The Theoretical Foot (17 page)

Honor was sorry now that they'd begun to talk about Sara, as it hardly seemed fair to speak of her to her lover, of times before he'd known her. Honor felt that it might give him an advantage over her sister, but now it was too late. She heard words that she had not before put together into sentences rushing from her.

“Oh yes, Sara was never one to spare us if she thought we'd done sonething wrong or bad or sneaky. She never touched us but she made us wretched, simply
wretched,
with her silent disapproval and I don't know exactly how. And she was terribly stuffy and rather Girl Scouty at the time, all about our doing a good deed daily and brushing our teeth and playing the game and so on.”

“Really?” Tim looked highly amused.

“Oh yes! And table manners! And being seen and not heard when out in public, things such as these. But mostly she was stern about sneaking around and being a tattletale, that sort of business, which she simply abhored. That's what's so surprising now.”

Honor's voice now died away. Oh God, she thought, how can I have been so indiscreet? Oh, Tim, forgive me!

He looked at her for a moment then, with a calm and speculative eye, asked, as if conversationally, “You mean about our not being married?”

Honor nodded. She was filled with misery.

“For heaven's sake, you look like a kicked puppy! You might have said something long ago. You Tennants are too damned discreet for your own good, you know? It's too bad, too, for a few people that Sara and I are not legally married. We will be as soon as we're able. With people like us, those who've known one another for a long time and have liked each other for all this while, it really doesn't matter. But I think most people probably ought to get married. So I don't think I advocate promiscuous cohabitation or all that damned foolishness. In fact, I abhore it.”

Honor still said nothing.

“So does Sara,” Tim added.

She frowned, then said crossly: “I don't need you to tell me that. I know my sister.”

“Well, please don't snap at me. Here, have a cigarette, though you do smoke rather too much for a girl your age.”

They smoked. They sat without speaking for a time. Upstairs they could hear the somnolent padding of François's tennis shoes and the occasional bump or clatter as he cleaned Nan's room. Once they heard Lucy Pendleton's painting chair being scraped across the floor. Once a train shrilled and rumbled distantly along the lake. Finally Tim slid off the tuffet and sat close to Honor on the floor, carefully not touching her.

“Are you in love?” he asked.

Honor didn't mind his asking, she was startled to realize. The very thing she would not even let her own self ask was all right being asked by him.

“Yes, I am. I am in love.”

How queer it was that her voice did not crack, that she did not cry out, that instead she sounded as calm as if she were saying, “Yes, I'll have some tea. I'd like lemon, please.”

“But how do you know?” Tim looked at her curiously again. “How does anyone ever know? I was in love several times before Sara and still I don't know.”

“Well . . .?” And now Honor hesitated. She was thinking hard. She wanted to tell Timothy as clearly as possible so he would know. He would help her. “Things like dreams,” she said, “and all that and then that awful feeling of uncertainty and doubt and sickness and worry over it. People who say love's wonderful are
saps,
actually.”

“It sounds like the real thing. Don't think I'll be flip about this, dear sweet Honor. That's my trouble in talking about terrible things, that we're all so afraid we've reduced them to trivialities, at least as far as intonation goes, but this does sound real.”

“Yes, it is. He's a Jew, which complicates it all the more.”

“You mean in your having children?”

“Not so much that but that Jews are double haunted now. That they are so hypersensitive, if you get me?”

“He's being noble, you mean?”

“God no. He doesn't even know how I feel about him. He's just being noble about humanity in general, as if he were another Jesus.”

“One's enough, I always say. And you don't want to be another Mary waiting around for the Holy Ghost. Tell the man. Talk to him. Pull him off his high horse.”

“Dan knows, a little, not much. Dan says such things as, ‘Oh, one of my best friends at university is Jewish, you know . . .?' I sometimes think my brother has the soul of a big-time politician.”

“He is probably too intelligent for his own good.”

