He was not; there was a letter. He held it before the fire with two hands as if it were the tiny dead body of a lover, and he stared at it as if some new breath might bring it back to life. A simple letter; a page. Hughie was dressed in just his suit pants, shirtsleeves, and an undone cravat, leaning into the sphinx-headed arm of his ridiculously Egyptian chair with the posture of something firming up against collapse. The fire sent its apprehensive light over the room, polishing and tarnishing the objects around us. A noise came from the chair as if my friend were gently choking. I admit I see these details only in retrospect; at the time, I had nothing on my mind but the sherry in his cabinet.
“Ah, Hughie, got a drink for your pal?”
He shook, startled, and I was such a fool that I laughed. But he was not facing me; he was facing the fire now, and just as he might drop it into a mail slot, the letter went neatly into the flames. He jerked back when he had done it and almost immediately his hand went out again to catch it. But the letter was buffeted by the waterfall of fire, and except for one small fragment, it burned into a kind of fragile film that floated up the chimney in one piece.
“Hey, what was that? Ain’t got a log?”
I heard him laughing now. “Get us a drink, old man,” he said.
“Who’s the host here?”
“You are for once. I’m dead tired. Hey, I’ll find us some H and we’ll have a little party. I feel like a little party.”
We had one. By the time I was back with the whiskey (I had changed my mind, as always) Hughie was up and dressed again, bearing in his hand a vial of his wicked hashish and two pipes which lay bedded together in their velvet like the beginning of a grand quotation. He was all aglow from the fire. He found us some cold beef and potatoes, then entertained me late with his liquor and his pipe. At first, the smoke was pleasant enough to send us both into a calm stupor. I looked up into my skull and it was as plain as the interior of a parasol, as full of indistinct shadows. We both lay there in solitude, together, as friends will, but soon we were restless. We set up a game, but as the hours filled with whiskey, as the cards were dealt and foolishly laid down, I fell once more into my own worries.
“I’m unhappy, Hughie.”
“So am I,” he said without looking up.
I fiddled with the pipe lying there on the table. “No you’re not. You’ve got a lucky life. I want your life.”
He spoke in bitter tones: “You may have it.”
I did not notice his voice. I never thought of Hughie as unhappy for a moment, and it would have annoyed me, I think, for him to take on such a new role so late in our friendship. Melancholy was
my birthright, not his. I lifted my hands into the darkness above the globe of lamplight. I said, “I want this stupid house, and your stupid girls.” I waved towards him, saying, “I want your young looks. I want nice clothes that people my age wear instead of … my God, look at me, I’m still wearing my dad’s pantaloons!”
He smoked without expression. “I don’t want to talk about your clothes.”
“You get along so fine. Most of us mope around about some woman or another our whole lives, nothing can make us happy.” I fell into a momentary pause as I considered what I meant by this. I looked back at him and said, “But you’re happy even if nobody loves you.”
Oh, he looked up now.
“Shut up, Max,” he said.
I laughed. “I mean who would love you? Your Pumpkin House. Imagine some woman in here yelling at you to get rid of your smokes. Get your feet off that ottoman! Where’s your good coat? Not here. You don’t need it,” I said, coming out of my dark haze and smiling. “Who could love you? You’re inhuman.”
He said nothing but just looked away from me, down to where the one unburnt scrap of letter lay on the hearth as white as youth.
“I’m wrecked. Can I sleep here tonight? I won’t vomit this time.”
“No,” he said, standing up and going to the scrap of paper. I could have read what was on it if I’d wanted, but I didn’t care back then. I was too concerned with myself. The scrap went into the flames, unnoticed, and Hughie stood with his back to me, staring at the fire. He said, “The maid comes in the morning and she gossips with the neighbors. She already thinks I’m a lowlife. I don’t need drunks on my sofa.” I heard him laughing now. “And you
will
vomit. I’ll call you a cab.”
“It’s Alice I miss.”
“I know.”
“It’s Alice.”
“Okay, Max.”
“Thanks, Hughie, I love you.”
