“Damn that woman, damn that old fool!” Gerta stared about the room. “Always I say I’m not at home, I’ve gone away to the country, I’m sick, but there she sits, down there with the cook in the kitchen waiting to pounce on me.” The old woman raged about the room, hovered over the chair a moment to see if Stella listened. She snorted at the golden head, ripped into the closets, threw forth bundles of soiled linen. She gasped.
“You’re no better!” The comb slid up and down, the nurse trembled in the pile of linen.
Down in the kitchen sat Gerta’s friend, a new maid from several houses away who traveled across back courts and had paid a call, for no reason, carrying a bag of cold buns which she munched while trying to become friends with Gerta. Gerta was afraid and angry and could not understand this woman who, dressed like an imbecile girl, wore her thin hair plastered to the head, who had no name and talked forever. Gerta would not touch the buns.
“You’re no better. And don’t think,” the voice was a whisper, distorted and low, “that I don’t know what went on last night. Don’t forget that!”
Her father fussed with his collar, a rouge color filling in flat cheeks, her mother directed him from beneath the sheets, the crowd screamed when a manservant hung a faded flag from the very narrow balcony.
Stella turned, face shrouded in gold. “Get out. Take the clothes and leave.” The old woman raced from the room hauling the delicate silks and wrinkled trains of cloth, stumbled and ran, and the hairbrush sailed through the door over the mammoth baluster and fell in a gentle curve to crash many floors below on the hard marble. She turned back to the light. The insurrection passed lightly as the brush, she was bounded by the pale bed, the brightening walls, and summer. The cook howled for more butter from a stuttering girl, the visitor chopped a bun. There on the floor, there beside the small proper bed was the spot, now in shade, where she had held him in her lap.
Despite the dark brown symmetry and shadows of the buildings outside, the air was filled with a light green haze. It patiently and warmly lifted itself over the sagging branches, weakened beneath the load of fresh young leaves scattered on trees caught between the walls and sidewalk. The morning with its widening haze, voices wrangling over the fences, brushes and rags fighting with the furniture, tousled girls scraping and whispering on their knees, the house filled itself with boys and tremendous baskets of fruit, hauling in, it seemed, crowds of people out of the city, awoke with cries and attention. That was the moment to sit in the sun with soft hair falling about one’s waist, to doze and wake, nodding and smelling the sweet air, collecting thoughts for years to come or gone by, like an old woman hooded in black in a doorway.
A half-dozen birds, caught in the leaves, tried to make themselves heard and far down the hall she could hear Gerta talking to her father who was trying to dress. The air was like honey to wave beneath her nose; she called forth her own pleasure, plucked anywhere from the moving number of summer sensations. She waved her hand, even on the opening day of war, the public’s day, and a gentle lusty swell crowded her head, shoved the half-dozen murmuring birds out of reach. In winter, the snow fell where she wished, in great dull even flakes, in smooth slightly purple walls where far in perspective she was held like a candle, warm and bright. In summer, alone, it was she that breathed the idea of naked moonlight swimming — divers together in the phosphorescent breakers, leaves as clothes on the silver beach — she that breathed the idea of brownness, smoothness into every day of June, July, August, who created hair over the shoulder and pollen in the air.
Her mother, a long mound beneath the sheets, had lost all this, terribly aged with a cold pallor, strong and indolent, unhappy in the oppressive heat. The mother lay in bed day after day, the spring, summer, years dragging by, with only her head two hands long above the sheets, her eyes fastened together, motionless until some forgotten whim, surge of strength, drove her from the bed. And in that hour she would shop. When she shopped, she ventured on the streets in gowns from another date, walked in steady steps, and took Stella along. She never liked the world she saw and her old husband never knew she was out of the house.
A hundred strokes, a hundred and five, the hair quivered in the space of gold; she changed hands, her skin as soft as the back of a feather. Her brothers, a pair of twins, fifteen-year-old soldiers dressed in stiff academy blue and trimmed in brass, walked past her open door, eyes ahead, arms in parallel motion, and she heard their miniature spurs clanking down the wide stairs. The boys never saw their parents, since the old man and woman had been the age of deaf grandparents at the time of the brothers’ remarkable conception. The brothers ate and lived alone. The jingling sound hung in her ears, one of the birds had become audible, and she thought of a parakeet with long sharp nails bathing in a blue pond where the green grass swayed and the sun was orange. There was no shock in the day, but the same smothered joy crept up with the morning’s trade and old flags that were unfurling along the guarded streets.
“Breakfast, breakfast!” Gerta called, wearied and harassed, from the center of the first floor lobby, lips drawn down, clutching a fist of silver, calling to wake the whole house into an even greater activity. The shabby crowd was growing restless, howling with round faces scrubbed cheery and proud, while inside the high walls the elaborate process of serving the isolated meal began. Twenty thousand feet in the sky, a sheet of wind flashed over the city cold and thin, while below, warm air rolled over the lake in the park, and swans opened their necks and damp feathers, bumping softly together in stiff confusion.
The old man, always seated first at the table, held his head high and rigid so that it trembled, pure white eyes staring and blinking from a skull like a bird’s, the whole area behind the thin tissue eaten away and lost. Sometimes he ate his melon with the fork, or spoon, or knife, or pushed it with his pointed elbow so that it fell to the floor, pits and meat splashing over his black curled-up shoes. The moustache fell to his high collar in two soft sweeping strands of pale gold, his long legs were a mass of black veins. His face, narrow and long, was covered with bark and was deep scarlet, and clots of blood formed just under the glaze of fine hair; and he would fall, slipping and breaking in every part at least once a week. But each time the clots would dissolve and be churned away, down the grass-smelling passages, and he would recover.
The table was so short, with the twelve leaves piled out of sight in dust, that she could almost smell his breath, with scarcely a bare foot of candelabra, bowls, tongs, green stems and silver trays between them. When she sat down, his head, like a brittle piece of pastry, tried to swim over the breakfast things, searching as every morning, but was blocked by a twisted maze of fern in an azure vase and a pyramid of butter patties topped with dark cherries. “Stool,” he said in a high voice because he could no longer pronounce her name. They sat close together in the middle of the long dining room, the man with his ninety years and the young girl with her peaches, while overhead, set in one of the domes, a large clock struck eleven. Gerta hurried in and out pushing a little cart laden with napkins, rolls, knives, sauces of all kinds and pans of under-done, clear boiled eggs. “Poor man,” she said, dabbing at a long run of fresh egg water on his tunic, turning now and then a look of wrath on Stella as if the poor girl herself had shaken his freckled hand and made the long translucent string slide off onto his chest. Stella frowned back, scattering crumbs over the little table and knocking the goblet so that a mouthful of water sizzled on the coffee urn.