That's right, Honor thought. My brother's not like Jacob—Dan is cautious. He might seem adventurous but he's secretly afraid of pain and hunger and public shame. Dan's the good kind to marry, not the poor and tortured soul like Jacob, not the outcast.

“He went to Vienna with money for refugees,” Honor said. “He went disguised as a British art dealer; he did look quite the part. But that was four weeks ago. Now I'm afraid for him.”

Tim rubbed his eyes as if he were tired and asked: “Tell me, Honor. Does he love you?”

“Yes, he does,” she said, “but he doesn't
want
to love me. He hates me because . . .? Well, because I'm healthy and I'm clean and I haven't suffered. And because I wear nail polish. I asked him what difference that would make in the fate of all the poor people if I suffered, too, but there's no changing his mind. He hates me for who I am, hates himself, too, for loving me instead of one of them, his own, one of the refugees.”

She sighed now remembering the painful silence that would fall on Jacob's friends in a café when—earlier in the summer in Dijon—he'd take her with him to a meeting. The men would be crudely, horribly courteous, while the women laughed at her behind their hating eyes.

“But I like to be clean,” she said. “In a revolution or a war I'd get dirty, I'm sure, but for now I prefer to be clean.”

(You great full-bosomed beauty, Tim thought. You firm-bodied girl, keeping yourself, waiting to bear children, where will you find them? Will some desirous little soapbox revolutionist deign to impregnate you? Will you accept the caresses of an unwashed soldier who stinks? Where is the quiet home for you? Where can you hide the children you don't yet have? The best to hope for you, dear Honor, is the artful contraceptive passion of a neurasthenic professor. He will certainly use mouthwash and perhaps a dash of aftershave in the armpits. No, there is no danger here of your bearing great strong farmer sons. I congratulate you, Madame, on your sterility, on your fine thighs, your strong round breast, useless, meaningless, except for causing you your own secret pain.)

“Perhaps you should bring him here?” Tim asked. “We could fatten him up and he could see that though we take showers on a daily basis we still have some faint comprehension of the vast extent of human misery?”

Honor stared at Tim. “Oh
no
!” she said. “I never could, he'd be too uncomfortable. I don't want you to think he's a boor; he's cultured, his father was a doctor in Vienna and he does know how to use a fish fork. But months now of this work, his hiding and brooding in ghastly places and his not knowing where his family is, which is probably in the concentration camps—all this has made him queer. I don't wonder now that he hates me, resents me for my safe life. And he's gone now anyway. He's probably in a camp now too.”

Honor stopped. She stared at Tim but wasn't seeing him. “And what would my sister have to say about it?”

“How do you mean?”

“I don't know. Every damned thing I do or say—or even bloody
think
—I am always wondering, What will Sara say?”

Tim seemed troubled. “Hey!” he said. “Hey, that's not right—I want to hear all about this, but first . . . I'll be right back.”

He rose as easily as a cat, then bent down again and kissed Honor on the cheek. “I'll be back,” he said again.

Honor knew, though, that he would not be back. She watched him hurry out onto the terrace and listened to the footsteps as they hastened off toward the vineyard, and she didn't care that he'd run away. She imagined he'd be back later, that later he might help her.

How good to have talked to Tim about Jacob! And about Sara's influence on her, which seemed more important almost than the details of her own sad love.

Honor took that whitened milk glass off into the kitchen then came back and lay back upon the blue chaise in the corner of the living room, her eyes open but not seeing.

iv

As Daniel hurried across the living room, he ran one hand nervously over his hastily shaved and powdered face. He hoped Sara—if she was in the kitchen—would be standing with her back to him so she wouldn't notice that he'd cut himself shaving under his chin. She hated that sort of thing.

