The House on Coliseum Street Page 4

  Aurelie’s taffeta rustled and Joan was twenty again and back in the house on Coliseum Street.

  “Doesn’t it seem funny to you,” Joan asked, “all of us living on his money?”

  “He was most generous.”

  “Just that fountain, why do you suppose he was so crazy about that fountain?”

  “I was in love with him,” Aurelie said, “or I would never have let him put it there.”

  “Why did he want to keep it so very much?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, child.”

  “You know what?” Joan asked, “I know why he didn’t marry Margaret. I think he was still in love with you.”

  Aurelie shrugged. “Such a quiet dull man.”

  That was the only comment she had ever made.

  Joan chuckled. The nasty taste of the evening with Michael was disappearing; she was feeling better.

  Aurelie went back to her magazine.

  “You know,” Joan said, “you look so wonderfully motherly, with glasses, I mean.”

  “I’ve heard about bifocal contact lenses,” Aurelie said without lifting her eyes from the page, “I shall have to see about them.”

  JOAN HAD HER HAND on the door to her room when the phone rang. Michael’s calling back…

  She waited, holding her breath. But she was still not surprised when she heard Aurelie begin a conversation.

  It couldn’t be. But if it was, I’d have gone out and waited for him.

  She went into her room.

  And he’ll never come back. Because I wasn’t the sort of girl he likes…

  She’d felt this way before. The ache was familiar. Hurt pride, she told herself scornfully. Why do I have to get so upset just because my little pride gets hurt? All these feelings, all these god-damn feelings…

  It’s something about me, she thought. I never can get the men I want.

  She felt sad. Very sad. And being sad felt good. It was a pleasure, really. Like eating something you liked. A mild pleasure. The whole world took on a lovely grey tinge and everything was weeping.

  She dragged the record player and its little table across the room and plugged it in right beside the bed. Then she rummaged around in the back of her closet until she found the recording she wanted: Liebestod.

  She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes and thought great cloudy thoughts and felt sadness run over her in huge predictable waves like the surf.

  Every now and then she spoke out loud to herself. “It’s hell to be alive,” she told herself, “and it would be hell to be dead too.” The record finished. Without getting up she lifted the arm and started it over again, turning up the volume. “If I died, they would be sorry.” And she saw herself laid out.

  “I don’t get anything right. Not ever.”

  She put the record on for a third time and cried little fat tears into the hot still night.

  AURELIE INSISTED ON BREAKFAST, a formal breakfast in the dining room. The table was carefully set with the same flower-patterned spode each morning. The food was carefully arranged on the buffet over little warmers and under little covers.

  It was the one rule of the house. Aurelie said nothing about late hours, never had. From the time they left the nursery and moved into rooms of their own, her daughters came and went as they pleased. But each and every morning, they were required to appear for breakfast. Aurelie, her hair carefully arranged, her face carefully made up, her robe of crisp taffeta in the summer and soft velvet in the winter, sat at the head of the table and made polite cheery conversation.

  These mornings, as for a good many years past, Aurelie was alone. Her husband Herbert Norton had long since stopped coming down. (Her previous husband, and the only other one Joan had been old enough to remember, had never been present in the mornings either. He had been a tall thin Lincoln-like Alabamian, a hardworking surgeon, who was always up at five thirty, out of the house by six, and operating by seven.)

  For the first year of their marriage Herbert Norton had appeared for breakfast. Or rather Aurelie had gone up and brought him down. Joan remembered his big nearsighted blue eyes circled by gold-rimmed glasses, peering out from behind Aurelie as they entered the room. He was much taller than she was; he was very nearly six feet, but he gave the impression of being small. He was delicate-boned and thin, formally polite and very self-effacing. He had been in the Navy for twenty years, had married Aurelie and retired. That had been ten years past. For those years he had drunk steadily, seriously. Whenever Aurelie went for him, he was most polite and came most willingly. But he had to be fetched for each appearance, and after a few years Aurelie no longer bothered. So, bit by bit, he disappeared: first from the breakfast table, then from the main part of the house and the main part of their lives. Some three years after their marriage Aurelie had the top floor, the third floor, remodeled for him. He had insisted on only one thing: a fire escape, an ugly old-fashioned iron one, that climbed the side of the house. After that he seemed quite happy to move up there. By then it had been months since they had gone out together, and when Aurelie entertained at home, she often forgot to fetch him. After all, he had no friends and seemed rather glad to be left alone.

  He did not come down at all. Aurelie’s cook brought him his meals. And there was a phone that he used only to call the liquor store.

  He did not even seem to be particularly interested in his daughter, Ann. Just a year after the marriage Aurelie had borne another daughter, a thin dark baby with tilted eyes and pointed pixie ears, who turned into a tall thin precocious child with a startling resemblance to Aurelie and none at all to her father. She spent her summers at camp and her winters at convent school in Florida.

