Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault

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СКАЧАТЬ she was in touch with the world now, because she sang to those who were involved and who comprehended the world. All around the earth, armies battled and cities were bombed, and she sang to the salesmen and the manufacturers of everything necessary to the prosecution of the war; she sang to the generals and the admirals and all the uniforms of the services of the country in a hotel on a hill in a great port city.

      She stood before the long, oval mirror, with imperious flicks of her fingers pressing the rubber ball in its golden net to spray cologne over her bare arms, watching her son, acting as an empress for him. Then she sprayed the air, high up toward the ceiling, pretending to wield an antiaircraft gun, and he laughed, still with his head back, his arched throat jumping. When she played with him during the day, he was often at odds with her, but in the evening, in this hour in which she felt no boredom because she was to leave him in a matter of minutes, she enjoyed the playing. During the day he was absorbed in his own self and she was his accomplice in that absorption, but now he became an accomplice in her self-absorption. When she pantomimed for him, acted silly for him, she felt that the audience later in the night was already gathered around her, enthralled by her entertaining her son.

      “Olga!” she called, “did you make the bed?” And to him, “Never mind, we’ll dump you in anyway.” She held out her arms to him. “Come on, then. You want to fly into bed? You feel like a bird? If the war’s still going on when you’re eighteen, you can learn to fly. You can fly a plane.”

      He leaped into her arms, causing her to stagger in her high heels. With his arms clasping her neck, a leg on each side of her waist, and his face looking back over her shoulder, he was carried into his room.

      “Up, up you go,” she said, boosting him onto the dresser top. From there he jumped, arms outspread, onto his bed.

      She threw back the covers, pushed and joked him under, and kissed him on the mouth when he was settled in. When he called to her while she was in her bedroom again, slipping her coat from the hanger, she called in turn to Olga to go and see what he wanted. With her coat slung over one shoulder, she passed his open door; Olga was sitting on the small chair, attempting a low, singsong voice that induced sleep. Vivian went down to the kitchen and stood drinking black coffee while she waited for the taxi horn, glancing at her dark red fingernails, turning her head to see the back of her knee just under the black dress, to see the high satin heel of her shoe.

       7

      The day that Roosevelt died she took her son for a walk to share the shock of the death with the people in the streets. She and her son went hand in hand along by the shops, and in every shop people were talking about the death, and the ones inside and the ones waiting to cross at corners all had a look of shock that—because it was not for anyone close, for father or brother or husband, for anyone they had spent a lifetime with, but for a great man—was touched or tainted with a sense of privilege: that they were granted a time beyond the life of the great man was like a sign of favor. The sorrow that she felt over the President’s death became an encompassing sorrow for the millions of others dying, the anonymous others dying, and her husband dying, and for everything that went on that was tragic and that was not known to her. But as little as she knew, she thought, her son’s knowledge was only a fraction of her own. He was not even aware of nations and their governments, of the year and the era, and much less of the irretrievability of the dead; but if he did not have the comprehension now, he would have it in a few years. In a few years he would have more than she had at this moment, a great man himself, perhaps, about whose death—when he was seventy or eighty, and she was already dead a long time—everybody would be informed by newspaper and by radio. They walked slowly because that pace was suited to the day of mourning and to her son’s small legs; yet, after a time, the slowness began to annoy her. There seemed to be too much imposed upon her in that slowness, the dependent age of the child and the tremendous death of one great man.

      In the evening, among the patrons of the lounge—among the men who, although they were subdued by the death, were nevertheless bathed and shaved and manicured and brilliantined and brushed and polished, and anticipative of pleasures that night with the women beside them or women waiting somewhere else—she gave herself up to the exciting paradox of the living opulently mourning the dead, and something more came into her consciousness of the magnitude of the world. At night in the bar with the changing patrons, the changing faces in the dimness moving in and out of her vision with more fluidity, more grace, because of the solemnity of the night, she realized, more than earlier with her son, the extent of a great man’s effect upon the world, the extent of the power he seemed to have even after his death, the extent of power over death that all these men seemed to have. She sang the president’s favorite song, and the pianist played it over and over again, pounding it out like a dirge while the solemn drinking went on at the tables.

      Her father came in with Adele and with the actress who was to have helped Paul into the movies, a woman small and delicate, with a broad, flat-boned, powdered face, her shoulders emerging tense and arrogant from her ample fur coat. With her was the actor Max Laurie, a tragic comedian, always in each of his movies in love with the hero’s woman. A civilian at the table next to them, whose shoulder was near to Max’s, leaned over between him and the actress, gazing with a pretense of idolatry from one to the other, amusing his two companions, two men, with his intrusion into the glamorous company.

      “It’s a sad day,” he said to Max. “You agree with me it’s a sad day?”

      “We agree,” said the actress.

      The man turned his head to look at the actress appealingly, a flicker of ridicule crossing his face. “Anybody who disagrees is a dog,” he said.

      “Nobody disagrees,” said the actress.

      “You ever met him?” the man asked. “They say he liked the company of actors and actresses. Banquets and entertainments, he liked that. Like a king, you can say, with his jesters. I thought you might have met him.”

      “Never did,” she said, turning her back on him, drawing up her fur coat that lay over her chair so that the high collar barred his face. Then she turned abruptly back, as she would have on the screen, while the man’s face was still surprised by the fur collar. “Are you envious because you won’t die great?” she asked him.

      “I’m living great, that’s all I want,” he said, and his companions laughed. “If you want to know another fact of life, because you don’t know all of them, it’s this: If you’re living great, the odds are you’ll die great. Like in the arms of some beautiful woman, right smack in her boodwah.” And while his companions laughed, he looked around at Max and at Vivian and at her father, and since they were not regarding him with annoyance, he looked again, boldly, into the face of the actress.

      “He was a wonderful man,” said Max, his rich voice conciliatory, simple. “I met him myself. A bunch of us were out making speeches for him, can’t remember if it was his first term or his twelfth.” He had a way of lowering his eyes when everybody laughed and glancing up with a smile that suspected, shyly, that he was lovable.

      “What was your name?” the man asked.

      “Max Laurie,” he said.

      “Is that Jewish or is it Scotch?” the man asked and everybody at both tables laughed. “He loved everybody, didn’t he?” he went on, striking their table with his palm. “Regardless of race, color, or creed. He had no discrimination—is that the word?” and overcome by his joke he bowed back over his own table, in silent tussle with his laughter.

      Vivian left the table to sing again, and when she returned, the actress had moved to the chair Vivian had vacated, and she sat down in the actress’s chair, nearer now to the intrusive man, and saw that he was observing her, his face that of an СКАЧАТЬ