He smiled at the remembrance of why his razor had slipped only a few moments before, feeling again the same uproarious astonishment that he'd felt then to think that any woman as that kid in the hall could possibly exist. How did she manage, really, to breathe? Did she sweat and get tired and have measles and all the other human things? Had he really actually seen her or had it been a dream that he'd opened his door and she'd been standing there in the dim hall with her arms full of bundles and her eyes as big as apples?

“What are you grinning about?”

Sara was looking at her brother coldly, then she turned from the sink piled high with fresh salad greens. “Hand me the big wooden bowl from that shelf, will you?”

Daniel reached for the bowl and handed it to her with a flourish that kept his cut chin hidden from her.

“Good morning, Madame,” he said. “Or should I say good afternoon?”

“You're a lazy dog, Dan. But I suppose children do need their rest.”

“You cannot shame me, woman, by taunting me with the fact of my youth. I'm proud to be one of America's hopes.”

Sara, unsmiling, bent her head. Why do I keep up this kind of silly babbling? Daniel wondered irritably. Her face is thin and she looks tired.

He leaned against the cupboard and raised one eyebrow wearily. “Is there anything I can do to help? Do you want me to set the table?”

Sara's face broke into a warm smile. She shook her head, glanced out of the open window, her hands idle, her expression vague and dreamy. Daniel ate the heart of a little head of chicory as he watched her, wondering why he never in his life had asked, A penny for your thoughts, as he'd often wanted to. He tried to chew the crisp green nugget noiselessly but Sara heard him and looked at him, then moved resolutely to the spice shelf, her face grown resolute and alive again.

“Oh, Dan, hurry! Don't stand there. Honor and Joe Kelly are in the wine cellar. Go rescue them,
please
! Nor gave me her dying look when she went down, and you know how damned lazy she is unless she likes a person. Poor Joe's probably standing there freezing. Tim will be down in a minute. But you be barman until he comes.”

“
Very
well, Madame!” Dan plucked another lettuce heart deftly from the pile as he went toward the steps. Then he turned.

“Sara,” he asked softly, his face bright with sudden amusement, “did I really see that wee lass, sleekit whatchamadoodle?”

She looked blankly at him and then grinned. “You mean Susan Harper? I didn't know you were awake enough, there in the hall, to see anything at all. Yes. Why? Have you fallen for her?”

“Naturally,” Dan agreed blandly, but as he went down into the coldness of the cellars he frowned. Women were silly. Even Sara bored him, often. Why should they all talk so glibly of such things as the biological attraction between people? And anyway, how could he ever even dream of seeing anything really desirable in any female in the world, after this summer and Nan Temple?

He sighed and touched his cut chin gently. Damn Sara! He was positive that she had seen it and masked the disugst that he
knew such things made in her. Why was she so fussy? What the hell difference did it make whether a man cut his chin a little? Why be so damned finicky all the time?

He felt depressed and went glumly through the first rooms of the cellar without noticing the rows of richly colored fruit jars and the shelves of cool vegetables that usually pleased him.

As he came slouching through the low doorway to the wine cellar, Honor looked him over critically. She felt annoyed at Daniel, hated it when his face was still puffy with sleep, hated being stuck down in the cold with such a wooden young man as Joe Kelly.

If I were a
normal
woman, she suddenly thought, I'd be thrilled to the teeth to be standing in the same room as this All-American and a Rhodes scholar, who may be a scholar, all right, but is he a gentleman? He's too thick and too heavy and he looks like a lug. He's supposed to be brilliant, at least Tim and Sara said so the night before, but I don't see any signs of it.

The man bores me, Honor thought.

She watched coldly as her brother, resembling a giraffe, stood blinking under the thin light from the globe in the ceiling. Joe Kelly was nearly as tall as Daniel but he looked almost elephantine beside the stringy body of Daniel.

Why are people afraid of silence, she wondered, but I suppose I should say something? I suppose they're all lonely, and talking reassures everyone about being in communication with their fellow human beings, or something. She noticed that each of the young men looked increasingly uncomfortable as she stood there but that as soon as she'd formalized the meeting, telling everyone everyone's already-known name, things felt easier.

