within ten minutes I too was on the sand, notwithstanding that I had promised to play cards with Mrs. Renling after her mineral bath, when, she said, she felt too weakened to read. I lay hot and wandering-witted on my belly, watching Esther, and my notions were many-branched, high-seasoned, erotic, a good half painful, hoping for and afraid of notice as she bent down and rubbed sun-oil like brightness on her legs, and her head turned toward me, who was loony and drunk with assessing the weight of her breasts and the soft little heaviness of her belly, so elegantly banded in by the sheath of her swim suit, or her hair which she combed, it seemed to me, with great animal strength, taking off the close white rubber helmet.
The sand swallows burst out of their scupper holes in the bluffs and out over the transparent drown of the water, back again to the white, to the brown, to the black, from moving to stock-still sand waves and water-worked woods and roots that hugged and twisted in the sun.
Presently she went up; and so did I, a little later. Mrs. Renling gave me the icy treatment for being late. And, I thought, lying on the floor of my room with my heels upon the bedspread like an armored man fallen from his horse, spur-tangled and needing block and tackle to be raised, that it was time, seeing my inattention was making Mrs. Renling angry, to have some progress to show for it at least. I got up and brushed myself without particular heart or interest, using two military brushes she had given me. I went down in the slow, white elevator and, on the ground floor, moseyed around in the lobby.
It was sundown, near dinnertime, with brilliant darkening water, napkins and broad menus standing up in the dining room, and roses and ferns in long-necked vases, the orchestra tuning back of its curtain. I was alone in the corridor, troubled and rocky, and trod on slowly to the music room, where the phonograph was playing Caruso, stifled and then clear cries of operatic mother-longing, that ornate, at heart somber, son’s appeal of the Italian taste. Resting her elbows on the closed cabinet, in a white suit and round white hat, next thing to a bishop’s biretta, bead-embroidered, was Esther Fenchel; she stood with one foot set on its point.
I said, “Miss Fenchel, I wonder if you would like to go with me some evening to the House of David.” Astonished, she looked up from the music. “They have dancing every night.”
I saw nothing but failure, from the first word out, and felt smitten, pounded from all sides.
“With you? I should say not. I certainly won’t.”
The blood came down out of my head, neck, shoulders, and I fainted dead away.
I came out of it without help. There wasn’t anyone to offer any, Esther not having spent an instant in seeing what had happened to me, evidently, because the singing rolled in on me in the splendor of its wind-up, at first with the noise of a seashell, then louder, with the climbing of the orchestra on the staircase of a magnificent hall, to the clear heartbreak of the very top where the drums severed and killed and gave a hammering burial to everything.
I don’t know whether it was the refusal or the emotion of speaking and being spoken to that knocked me down, and I wasn’t in any condition to touch around and feel for the trigger, where it was and why it was like a loose tooth. It was enough I had found out how strong the charge was, and that it was the kick of a false situation that went off. And meanwhile I was sucking breath and the air felt chilly to me because of my damp face. I got my back against a sofa, where I felt I had got trampled all over my body by a thing some way connected by weight with my mother and my brother George, who perhaps this very minute was working on a broom, or putting it down to shamble in to supper; or with Grandma Lausch in the Nelson Home—somehow as though run over by the beast that kept them steady company and that I thought I was safely away from.
Meantime Miss Zeeland was standing in the doorway, the daughter of the famous corporation lawyer, looking at me, in her evening feathers, and her body in the long drape of her dress making a single unbroken human roll. She had on golden shoes and white gloves to the elbow, and looked visionary, oriental, with her rich hair swept up in a kind of tower that was in equilibrium to her big bust. Her face was clear and cold, like a kind of weather, though the long clean groove of her upper lip was ready to go into motion, as if she were going to break her silence with something momentous and long-matured; explain love to me, perhaps. But no, her ideas remained closed to me, though she didn’t leave until I got up to turn off the phonograph, and then she glided or fanned away.
I went to the men’s toilet to wash my face with a little warm water and then went to dinner. I didn’t do much with the food, not even the pêche flambée, as didn’t escape Mrs. Renling, and she said, “Augie, when is this love nonsense going to stop? You’ll hurt your system. Is it that important?” Then she used her most fondling words on me, to get me around by kidding, and, as a woman, tried to put a top on my imagination of women where she thought a top should be, explaining what there was and was not to women, and praised the male in all things as if she was working for Athena. It drove me a little crazy. I wasn’t right on my rocker anyway, and hearing her run down the body of womankind in her metal, bristling way made me look at her with a streak of bad blood in the eye. And I waited almost with the shakes of malaria for Esther to appear in the dining room. The old Fenchels were already at their table. Then Thea came, but her sister wasn’t having supper apparently.
