“Well, if you must know,” Aunt Lora said. “—there was evidence he’d been drinking. They’d been drinking. At the Club.”
Sybil could not have been more shocked had Aunt Lora reached over and pinched the back of her hand. “Drinking—?” She had never heard this part of the story before.
Aunt Lora continued, grimly, “But not enough, probably, to have made a difference.” Again she paused. She was not looking at Sybil. “Probably.”
Sybil, stunned, could not think of anything further to say, or to ask.
Aunt Lora was on her feet, pacing. Her close-cropped hair was disheveled and her manner fiercely contentious, as if she were arguing her case before an invisible audience as Sybil looked on. “What fools! I tried to tell her! ‘Popular’ couple — ‘attractive’ couple — lots of friends — too many friends! That Goddamned Champlain Club, where everyone drank too much! All that money, and privilege! And what good did it do! She — Melanie — so proud of being asked to join — proud of marrying him — throwing her life away! That’s what it came to, in the end. I’d warned her it was dangerous — playing with fire — but would she listen? Would either of them listen? To Lora? — to me? When you’re that age, so ignorant, you think you will live forever — you can throw your life away—”
Sybil felt ill, suddenly. She walked swiftly out of the room, shut the door to her own room, stood in the dark, beginning to cry.
So that was it, the secret. The tawdry little secret — drinking, drunkenness — behind the “tragedy.”
With characteristic tact, Aunt Lora did not knock on Sybil’s door, but left her alone for the remainder of the night.
Only after Sybil was in bed, and the house darkened, did she realize she’d forgotten to tell her aunt about Mr. Starr — he’d slipped her mind entirely. And the money he’d pressed into her hand, now in her bureau drawer, rolled up neatly beneath her underwear, as if hidden...
Sybil thought, guiltily, I can tell her tomorrow.
5. The Hearse
Crouched in front of Sybil Blake, eagerly sketching her likeness, Mr. Starr was saying, in a quick, rapturous voice, “Yes, yes, like that! — yes! Your face uplifted to the sun like a blossoming flower! Just so!” And: “There are only two or three eternal questions, Blake, which, like the surf, repeat themselves endlessly: ‘Why are we here?’ — ‘Where have we come from, and where are we going?’ — ‘Is there purpose to the Universe, or merely chance?’ These questions the artist seems to express in the images he knows.” And: “Dear child, I wish you would tell me about yourself. Just a little!”
As if, in the night, some changes had come upon her, some new resolve, Sybil had fewer misgivings about modeling for Mr. Starr this afternoon. It was as if they knew each other well, somehow: Sybil was reasonably certain that Mr. Starr was not a sexual pervert, nor even a madman of a more conventional sort; she’d glimpsed his sketches of her, which were fussy, overworked, and smudged, but not bad as likenesses. The man’s murmurous chatter was comforting in a way, hypnotic as the surf, no longer quite so embarrassing — for he talked, most of the time, not with her but at her, and there was no need to reply. In a way, Mr. Starr reminded Sybil of her Aunt Lora, when she launched into one of her comical anecdotes about the Glencoe Medical Center. Aunt Lora was more entertaining than Mr. Starr, but Mr. Starr was more idealistic.
His optimism was simpleminded, maybe. But it was optimistic.
For this second modeling session, Mr. Starr had taken Sybil to a corner of the park where they were unlikely to be disturbed. He’d asked her to remove her headband, and to sit on a bench with her head dropping back, her eyes partly shut, her face uplifted to the sun — an uncomfortable pose at first, until, lulled by the crashing surf below, and Mr. Starr’s monologue, Sybil began to feel oddly peaceful, floating.
Yes, in the night some change had come upon her. She could not comprehend its dimensions, nor even its tone. She’d fallen asleep crying bitterly but had awakened feeling — what? Vulnerable, somehow. And wanting to be so. Uplifted. Like a blossoming flower.
That morning, Sybil had forgotten another time to tell her Aunt Lora about Mr. Starr, and the money she was making — such a generous amount, and for so little effort! She shrank from considering how her aunt might respond, for her aunt was mistrustful of strangers, and particularly of men... Sybil reasoned that, when she did tell Aunt Lora, that evening, or tomorrow morning, she would make her understand that there was something kindly and trusting and almost childlike about Mr. Starr. You could laugh at him, but laughter was somehow inappropriate.
As if, though middle-aged, he had been away somewhere, sequestered, protected, out of the adult world. Innocent and, himself, vulnerable.
Today too he’d eagerly offered to pay Sybil in advance for modeling, and, another time, Sybil had declined. She would not have wanted to tell Mr. Starr that, were she paid in advance, she might be tempted to cut the session even shorter than otherwise.
Mr. Starr was saying, hesitantly, “Blake? — can you tell me about—” and here he paused, as if drawing a random, inspired notion out of nowhere “—your mother?”
Sybil hadn’t been paying close attention to Mr. Starr. Now she opened her eyes and looked directly at him.
Mr. Starr was perhaps not so old as she’d originally thought, nor as old as he behaved. His face was a handsome face, but oddly roughened — the skin like sandpaper. Very sallow, sickly pale. A faint scar on his forehead above his left eye, the shape of a fish hook, or a question mark. Or was it a birthmark? — or, even less romantically, some sort of skin blemish? Maybe his roughened, pitted skin was the result of teenaged acne, nothing more.
His tentative smile bared chunky damp teeth.
Today Mr. Starr was bareheaded, and his thin, fine, uncannily silver hair was stirred by the wind. He wore plain, nondescript clothes, a shirt too large for him, a khaki-colored jacket or smock with rolled-up sleeves. At close range, Sybil could see his eyes through the tinted lenses of his glasses: they were small, deep-set, intelligent, glistening. The skin beneath was pouched and shadowed, as if bruised.
Sybil shivered, peering so directly into Mr. Starr’s eyes. As into another’s soul, when she was unprepared.
Sybil swallowed, and said, slowly, “My mother is... not living.”
A curious way of speaking! — for why not say, candidly, in normal usage, My mother is dead.
For a long painful moment Sybil’s words hovered in the air between them; as if Mr. Starr, discountenanced by his own blunder, seemed not to want to hear.
He said, quickly, apologetically, “Oh — I see. I’m sorry.”
Sybil had been posing in the sun, warmly mesmerized by the sun, the surf, Mr. Starr’s voice, and now, as if wakened from a sleep of which she had not been conscious, she felt as if she’d been touched — prodded into wakefulness. She saw, upside-down, the fussy smudged sketch Mr. Starr had been doing of her, saw his charcoal stick poised above the stiff white paper in an attitude of chagrin. She laughed, and wiped at her eyes, and said, “It happened a long time ago. I never think of it, really.”
Mr. Starr’s expression was wary, complex. He asked, “And so — do you — live with your — father?” The words seemed oddly forced.
“No, I don’t. And I don’t want to talk about this any more, Mr. Starr, if it’s all right with you.”