As far as she could tell, no one had heard Charles’s insane accusations. In one way it was a pity. Whenever he acted up like this, Charles was pretty careful to let no one hear him except her, so that people were fooled into believing that he was an extremely amiable man. The servants adored him (naturally — he made no demands on them); Laura and her mother thought he was wonderful (he was, with them); and his friends were continually telling her how lucky she was (lucky to be alive).
It was extraordinary how he managed never to give himself away to anyone else but her. She even felt a certain detached admiration for him in this respect, but it was tempered by a deep uneasiness: Is there something about me that brings out all this venom, could it be me?
She opened the door and stepped into the hall. Laura was standing at the head of the stairs and something about her posture indicated that she’d been standing there a long time, deliberately listening. She was wearing her school clothes, a red, baggy sweater and a plaid skirt, and she had a notebook under her arm.
“I just got home,” she said. “I was coming up the steps and I heard Charley shouting. I just wondered.” She glanced away, hugging the notebook, balancing her weight on the edges of the soles of her saddle shoes. She was thin and dark, with straight thick brows and narrow eyes that had a disconcerting I-know-and-you-know-that-I-know expression. She practiced this expression in front of a mirror every morning when she combed her hair, and it was quite effective. “I just happened to hear him.”
“Stand properly; you’ll ruin your shoes.”
“Are we going away?”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
“I heard — I just wondered.”
“Of course we’re not going away. Charles is ill, he’s under a strain and sometimes he gets peculiar ideas.”
“Can I go in and see him?”
“No,” Martha said sharply. “He doesn’t want to see anyone. And stand properly.”
“The gym teacher said it was good for you to stand on the sides of your soles. It strengthens the arches.”
“You may tell the gym teacher for me that it also ruins the shoes.”
“Well, you can always buy new shoes but you can’t buy new arches.”
“You’re getting too fresh,” Martha said.
In her own bathroom she washed her wound and poured alcohol over it. The bite wasn’t deep but she hoped it was deep enough to leave a scar. Scars were useful weapons.
When she returned to the hall Brown was there with Laura. Brown jumped when he heard her step.
“Mr. Pearson has had another bad spell,” Martha said. “I’m going to phone the doctor.”
Unhurriedly she descended the steps.
Laura and Brown exchanged glances.
“She’s got a bandage on her hand,” Laura said casually. “See it?”
“No.”
“I bet they had a fight.”
“You’re a crazy kid,” Brown said, frowning.
“As a matter of fact, I heard them. I heard every single word. I could tell, if I felt like it. I will if you’ll let me have your car on Saturday.”
“You nearly wrecked it last time.”
“It wasn’t my fault. I told you all about it.”
“Beat it,” he said roughly.
“It’s lucky I’m a liberal or I’d have you fired for the way you talk to me when nobody else is around.”
“Try it, canarylegs.”
A flush spread up along her neck to her cheeks. “I couldn’t be bothered. We’ll be moving out one of these days anyway.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Wait and see.”
“I’ve been waiting.”
“You’re not the only one.” She intensified her knowing expression. “I never liked it here much anyway. It’s disgusting to keep a butler in this day and age.”
She saw Brown’s eyes narrow in anger and she turned with an air of victory and walked away.
“One of these days I’m going to pin your ears back,” Brown called after her. “If I thought they’d stop flapping long enough for me to catch hold of them.”
“Oh, really?”
She balanced her notebook on top of her head to improve her posture and glided solemnly down the hall.
Once inside her bedroom (done in red plaid wallpaper that she’d picked out herself) she took up her position at the vanity mirror. She spent a good deal of time here, trying to decide what she looked like. Sometimes she looked quite beautiful, a subtle haunting beauty that brought gentle tears to her own eyes, and then she would decide to be an actress. But other times she looked perfectly awful and she visualized herself in cap and gown, receiving her Ph.D. in front of an admiring throng: “She’s not pretty, no, but what a mind the girl has, one of the truly great minds of the century!”
Today she had a pimple on her chin and another beside her left ear, and she had just gotten a C in Lit. I, so she decided to become a psychologist. She narrowed her eyes and looked like a psychologist.
There, at least that was settled. She would be a psychologist, but for a while she’d keep it a secret. Last winter she had made the mistake of telling Charley she intended to become a missionary. Charley had laughed and laughed. Not two weeks after that she discovered that her inspiration, an aging Youth Leader from the Y.M.C.A., had a wife and two children and was not going to Darkest Africa or Darkest India but merely to another Y.M.C.A. A truly terrible blow, and she rallied from it only because she had to for the mid-winter exams.
Everything happens to me, thought the psychologist. Life is just one pitfall after another. One horrible, shattering disillusionment followed by another horrible shattering disillusionment.
But always she rallied, she survived. To look at her no one would ever dream what she had been through. There wasn’t a wrinkle in her face (pimples didn’t count, they could happen to anybody), and her forehead was as smooth and serene as a mountain lake. Life had beaten her but she came up smiling. She smiled, at the same time keeping her eyes narrowed so that she appeared to be squinting in strong sunlight.
Most infelicitous, she thought, frowning. A most infelicitous physiognomy.
She rearranged the mirrors to examine her profile. Her nose was nice, but the pimple beside her ear spoiled everything. It was no ordinary pimple, it was huge, it glowed, it was phosphorescent. She couldn’t bear it, she wished she were dead.
But, as usual, she rallied. She coated her face liberally with pancake makeup. It made smiling difficult, but who wanted to smile anyway? What was there to smile about? Oh, the horror, the disillusionment! Oh, the C in Lit., the Y.M.C.A. and the phosphorescent pimple!
My life is ashes, she thought. Just plain ashes.
Though Laura’s adolescent mind vacillated from one extreme to another, in her judgments and decisions about herself, she showed considerable maturity in judging other people. Nothing that went on between Charles and Martha escaped her, and years ago she had decided that she would never get married. Charles was all right when Martha wasn’t around. The fault must, therefore, lie in marriage itself. She remembered that her father and mother had been happy together, but she wondered now if it hadn’t been all a pretence for her sake. Perhaps her mother and father had felt exactly as Charles and Martha felt about each other but were better able to conceal it. It was a disturbing thought, and it worried her.
Sometimes when she was in bed at night all her worries would bunch themselves together and lie on her heart, heavy as lead. She had a recurring dream, a bad, shameful dream, in which Martha died and she herself was married to Charles. These dreams had begun when she was fourteen and whenever she had one she couldn’t bear to talk to Charles for days afterward. She would sit around, mute and stubborn.