“And you know,” said Mrs. Renling after a time, “the girl hasn’t had her eyes off you since she came in. Is there something between you already? Augie! Have you done something? Is that why you’re low? What have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything,” I said.
“You better not!” She was on me, sharp and shrewd, just like a police matron. “You’re too attractive to
women for your own good, and you’ll end up in trouble. So will she; she’s got hot pants, that little miss.”
She gave Thea stare for stare. The waiter set light to the Fenchels’ flambée, and there were little fires here and there in the green of twilight.
I left the dining room without saying more. To walk around on the shore road and get the shameful twists out of my guts and digest my trouble. It was awful, the feelings I was having, the disgrace and anger over Esther and the desire to conk Mrs. Renling on the head. I went along the edge of the water, and then around the grounds, staying away from the porch where I knew Mrs. Renling would be waiting to pay me off for my rudeness, and then to the back, to the children’s playground, and sat down on the slat seat of the garden swing.
Sitting here, I started to dream that Esther had thought it over and had come out of her room to look for me, so that I had to groan over the grip my stupidity had on me and was sloshed all over with corrupting feelings, worse than before. Then I heard someone light coming near, a woman stepping under the tree into the dusty rut worn beside the swing by the feet of kids. It was Esther’s sister Thea, come to talk to me, the one Mrs. Renling warned me of. In her white dress and her shoes that came down like pointed shapes of birds in the vague whiteness of the furrow by the swing, with lace on her arms and warm opening and closing differences of the shade of leaves back of her head, she stood and looked at me.
“Disappointed that it isn’t Esther, aren’t you, Mr. March? I guess you must be having a terrible time. You looked pretty white in the dining room.”
Wondering what she knew and what she was after, I didn’t say anything.
“Have you recovered a little?”
“Recovered from what?”
“From fainting. Except Esther thought it might be an epileptic fit.”
“Well, maybe it was one,” I said, feeling heavy, sullen, and crumbling.
“I don’t think so. You’re just sore, and you don’t want me to bother you.”
That wasn’t so; on the contrary, I wanted her to stay. So I said, “No,” and she sat down beside my feet, touching them with her thigh. I made a move, but she touched my ankles and said, “Don’t bother. You don’t have to make yourself uncomfortable because of me. What happened anyway?”
“I asked your sister for a date.”
“And when she said ‘No’ you passed out.”
I thought she was warm toward me and not merely curious.
“I’m all for you, Mr. March,” she said, “so I’ll tell you what Esther thinks. She thinks that you service the lady you’re with.”
“What?” I cried out and jumped from the seat and gave myself a crack on the head against the dowels of the swing.
“That you’re her gigolo and lay her. Why don’t you sit down? I thought I should explain this to you.”
As if I had been carrying something with special sacred devotedness and it had spilled and scalded me, that was how I felt. And here I had all along thought that the worst that could occur in the minds of young girls, heiresses even, was innocent by the standards of Einhorn’s poolroom.
“Who thought of that, you or your sister?”
“I don’t want to throw all the blame on Esther. I thought it might be so too, even though she brought it up first. We knew you weren’t related to Mrs. Renling because we heard her say once to Mrs. Zeeland that you were her husband’s protégé. You never danced with anybody else, and you held hands with her, and she is a sexy-looking woman for her age. You ought to see the two of you together! And then she’s a European, and they don’t think it’s so terrible for a woman to have a much younger lover. I don’t see what’s so terrible about it either. Just my deadhead of a sister does.”
“But I’m not European. I come from Chicago. I work for her husband in Evanston. I’m a clerk in his store, and that’s the only occupation I have.”
