and Graice says hesitantly, as if uncertain of the question, Yes, and missis Savage says with a searching look, And are your parents. ?
and Graice, who has been turning her dessert spoon slowly in her fingers, lays it down on her plate and says, with a slow shake of her head, My mother died two years ago. of a long illness. She pauses.
She hears missis Savage and missis Wells make murmurous sympathetic sounds but she doesn't look up. She says, with a slight slammer, It was a peaceful death. I mean, at the end. I mean, she was at peace.
at the end. She pauses again. She's breathing quickly and shallowly and her eyes are hot with tears. She says, It was. no one s fault.
They operated, but. Her voice trails off; the grandfather clock begins its slow mellifluous chime. Again the older women murmur words of sympathy but Graice doesn't look up and Graice doesn't hear.
Then she's hurrying from the table. finds herself in the front hall.
it's the guest bathroom she's seeking: this black and gold papered little room, interior, windowless, a mirror with wavy glass in which her pale guilty face floats in the instant before the slow gathering wave of nausea inside her breaks and she vomits out her guts in the toilet.
So it happens that Graice Courtney stays the night at Savage House.
Seeing the condition she's in, both the Savages insist.
Graice is too weak, too sick, too frightened to protest. As the Savages help her up the stairs, to one of the guest rooms, she has to lean heavily on them. her legs are barely strong enough to support her.
They are murmuring words of consolation, encouragement.
But Graice is too confused to hear. And sleepy: can't re member when she has been so sleepy in the presence of others.
Since the death.
Since the funeral when she slept twelve hours.
She's led to the room by missis Savage, and how cavernous a room it is, how chilly, dark silk wallpaper in panels, twelve foot ceiling, a braided carpet on the polished floorboards, the high canopied bed piled with bedclothes awaiting Graice Courtney's body.
missis Savage is speaking in her kindly concerned voice: Here are towels, Graice, here is one of Jenny's nightgowns, Graice, one of Jenny's bathrobes, the bathroom is through that door, there is soap, there are toiletries in the. in the morning you'll feel much much better.
Graice is trying to explain something but the words won't come.
missis Savage sits beside her on the bed stroking her hand, squeezing the weak icy unresisting fingers, saying gently, Never do we know why, Graice, never never do we know why, why such things happen and we must bear such grief, such heartbreak for which we're un prepared, why God expects so much of us, what His plan for us is.
Graice begins to cry. Graice begins to cry and stops. Forces herself to stop.
Otherwise she'll begin to laugh. Talk of God, Duke Courtney used to say, is fancy jargon for What's the odds?
Graice manages too to forestall a violent attack of shivering until missis Savage is gone and the door is safely closed. Then she undresses with slow clumsy fingers, she slips into the bed trembling with the need to sleep, the high hard mattressed bed is like a boat adrift on a dark sea, heavy chilled sheets drawing her body's warmth from her, but Graice lies very still and unmoving God help me God help me please help me and eventually her body's warmth re turns.
But by then she's asleep.
If I re member, it's in vague watery patches like any of my dreams.
11Aere, kitty! Here, kitty kitty kitty! Here, Houdini! Where the hell are you?
Leslie Courtney spends a half hour tramping in the stinging cold, coatless, bareheaded, nostrils pinched against the garbagey smell of the alley. and today has been one of his busiest days: a long morning session at Precious Blood Church photographing the choir, two portrait sittings after lunch, a week's work backlogged in the darkroom, and financial accounts to balance, and the telephone is probably ringing at this very moment, no one in the shop to answer it. Damn, Leslie is thinking, goddamn, he should have hired someone to help him out; the photography business invariably picks up in the weeks before Christmas and now it's less than a week and there's a barely controlled frenzy in the air you can almost smell, people driving their cars recklessly customers vague and impatient not knowing what they want or how much they want to spend, Christmas carols blaring on all sides, the bright lurid silly sentimental strings of lights up and down Main Street and the winking re d and green lights Leslie Courtney feels obliged to tape around the border of the front window of Courtney's Photography Studio. there's a simpleminded cheerfulness to holiday lights you can't deny, whether you approve or not.
This intoxicated end of the year atmosphere to which in theory Leslie Courtney should be immune he's familyless, has no crucial presents to buy but to which he seems to be vulnerable not only as a Hammond merchant but as a citizen of the United States.
Where Christmas isn't just an annual religious celebration, it is the religion Crammed into a hectic week or two, then finished for another year.
He cups his hands to his mouth, bawling, Houdini! Damn you! Kitty kitty kitty.
Houdini the midnight black cat with the stumpy tail and the frayed ear and the green tawny eyes has been missing for nearly two days. Leslie Courtney can t bear to think that something might have happened to him, the damn cat is in his trust.
Houdini? You know who this is! Kitty kitty kitty!
Tramping through the snowy trashy alley where, if you stumble out of the rutted tire trails, you're in snow anywhere from six to eighteen inches deep. Past Ricardo's Shoes, past Aiken's Hardware, past the Hosiery Box, past Rexall's, the rear entrances of stores almost as familiar to Leslie Courtney as his own. Tonight, a Thurs day, most of the downtown stores are open until nine.
It's pitiful, Leslie thinks, how merchants vie with one another to draw the customer in, hope to lure him into buying. A society where everything is for sale, all things have their prices. Making of its citizens prostitutes of varying degrees of success and failure.
His voice is becoming raw, despairing: Houdini? Kitty?
At the cross street, Sixth Street, Leslie pauses. His breath is steaming. He wonders if he should continue the search, following the alley another block, or should give up temporarily and go back home.
The telephone might be ringing. Houdini might have come back in his absence. He's hungry and cold. It's six thirty and pitch dark: December 20. Tomorrow is the darkest day, longest night, of the calendar year.