I could see his whole body outlined by the lightning flashes of the fire. He did not move for a while and neither did I, intent to sleep there in my chair where I was happy. The fire spoke, chattering like a madman, and then quieted again in a helix of sparks. My friend, so still and copper-outlined in the dark, said something so softly that I cannot, even more than thirty years later, hear what it was.
It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another’s heart.
In the morning, I would remember very little of that night, and Hughie never mentioned it to me; I’m sure he had heard many stupid rants from drugged and drunken friends in his days, and forgave me, of course.
And that first afternoon of his husbandhood, he waved to me gaily from the window of the train. I suppose he married for love, a little, but largely he married for fear, as most men do. But it is not for me to describe Hughie’s heart. He met his bride within months of our chat, took her out in streetcars and carriages all over town, ate Chicken in Cockleshells at that old great San Francisco restaurant, the Poodle Dog, and asked her to marry him within a year. I was not consulted on any of this except the color of his gloves (tan, as I told you). But how funny it is with men: they will beg you loudly not to leave them at the pub, but they will go off and marry without a word, as if it did not concern you in the least.
Hughie took his commission right after the wedding and headed to the Philippines, where his captain took Guam from the Spanish
in a single afternoon. Meanwhile, Mother’s business did well, mostly because she had the brilliant idea (or vision, as she put it) to become a specialist in Civil War dead. Women in old lace caps came by the hundreds, sitting in our darkened parlor while Mother summoned up the horrors of Cold Harbor: “There’s dead men a-lyin’ in over five acres here, and I’m among them, Mama …I ain’t got no legs.” She gave it in such detail that the stunned women often forgot to pay and had to be reminded by post the next day.
By the time I was twenty-five, I seemed to be in my mid-forties: plump and elegant with waxed mustaches. I looked like my mother’s generation. In 1895, in fact, we appeared to meet each other’s age and, nodding as we passed, continued in our opposite directions towards age and youth, respectively.
What I did not realize was that, as Mother and Mina were growing older—the former with her graying chignon and the latter with her flirtatious laugh—I was getting closer and closer to my real age. While at twenty I had been far off the map of youth, now that I was nearly thirty I looked nearly right. Perhaps not quite in the bloom of youth, but approaching it in my ogreish way, and I began to get more than my usual share of glances from ladies who peered like fascinated children out of carriages, streetcars, and shopwindows. Because I saw the world only as a bored audience eager to hear the joke of my life, I thought these girls were just eyeing my odd clothes, and that their pink-orchid smiles were just amusement at my ugliness. I did not understand these women were speaking to me in silence. I did not understand that my glands, like those fine tubules that twine down a silkworm’s back, were spinning from my ugliness a face both young and fine. The century turned, the seasons changed, but little changed for me until a lucky and terrible disaster.
What a hidden blessing to be grounded, Mrs. Ramsey, for now I have the time to put this down just as it happened:
It was in March of 1906, on the three-penny planks of Fillmore Street. The morning was a surprise to me; so warm and fogless for March, so lovely that people floated almost in a daze through Golden Gate Park, carriage tops down, and one could see women on the promenade in the palest of summer dresses, never worn before or since, women grinning in the glory of light fabric but stilt—cautious girls—carrying a fur wrap in case this miracle should turn on them. A bright, hot sunny morning in San Francisco! Imagine! The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person.
A street scene like any other, though, of course, from a time that now seems forever lost. There were dray horses hauling goods to the rich folks up the hill; there were Chinese lugging vegetables across their shoulders, traveling the back alleys and shouting to the cooks in the kitchens; there were men and women by the score out on that gorgeous day. Another great change in me that year: I had shaved my beard at last. I walked along dressed in a plaid bow tie and a porkpie hat, looking every bit a man in his mid-thirties and glad of it because, for this brief moment of my life, I was the age I seemed.
