“Was, is,” Loring repeated. “Why the change in tense?”
“I made a mistake,” Alice said hoarsely. “He is engaged to her. It was a slip of the tongue.”
“All right.” He stopped speaking, laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes, waiting.
“All right,” Alice said finally. “He intends to marry her but she doesn’t intend to marry him. She’s kept him waiting now for two years. He lives with us right at the house, waiting to marry her. They were engaged at the time of the accident.”
She spoke slowly as if she had projected herself into the past and was feeling her way along among the ghosts.
“When Kelsey came home from the hospital she knew that she could never be cured, that she was going to be blind for the rest of her life. She didn’t keep Philip waiting until she knew — she knew already. She never planned on or hoped for seeing again. There is none of that in Kelsey, no self-deception, no softening of blows for herself.” She paused again, feeling her way back to the present. “So Philip is waiting. They never even talk about the marriage any more, she gives no reason, nothing is brought into the open. A few months ago she stopped wearing his ring. She said she lost it. Later on I had to hire a new maid. Her name is Ida. About two weeks after Ida came she was wearing the ring, on her little finger. Kelsey had given it to her.”
“Strange,” Loring said.
“No one else has noticed it and I haven’t talked to Kelsey about it, but she’s waiting for me to bring the subject up. I can tell it in the way she looks at me, half-sly, half-challenging.” She drew in her breath. “She’s through with Philip. She hates him, I think, but she won’t let him go.”
He was writing rapidly again, and the sight of him, the realization that he was writing down what she said shocked her.
She said stiffly, “I wish you wouldn’t write this down.”
“Why not?” He smiled dryly. “Isn’t it true?”
“Of course it’s true,” she said harshly. “Why did you say that? Did you think I’d go to all this trouble, suffer this indignity, to tell you a pack of lies?”
He was young and inexperienced enough to resent her tone and the word “indignity,” but he hung on to his smile. He recognized the natural antagonism between this girl and himself.
It’s because, Loring thought, we’re close in age and she’s the kind of girl who girds herself for the battle of the sexes, automatically, instinctively, smelling the battle from miles away. He knew by just looking at her that she bathed and changed all her clothes once or twice a day, that she applied her lipstick carefully and lightly so it wouldn’t be noticed, that she would wrinkle her nose or even faint if she had to ride on a Harbord Street trolley on a rainy day. The smell and touch of human beings would be too much for her. He began to wonder about her parents and the kind of life they had lived.
He said abruptly, “How old is your father?”
“Fifty-three,” she said. “Do you intend to keep on asking me questions or shall I just talk?”
“Go on and talk.”
“It wasn’t fair to tell you about Kelsey first, giving her to you without her context. We are... we are all of us queer, I suppose, except Johnny. You’ve known families where the unspoken word is stronger than the spoken word, where everything that happens is drawn out into tenuous wisps, half-thoughts, shadow feelings... You know?”
“Inverted,” Loring said. “Turned in.”
She repeated the word. “Turned in, toward ourselves and toward each other.” She smiled self-consciously. “There is always a great deal of atmosphere around us. If we have something for lunch that Kelsey doesn’t like the dining room is charged with electricity. Sounds uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”
He smiled at her. “It does.”
“Only Johnny isn’t like that. He feels the atmosphere but it merely puzzles him. He is very simple-minded.”
“Simple-minded might mean anything.”
“He’s not a moron,” she said sharply. “I meant, it’s easy to figure out his reactions.”
“Simple, then.”
“Yes. I imagine my father was, too, a long time ago. He and my mother didn’t like — hated each other.”
He nodded, as if an idea of his had been confirmed. “The children of mismated marriages are often over-perceptive. They become accustomed to interpreting small signs of tension. Because they dread quarrels they are quick to see the signs.”
“There were no quarrels.”
Loring was interested in her quick denial. She didn’t mind his knowing her family was queer, neurotic. Neuroses occurred in the best of families, quarrels were merely common.
The implication of anything as common as quarrels changed her voice and her words. Her voice throbbed with culture and she chose her language more carefully, pausing to find the striking word, the telling phrase.
“No quarrels,” she said, “simply atmosphere, black, fat clouds of it. They were in love with each other in the beginning. He did actually marry her for love, but she was rich, you see, she was never quite sure. Father rarely talks about it, but he told me years ago, before she died, that it was all right to marry a wealthy woman for her wealth but not for love. It gave her too much power over you, he said, you became doubly sensitive. Then, too, she was ill most of her life. She had a soft, sick voice, and her bones were small and brittle but threaded with iron. She hated living, but I think she hated dying even more. She couldn’t bear to die leaving him alive. I am telling you about her so you will understand about Kelsey.”
Her speech had a queer rhythm which Loring found disturbing. It was almost, he thought, as though the rhythm was a deliberate method of emphasizing and explaining her words, like an invisible footnote: We are all queer, we even talk queerly, op. cit., ibid.
“When she died we were sick with relief, sorry, too, but mostly relieved, thinking we were free of her. But we weren’t because she’s back again, in Kelsey. Nothing has changed, not even the money. She left it all for Kelsey, every cent of it. We live in Kelsey’s house and eat Kelsey’s food.”
“Is that why you stay?”
“For free board and room?” she said. “No, it’s not as simple as that. We’re all capable of supporting ourselves. Johnny has a job, Philip is a pianist, and I... I could at least be a housekeeper. It’s what I am now. No, we don’t stay for economic reasons, we stay because we can’t leave. She’s blind, we can’t walk out on her.”
“Conscience?”
“If you must have a label,” she said shortly, “call it conscience.”
“Yet none of you had anything to do with the accident?”
“No. She was driving herself. It was her fault. She can’t blame any of us.”
“Does she?”
“No, not in words, but in attitude. She’s bitter and hostile. She seems to like nobody but Ida.”
“The maid who wears the ring?”
“Yes. She makes us feel that we are responsible for her blindness — guilty and ashamed. But none of us has done anything to be ashamed of.”
She paused, waiting for his reassurance, “Of course not. Of course you haven’t.”
He said nothing and she lowered her eyes. “I have done nothing I’m ashamed of — until now, until I came here. I shouldn’t have come. She’s not insane, she’s twisted. I thought you could help her and us too. I shouldn’t have come here. Could I just pay you and walk out?”
“You could,” Loring said. “Waste of money, though. Her money. I suppose you did come here about your sister and not about yourself?”
“Myself?”
“It occurred to me,” he said dryly. “I get people — girls like you especially — who simply come here to talk to me. Ingrown, lonely women who don’t need a psychiatrist, who only need someone who’ll listen to them. Sometimes they come twice a year and tell me about their jobs and their lives and their families. Sometimes they’re in love and are radiant or weepy, depending on the lover. But most of the time nothing at all has happened to them between visits and they go back into the past and repeat what they’ve told me before, how at the age of four Uncle Charley came for a visit from Montana and how many valentines they received in the fourth grade... The lonely ladies. I can’t do anything about them. That will be five dollars, please. I hope your sister got her money’s worth.”