There's a steady stream of traffic on Sixth Street, the hissing of tires in slush. Across the street PIZZA STAR flashes in re d neon.
It's no place for an animal, even hardy street wise Houdini. Leslie checks the gutters looking for the cat's corpse. steeling himself for what he can't believe he might actually find.
A man Leslie knows, by face rather than name, happens by, asks what the hell Leslie is doing, and Leslie says in a bemused voice that doesn't suggest his concern, Oh, I'm looking for this damned cat that belongs to my niece; it's staying with me while she's at school. He's grateful the other doesn't linger to chat.
Leslie's teeth are chattering, the cold is penetrating his bones.
His hair has become so thin in the past year he pointedly feels the cold, if he's hatless, like an eerie breath blowing slyly on his scalp.
He decides to give up.
Hurrying back along the alley he calls, Houdini! a few more times, purses his lips, and whistles. That sharp piercing whistle sometimes has the power to rouse Houdini from his hiding place inside the house.
When he's inside the house.
Leslie doesn't want to acknowledge how fearful he is, how sick he's beginning to feel. For what if, this time, Houdini is gone.
his niece's beloved cat.
Leslie Courtney's living link, as he thinks of Houdini, with Persia Courtney.
Leslie enters his ground floor apartment through the rear vestibule, a space about the size of a telephone booth, enters the kitchen, takes off his glasses at once to wipe the steam from the lenses. The telephone isn't ringing. The apartment is deathly silent, only the vibrating hum of the aged refrigerator that's as internalized as Leslie Courtney's own heartbeat.
He fits his glasses back on, adjusts the earpieces. The familiar room, the kitchen, leaps back into focus: but to what purpose?
That sick helpless feeling deep in the gut.
That sense of loss, irreparable loss: loss of which, if you want to re main sane, you must never think.
Mechanically, as he's in the habit of doing at least once a day, he opens one of the cupboard doors, checks the bottle of Seagram's high on the shelf. It's the only bottle of liquor. He no longer drinks hard liquor, not even wine, not even beer or ale, but he keeps the unopened bottle of Seagram's on the shelf. In case, some day or some night, he simply can't bear what his life has become. can bear it.
When Persia was first hospitalized Leslie vowed he wouldn't take a single drink until she was well and discharged from the hospital, at which time he would celebrate the occasion with a drink and he hasn't had a drink since.
There's a sense in which he's still waiting.
Houdini? Are you in here?
He checks the corner of the kitchen floor where the cat's bowls are kept, neatly on a sheet of newspaper: a bowl of water, a bowl of dry cat food. At first it seems to Leslie that some of the cat food has been eaten; then he decides it hasn't.
Misery mounting in him, he wanders through the rooms touching walls, pieces of furniture, like a blind man. He's seen these surroundings so many times he isn't required to see them again.
In the two years in which Graice's cat has been living with Leslie he has wandered away from home twice, but never as long as this.
Both times before he'd re turned excited and hungry, showing no signs of having been injured. This time, something must have happened to him: a fight with another tomcat, or with a dog, or an accident in the street.
It's one of the ironies of the situation that Leslie has a mild allergy to cat hair. That he often wakes with his sinuses packed and throbbing to discover Houdini snuggled up close beside him in his bed, atop the covers. the damned creature can force open Leslie's bedroom door in the night without disturbing him. And, once Leslie discovers him sleeping on the bed, he hasn't the heart to make him leave.
He's become absurdly fond of Houdini though he disapproves of the cat's sly ways, his pose of innocence until Leslie's back is turned, and, God knows, he's appalled sometimes by the animal's hunger. a nearly metaphysical hunger of the kind that can never be satisfied.
Whenever I see a picture of myself I think, There's proof' I re ally am here.
But the camera preserves images only. Images of things dying, or dead.
Graice said, tears streaking her face, I can't bear to see them! Take them away! Hide them!
So Leslie has re moved most of the photographs of Persia and Persia and Graice from the front of the shop and has hung them on the walls of his bedroom. In rows, framed, under glass: the earliest was taken in May 1940, Persia Courtney as a lovely, very young bride in a ruffled white dress and a bridal veil; the last was taken in August 1955, here in the studio, Persia and Graice in their pretty summer dresses, seated side by side on the wicker love seat. In chronological order on Leslie's bedroom walls are images of a wide browed smiling woman as she ages subtly yet unmistakably from girlhood to maturity: Persia in a strapless chiffon gown with her dashing husband Duke as The Incomparable Courtneys one of a series of publicity photos Leslie volunteered to take ; Persia just home from the hospital gazing dewy eyed at her infant daughter nestled in her arms; Persia in a Rita Hayworth pose, smiling seductively at the camera, in an off the shoulder Spanish blouse; Persia with dark defined lips and upswept hairdo, her little girl re sting her head against Persia's shoulder and gazing too into the camera with frank smiling eyes and so on and so forth. How many poses, how many years, now completed. The Persia Courtney Leslie last saw, being carried into the emergency room of Hammond General Hospital, a raving, delirious, jaundice skinned woman with matted hair, bears no kin ship to any of these images. none that Leslie can bring himself to acknowledge.
Leslie has hung the many photographs of Persia Courtney in his bedroom to spare Graice distress when Graice visits him, but Graice rarely visits now that she is in college. Graice is rarely in Hammond now that she is in college. Even her summers, if she can, she spends in part or wholly away from Hammond. And now there is a family in Syracuse, it seems, that has befriended her. she spoke evasively of them, and with girlish pride, the last time she called. She won't be coming home over the lengthy Christmas re cess because she has so much schoolwork to do. And because this family the Savages has been kind enough to invite her for Christmas Eve and for other holiday events.