There came a scream from the street. I turned my head so quickly I lost my hat: there before me was a carriage piled full with a picnicking family, and coming towards it down the hill hurried a brakeless gasoline automobile. I remember how the little girl in the carriage stood up, pointing at the beast that would kill her: some monster from a dream, a book, from the flickering gibberish of a magic lantern show. I remember how the ribbons in her straw hat coiled back in the wind like snakes about to strike, how the family stood in mute tableau, the horse twisted eyes-white to
the death machine, how the car driver slumped, jerking in the spasms of his stroke while his shirtwaisted passenger climbed over him in a frankly sexual way and fought with the controls. One could make out the mother in the carriage grabbing her girl’s waist, about to throw her towards the sidewalk. The father, thrusting one defiant palm to stop the oncoming machine. I did not see the awful moment; or perhaps our brains erase these things for us. I recall a sound that I do not have the heart to describe.
But it is not of the accident that I want to tell. I have seen worse human horrors than these, and more than my share. What’s important about that sunny afternoon of death was that I turned away, and this choice to turn has made my life what it is. I turned away from this awful sight, towards the hot, bright, impossible sky, and there, silhouetted so crisply, I saw a hot, bright, impossible sight:
An eye. A clear brown eye on whose surface was reflected the scene of death itself. The star-lashed eye of a woman.
Who? Oh Reader. Oh careless, careless Reader.
It was Alice. Time, that unfaithful friend, had changed her.
Not cruelly, as you’re thinking, but in the most ordinary of ways. Standing on the street beside me: taller, hair darker. Shoulders broad, neck long with a little softness under the chin, face full and clear, unmuddied by the baby fat of fourteen. Faint lines around her eyes, as expected, tracing every expression I’d known in girlhood. Unexpectedly pale and powdered, yet a drop of sweat sat on the wing of her nose like the jewel of an Indian bride. The girl I remembered was not there. The face so soft and full, incapable of any hardness no matter how strongly she hissed or hated, it was not there. The cheeks so soft with down, the clean eye blinking in wet fronds of lashes, the restless breastless body; all that was gone: the softness, the pink, the girl.
And yet. She was both more faded and sharper all at once; the dreaminess of the eyes was lost, but a clarity that was dormant at fourteen had come into gradual focus, giving her a new kind of beauty. This was no girl of fourteen, breathing a curl of smoke into my mouth; this was a woman over thirty.
“My God!” we both shouted, and for a moment I thought we were both gasping at this reunion. I realized, of course, that she was speaking of the little carriage girl, now entombed in rubber and splintered wood. I turned and saw men running to pull metal aside. The car passenger was already on the street, alive enough to accept a young man’s coat and wrap it over her tattered skirt. The horse, now in the last hours of its life, nodded its head hopelessly from its place beneath the wreckage. I could not make out who else could be saved. A tire and a wheel rolled together for a few feet before falling in endless spirals to the road. There was no sound to be heard above the noise of panic. Well, perhaps one sound: an inhuman heart rejoicing.
“Come,” I said, and offered my hand, which, in the atmosphere of disaster, I knew would not be rejected. I was right; Alice stared at me, squinting, then took my hand in her gloved palm and ran with me. I had not yet had time to feel my luck, that I had found her at last; after all, true believers are not amazed by miracles.
But look at this unexpected fortune:
she did not know who I was!
This was the witching hour of my life—the only time when I was exactly what I seemed to be—and God had brought me, at this golden time, the prize I wanted most. I found a little tea shop for us, something with red “flock” walls and café curtains pulled shut so that the shadows of passersby formed a kind of Balinese shadow play on the yellow fabric. Somehow, as we took our seats and ordered, I was so stunned by my good fortune that I could
say nothing. Here it was, the prize. To sit across from Alice one last time. To hear her sigh when the tea arrived in an opium-cloud of steam. To see her eyes close voluptuously when she took a bite of cake. To notice a spot near her ear where she had failed to powder and the skin—that old pink, glorious skin—showed through. We chatted and I was grateful. If fate had handed me a body always in disguise, and if disguise alone would let me be near my love, then I would accept it. She would never need to know. She could not love me, you see. I had noticed the golden ring on her finger.