  Most of the time Joan forgot he was in the house, remembering only when she saw the delivery boy from the liquor store climbing up the three flights, cursing softly under his breath. Remembering again when the doctor plodded up wearily, for Mr. Norton had had two mild heart attacks.

  Every evening with the gathering dark he pulled in the shutters and closed all the windows in his two rooms and locked them. And every morning with the first strong light—four thirty in the summers and seven in the winters—he staggered around opening them again. At the one that was framed by the highest shoots of the moonflower vine he would always stop, press his nose against the screen and take a couple of deep breaths. The dust on the screen invariably made him sneeze, a gigantic snort that echoed all along the block. Each morning it was the same. The people in the house had gotten so used to it that they no longer even heard it.

  He lived peacefully up there, with his charts and military books and strange old-fashioned navigating instruments. And every now and then he made a trip to the hospital to have his gentle little delusions replaced by heavy shots of vitamin B.

  His stepdaughters forgot he was there. And if Aurelie remembered, she never mentioned it.

  So, that morning, the third of June, only Aurelie and Doris were at the table when Joan came down.

  Aurelie glanced at her critically. “Mercy sakes, child,” she said to Joan when she appeared, “whatever happened to your eyes?”

  “Nothing happened to them.”

  Doris, who was wearing clean white shorts and a shirt, grinned over her coffee cup. “Wagner all night long, huh?”

  “Honestly,” Aurelie said, “were you playing that again?”

  Joan shrugged and poured her coffee. “I happen to like music.”

  “I’ll forgive you,” Doris said. “You want to come play tennis?”

  “Where’s your date?”

  “I’ve got one, honey, don’t you worry. But I was going to ask him to bring a friend for you.”

  “Thanks,” Joan said, “but my tennis isn’t very good.”

  “You’ve got to do something here in the summer.”

  “I think,” Joan said, “I’ll go take a course.” She enjoyed their surprise. And the plan grew as she spoke. “A cultural summer. I’m going to sign up for a couple of courses in music over at the co
llege.”

  “Good old tone deaf,” Doris said.

  “Honestly, child,” Aurelie said, “what a waste of money.”

  “It’s my money,” Joan said stubbornly, “and I can spend it any way I want.”

  “That,” Doris said, “reminds me of a joke.”

  “Not at breakfast,” Aurelie said.

  “Wouldn’t you think you’d get enough school all year without adding to it in the summer?”

  “That’s my affair.”

  “Okay, rich bitch,” Doris said.

  “That is quite enough,” Aurelie said.

  “It’s nice,” Doris said, “to have an intellectual sister.”

  “A bookish woman,” Aurelie said, “is simply impossible.”

  “Call my broker,” Doris mimicked, “I am just loaded with money.”

  Joan stared at the blue glass Victorian jam jar and the silver napkin ring that lay beside it. “Two of you,” she said slowly. And she picked up the ring and balanced it on top of the jam jar. “The two of you line up against me.”

  “Ohhhhhh,” Doris moaned, “poor little meeeeee.”

  “Oh child,” Aurelie said, “you are so solemn.”

  Joan studied the edge of the plate, and slowly she went over every object on the table as if she had never seen them before. “The two of you,” she repeated. And the words brought back the sorrow of last night, the wonderful lovely sorrow… The lost … the something that was lost, the place you couldn’t go back to, the dream you didn’t want to give up in the morning and you lay tight in bed trying and trying to hold it and it slipped away, like fog, and you couldn’t remember the smell or the color or the feel of it, what it was and where it had been. And that was the final end, when there wasn’t even a memory…

  Joan lifted her eyes in time to see Doris clutching her throat in anguish, chanting: “Oh woe, oh woe, O Weltschmerz, O Wiener Schnitzel, O crap, O shit.”

  Aurelie brought her palm down on the table sharply so that the dishes rattled. “That is quite enough. Leave the table.”

  “Yes, Mother. Going, Mother. Right away, Mother.” Doris giggled, but she got up at once and slipped out of the door into the kitchen. They could hear her begin a conversation with the cook. In a couple of minutes a car tooted outside, and the kitchen door slammed. The car zoomed off, double clutching with a roar.

  Aurelie poured herself some coffee, then filled Joan’s cup. “Here, you funny little sad thing,” she said.

  Joan added sugar without answering.

  “One thing …” Aurelie said, “my daughters are different. Joan, honey, don’t you think you’d be happier if you were married?”

  “Fred?”

  “A very fine man,” Aurelie said. “I couldn’t approve more. And we haven’t had a lawyer in the family for generations.”

  “I think I’ll go to medical school and never get married.”

  Aurelie chuckled her deep mannish tones. “You flunked biology, dear.”

  “I might be a missionary.”

  “A nice man,” Aurelie said. “We’ve been so unlucky with men in this family.”

  “Your favorite subject,” Joan said sourly.

