“I don’t know. I think so.”
“It would be wonderful to love you and be loved by you.”
“I’m happy that you think so.”
Chapter 7
Toward morning she awoke on the sofa and lay in the precarious peace between sleeping and waking, while the ceiling receded, and the walls withdrew, and the room became spacious and vaulted and filled with sunlight and music and the scent of flowers. She sat erect on the edge of a hard bench of dark and polished oak in the posture of primness that she would never lose, and the sunlight slanted in through high Gothic windows of stained glass and touched with transparent flame the arrangements of lilies and carnations and white, white roses that were massed in woven baskets before a pulpit.
She was in church, and someone must have died and been buried, for it was only after a funeral, unless it was Easter, that so many flowers were displayed before the pulpit. Yes, yes, she was in church, and the music she heard was coming from the great pipes of the organ, which were concealed by the lattice behind the choir loft, and there was a beautiful man in a frock coat standing below among the flowers in the slanting sunlight. The music was something by Bach that she could never remember, and the man was her father, whom she could never forget.
The music stopped, and there was a long silence disturbed by no more than the merest whisper of movement, and then the man, the minister, her father, began to read from an enormous open Bible, and his rich voice, sonorous and penetrating, was like a golden resumption by the organ that had become quiet, and his head in the soft and shining light was massive and leonine, its tawny hair swept back like a flowing mane.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
She sat quietly on the oak bench beside her quiet mother. The beautiful words in the beautiful voice of the beautiful man seemed to reach her from a great distance and a remote time, from the Mount itself and the day they were spoken there. The adoration of the woman beside her, the wife and the mother and the worshiper, was a tangible emanation that could be felt like the air and smelled like the scent of the flowers. Ivy had learned long ago that her mother did not come to church for the same purpose that other people came. Other people came to worship God, but her mother came to worship the minister. This had at first seemed to Ivy a fearful defection, a flagrant incitement of God’s wrath, but she had later lost her fear with the loss of her belief, not in God, but in the power of her father to incite in God any responses whatever. Thereafter, in the presence of her mother’s adoration of her father, she felt only a terrible sense of inadequacy and isolation, as if she had been excluded from their love by the same passion that had created her.
She listened uneasily, with a feeling of shame, to the text her father read. She always felt, when he talked of meekness and humility, that she was a passive part of an enormous hypocrisy, for he was not meek, nor was he humble, and he was in fact the vainest man she had ever known or would ever know. Not only was he vain in petty matters, the effects of his voice and hair and every studied pose, but also in his utter inversion, a narcissistic absorption in himself which made impossible any awareness of the pain that others might suffer, or any genuine compassion if he had been aware.
He was not really a good man, but he gave the impression of goodness, nor was he a brilliant man, but he gave the impression of brilliance, and so he exploited the illusion of being what he was not, and he was extremely successful in the ministry of God and Church. There was in Ivy’s life from her earliest memory a succession of churches in a succession of towns, each of them better than the one before, and so she sat now in the last and best and listened in shame to the golden words of an ancient sermon, but then she was suddenly not sitting in church at all, but was standing before her father’s desk in his paneled study at home, and his voice continued from church to study without interruption, although it was saying in the latter place something entirely different in an entirely different tone.
“Ivy,” he said, “this is your Cousin Lila, whom we have been expecting. She has come to spend the summer with us. We hope she will like us so well that she will want to come every summer for a long time.”
Ivy turned to face her cousin, and her life, which had seemed until that moment to have a certain orderly purpose that could be traced in the past and anticipated for the future, had in an instant no purpose and no past and no future at all. There was only this moment of awakening at the end of an emptiness that had no meaning because it had no Lila. Lila was slim and shimmering, beginning and end, and she held out her hand in an aura of light. The hand was cool and dry and wonderfully soft, and its touch to Ivy was an excitement.
“Hello, Lila,” Ivy said. “I’m so happy you’ve come.”
“Thank you,” Lila said. “I’m sure I shall enjoy my visit very much.”
This was, Ivy thought, only a politeness, and she had a feeling that Lila had no certain expectation of enjoying herself, and that she had, in fact, come unwillingly to spend the summer. Ordinarily Ivy would not have been particularly concerned about the attitude of a guest in the house, especially a relative, but now she felt that it was desperately imperative that Lila, this shining cousin, should truly enjoy herself so much that she would never want to leave, or leaving, should long to return.
“I’m sure you girls will find a great deal to talk about,” the Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll ask you to excuse me now, as I have some work that must be done. I’ll see you at dinner, if not before.” Ivy and Lila left the study and the house and sat down together in a glider that had been placed under an elm tree on the side lawn. Lila was wearing a white silk dress without sleeves, and her skin above and below the silk was a tawny gold. Her rich, curling hair was black and full of shimmering light. Looking at her, Ivy felt all edges and projections, an awkward assembly of ugly bones. This wasn’t true, for she was almost as attractive in her own way as Lila was in hers, but Lila had already, as she would always have afterward, the unintended effect of making Ivy feel plain by comparison.
“How old are you?” Lila said.
“Sixteen,” Ivy said. “Almost seventeen.”
“Are you? I’m nineteen, almost twenty. I wanted to work this summer until time to return to school, but my father wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t want me at home either, however, which is why he packed me off out here.”
“I’m very glad he did. What kind of work did you plan to do?”
“Modeling. I was promised a place in a shop for the summer. It wasn’t a very good job, to tell the truth, but it would have been experience. I think I’d like modeling.”
“You’d be certain to be successful, you’re so lovely.”
“Do you think so? Thank you very much. You’re pretty too, you know.”
“I’m not really. You’re only being kind.”
“Kindness is not one of my virtues, and you shouldn’t be humble. A pretty girl who knows it, is prettier than a pretty girl who doesn’t know it. The knowledge does something for her. It lights her up inside.”
“Well, anyhow, I’m pleased that you think I’m pretty, whether I am or not. I wonder why we have never met before. Don’t you think it’s odd?”
“Not particularly. Why?”
“I mean, your father and my father being brothers and everything. I’ve never seen your father at all. My father hardly ever even mentions him.”
“I’ll bet he doesn’t.”