“Now don’t be upset, Mr. March. Please don’t be. We get around and see a lot. Why do you think I came out here to talk to you? Not to trouble you more. If you did, you did, and if you didn’t, you didn’t.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying. It’s a lousy thing to think of me, and of Mrs. Renling too, who’s been only kind to me.” I was angry and sounded angry, and she held her answers back; she also was heated and tight with excitement. I felt as well as saw her eyes deeply studying me. Whereas till now she had smiled occasionally there was no longer the least bit of humor in her face, which I saw well in the whiteness and ground dust and orchard leaves. I began to understand that I was with someone extraordinary, for it was a hot, prompt, investigative, and nearly imploring face. It was delicate but also full of strong nerve, with the recklessness that gives you as much concern as admiration, seeing it in a young woman; as when you see birds battling, like two fierce spouts of blood; they could easily die from small harms and don’t seem to realize it. Of course that’s one of those innocent male ideas probably.
“You don’t really believe I’m Mrs. Renling’s gigolo, do you?”
“I’ve already told you I wouldn’t care if you were.”
“Sure, what difference should it make to you!”
“No, you don’t get it. You’ve been in love with my sister and following her around, so you haven’t noticed that I’ve done exactly the same to you.”
“You’ve what?”
“I’ve fallen in love with you. I love you.”
“Go away. You don’t. It’s just an idea. If it’s even an idea. What are you trying to give me?”
“You couldn’t love Esther if you knew her. You’re like me. That’s why you fell in love. She couldn’t. Augie! Why don’t you change to me?”
She took my hand and drew it to her, leaning toward me from the hips, which were graceful. Oh, Mrs. Renling over whom I thought I had triumphed because her suspicions were so misplaced!
“I don’t care about Mrs. Renling,” she said. “Suppose you did, once.”
“Never!”
“A young person can do all sorts of things because he has more in him than he knows what to do with.”
Did I say that the world had never had better color? I left something out of account, a limping, crippled consideration which seems to lose ground as you reach beauty and Orizaba flowers, but soon you find it has preceded you.
“Now, Miss Fenchel,” I said, trying to keep her in her seat as I stood up. “You’re lovely, but what do you think we’re doing? I can’t help it, I love Esther.” And as she wouldn’t stay put I had to escape from the swing and get away in the orchard.
“Mr. March—Augie,” she called. But I wasn’t going to talk to her now. I went into the hotel by the service entrance. When I was in the room, with the phone off the hook so that Mrs. Renling couldn’t reach me, I explained to myself, while taking off my good duds and dropping them on the floor, that this was merely something between sisters and I figured in it accidentally, not really personally. But my other thought was that, if it weren’t so, there was no luck in these things; how everyone seemed to get drawn in the wrong direction. So for the same desires to meet was a freak occurrence. And to feel them so specific, settled on one person, maybe was an unallowable presumption, too pure, too special, and a misunderstanding of the real condition of things.
When I walked in to have breakfast with Mrs. Renling next morning I left the door open.
“What, were you born in the coal scuttle?” she said. “Close it. I’m lying here.” And when I went, halfhearted, to do it, she observed how wrinkled I looked. “Go down to the tailor after breakfast and get pressed. You must have slept in your pants. I make allowance for you because you’re in love, even the way you were so courteous to me last night. But you don’t have to be a tramp.”
After breakfast she took off for her mineral bath and I went down to the lobby. The Fenchels had checked out. There was a note at the desk for me from Thea. “Esther told uncle about you, and we are going to Waukesha for a few days and then East. You were foolish last night. Think abou
t it. It’s true I love you. You’ll see me again.”
Then I had a few rough days and got stretched out in melancholy. I thought, where did I get that way, putting in for the best there was in the departments of beauty and joy as if I were a count of happy youth, and like born to elegance and sweet love, with bones made of candy? And had to remember what very seldom mattered with me, namely, where I came from, parentage, and other history, things I had never much thought of as difficulties, being democratic in temperament, available to everybody and assuming about others what I assumed about myself.
And in the meantime, more and more, I had to carry what till now had carried me. This place, for instance, the Merritt, cream and gold, was now on my neck—the service, the dinner music, the dances; the hyperbolical flowers all of a sudden like painted iron; the chichi a millstone; and, on top of it, Mrs. Renling and her foundry-cast weight. I couldn’t take her now when she was difficult. There was bad luck even in the weather, which turned cool and rainy toward the last; and rather than stay in where she could lay hands on me and carry on and tyrannize, I stuck around the amusement park at Silver Beach, where the seats of the Ferris wheel were covered, getting blackened, and I got soaked through my raincoat (from the old times and not up to my recenter elegance). I sat in the hot-dog stands among the carnies, concessionaires, and shell-game operators, waiting for the course of baths to finish.