Daniel's voice was very deep, which meant he was feeling shy. Poor boy, and he had a nasty knick on his chin, as well. Thank goodness
she
was finally over being so terribly young and self-conscious!

“Pour yourself a drink,” she advised him gently.

Daniel looked at her half-empty glass disapprovingly, then at Kelly's.

“Did
she
do that?” Daniel asked him. “I hate women bartenders.”

“It's cold down here,” Honor said. “You have to drink to keep limber. You pour him one, Mr. Kelly, will you? I can see he's in a terrible state.”

“I am, thank you,” Daniel said. “Why, thank you, suh, but if you all will be that kind and obliging, a dash more bitters, suh. That's right. Perfect. To your very good health and to yours, Madame.”

Daniel clinked glasses punctiliously, then gulped back his drink and visibly shuddered.

“It's very bad to drink on an empty stomach,” Honor said. “Isn't that right, Mr. Kelly?”

“Would you mind not calling me that?”

She liked the soft murmur of the stranger's voice. It was too bad he was so thick, she thought. She smiled at him apathetically and watched his small warm brown eyes, which were both sad and as deep as a monkey's. It seemed queer to her suddenly that this great hulk was that little Susan's lover, and she astonished herself with this thought.

“What's wrong?” Joe Kelly asked. “Have I put my foot in it?” He looked at her confusedly, with his face flushing.

Honor started, then laughed. “About your name, you mean? All right, no more Mr. Kelly, but I don't know you well enough to call you anything else just yet.”

“She gets that from Sara,” Daniel explained. “Sara's funny about names and being familiar and all that.”

Honor frowned. How stupid of Dan to believe this was their sister's instruction.

“But of course,” she said enthusiastically. “You must call me Honor and I will call you Joe.”

To herself she added, Maybe, wondering why she should call this dull young man anything at all. She sipped her gin, shivered, listening inattentively to the hit-or-miss of the conversation between the two men standing with her, feeling herself to be a sullen child.

But where was Tim, would he ever finish what he'd begun saying to her that morning? Or would the coming of these two new visitors cause him to forget? And where was Susan?

Honor smiled to herself. She liked to look at people with clear outlines. She liked Susan with her delicate bones and her large teeth and eyes and her beautiful skin. When she'd first seen the tiny woman standing there in the living room with her bundles, she'd instinctively disliked her, because she seemed like an interruption. Now she'd come to like her. Indeed, she felt warm and
maternal
toward Susan, as she now recognized with amazement.

The only trouble with me, Honor thought as she sipped her gin, is that I need babies.

Then she heard Susan's hard little heels come tapping down the stairs and the sound of Tim, who was both talking and laughing.

By God, it's true, Dan cried out exultantly to himself. I did actually see this funny little thing! And he then stood looking down with pure delight at Susan, thinking he'd maybe never seen anything so cute. She wasn't exciting to him as she didn't really seem like a woman at all, more a type of delicious joke. He watched her talk and drink and pretend to be a grown-up and could feel his throat shaking with choked-off laughter.

He looked at his sister leaning back against the cold wall with her arms now folded tightly across her waist. Now there, he thought, was a fine big girl who someday, when she'd matured a little and had experienced more of life, would make some man a fine wife. She was, however, completely cold, of course. This supposed affair of hers with the crackpot student in Dijon was merely some fanciful idea. She really knew nothing at all of passion, Daniel insisted to himself. Girls were very different from men. Honor might be older than he was but—in experience—she was still a child when compared to him.

Kelly, given time, might be the kind who could teach Honor what was good for her—it was merely laughable to think he'd been lying in bed with the tiny woman who stood beside him. They were like a Saint Bernard and a Pekingese. Daniel swallowed hastily with a little snort of innocent mirth, taking the rest of his drink, then led the way without speaking up the stairs and into the kitchen.