  “A woman alone,” Aurelie said, “is so very sad.”

  “If I’m going to register,” Joan said, “I’ve got to get dressed and over there.”

  She felt her mother’s accusing eyes follow her from the room.

  SHE HAD BEEN IN college for two years and it seemed just like another school day as she walked the short three blocks from the front gate on Coliseum Street to the campus. At the first corner she pulled an orange hibiscus from the bush in the Landry yard, the way she did every morning. For the rest of that block, without looking, she tore the saucer-shaped flower to careful pieces so that she left an orange trail behind her. At the second corner she stopped on the iron walk that crossed the gutter and dropped in the last bits of stamen and green leaf that her fingers still held. It was a deep gutter, its sides lined with careful sloping slabs of slate. Since it was the deepest drain in the neighborhood there was always water in it—even once when it had frozen (back when she was a child of six or seven) there had been ice so thick on it that the children had come down and walked along it, making skating motions. Until Philip Carter, the redheaded boy who lived two blocks away, went home and got his roller skates. After a couple of trips he had cut through the ice and the wheels had wedged in the soft mud. That was the end of the ice skating. By afternoon the sun slipped around under the trees and the ice melted. There had not been another freeze like that again. For weeks after there was the smell of dead foliage decaying in the sun.

  At the third corner a streetcar went clanking past and she stopped and sniffed its peculiar smell, sharp and pungent and exciting. As if it were reminding her always that she was about to leave for a marvelous place…

  She loved the streetcars. Each time the city removed a line she felt a little clutch of bewilderment; she could see the day coming when there would be no more left. And what then? And where would she go then when she was disturbed and sick with the peculiar kind of nausea that fear gave her? …

  She was afraid of so many things. Sometimes for no reason at all, she would feel the muscles knot up and the cold feeling begin. Then she would head for the streetcar line and ride, back and forth, for an hour or so, until the noisy rocking ride comforted her.

  She stared after the car as it traveled rapidly down the tracks, rocking decidedly from side to side, a clumsy caterpillar-shaped creature.

  It was nice to have it there…

  She was whistling as she turned through the imitation Gothic gates that bore a bronze plaque saying A Gift of the Class of 1905. She noticed that one of the little lamps had a broken glass.

  She had never been to summer school before, but she had not expected any difference. When she came around the building and looked out over the quadrangle, she stopped abruptly, startled, trying to see what had changed.

  It wasn’t the people. There were as many of them as ever, streaming over to the far building to register for their classes. It was the grounds. They looked seedy—like a good suit that had been slept in.

  Under the fierce June sun and the heavy rains, the staff of gardeners made no headway. There was one man now, an enormously fat Negro, wheeling about on a tremendous lawn mower. He flicked by her. Grass splattered out on the path. She studied the cut blades and fancied that she could see them begin to grow again, leaping up from under the path of the mower.

  You could feel it growing, she thought, even under the pavement.

  The bed of zinnias had gone wild, too. They grew at right angles to the ground, like mad children crawling along on hands and knees. Next to a building a single sunflower shot straight up and turned its flat yellow face at the level of the second-floor windows, ten feet high. And the honeysuckle, along the walls, sprouted long wavy arms into the air or stuck creeping exploring fingers along the brick.

  A girl and a young man went by, holding hands loosely in the heat. Her full starched petticoats and skirt rustled and left a faint trail of starch smell. Joan found herself watching after them, watching the girl’s feet, lean brown feet in tiny-strapped white sandals.

  I’ve got ugly feet, she thought, thin and long and bony. My toes are funny lengths and the veins go back and forth, like clotheslines. I wish I had nice feet and I wouldn’t have to wear stockings and cover-up shoes all the time…

  She walked along toward the registration building. A wasp droned over her head and a tremendous green grasshopper flashed across her path. Out of sight, but not far off, a Good Humor man went past, his wagon tinkling a distorted version of the Brahms Lullaby. A large brown and white dog loped up and began digging frantically in a camellia bed. When the hole was deep and long enough, he curled around in it, fitting it to himself, and stretched out, belly down on the cool damp.

  Joan was watching him, when from behind her someone said: “Of all the people I didn’t expect to find in summer school
, you are it.”

  She went on watching the dog. The voice was familiar; she had heard it before, but she could not place it. If I turn around, she told herself just as slowly as she could think, I could tell who it is… If I turn around…

  It was a thing she did, this thinking very slowly. She worked at it; she had trained herself so that thoughts came before her mind in a sleepy progression. She had chance to turn each one over and study it, like the slow progression of slides under a microscope.

  “I was saying hello.” Michael Kern stepped around and stood directly in front of her. “Hello again.”

  “I don’t like to be hurried,” she said stupidly.

  His eyes were a yellowish brown, she noticed, in the strong sun.

  “So take your time.”

  The slow progression was ruined. Things speeded up to their ordinary pace. She felt annoyed and cheated.