Strange Sisters

Chapter 6

In the course of inevitable events, hardly conscious of her movement at the time, she moved from the booth to the bar. From Sidecars to rye. It was entirely logical that she did so, perfectly in keeping with the character of her life. She was always moving, it seemed, from one thing to another, from landmark to landmark, and though she could never look forward to see the way she was going, having no miraculous power to divine the future, she could look back afterward from the place of her arrival to the point of her departure and comprehend in a hazy way their relationship to her ultimate end. From a woman buried in lilies to Stella to Vera to Jacqueline. From Renowski to Brunn. From booth and brandy to bar and rye.

Now where? To what now? Why, to justice, of course. It was really so logical, so beautifully logical, just like mathematics, just like two plus two equals four. They’re taking him to justice for the color of his hair. Gender again. The damned, confusing gender. Her hair. The nameless and abominable color of her hair.

For the most part, now, she remained in the strange slough of emotional exhaustion, of quiet acceptance of what had gone before and resignation to what would follow, but now and then, pricked by a shard of her shattered hope, she would rise to a higher strata of rebellion and terror, and then she would lift her whisky glass and find it empty and rap with it on the bar for the attention of the bartender. The bartender would bring the bottle and look at her unfocused eyes and would think, Oh, God, another lousy lush, another drunken tramp, but he would pour the rye with a resignation equal to her own, though his was compelled by a shallower despair.

It was an antic world. The world moved, and everything in it moved. At first the movement was random and uncoordinated, everything acting independently, but pretty soon there was unison of speed and direction, and the world was a giant, multi-colored spiral in which there was no distinction of parts. She stood at the large end of the spiral and looked down the diminishing hollow interior created by the law of centrifugal action, and far, far off, almost at the small end of the spiral, which was the end of everything, was the small, receding figure of Jacqueline. Jacqueline was leaving her. Jacqueline would never come back. Even as she stood looking down the whirling spiral, the tiny figure was absorbed by emptiness and there was no one there. She tried to cry out, stricken by a terrible loneliness and desolation, but she could make no sound. She felt, of a sudden, a great self-pity. Tears formed on the lower lashes of her eyes and crept without sound down her thin face.

The bartender saw the tears and thought bitterly, Oh, God, she’s going to bawl. All I need to make it a perfect day is a maudlin lush.

His fear was short-lived. She was not going to cry. She thought of Stella, and the tears dried on her cheeks. How could she have forgotten Stella? How could she have forgotten that all things come in the end to their beginning, come by the “curvature of time” and space to the point of origin? Stella was the beginning. It was natural that she should return to Stella now in the end, or the threatened end, and Stella would fix everything. Stella would look at her with a secret laughter in her eyes, and the overflow of the laughter would run through her voice, and life would at once be sweetened and reduced to simplicity. One drink, one drink more, and then back to Stella. Jacqueline had failed her, but Stella would not.

Then she remembered that Stella was dead.

She remembered everything.

She was in her own room in Stella’s house, for she had by that time moved back into a room of her own, and it was very late, almost midnight, and Stella was out with one of her many men. Actually, however, there weren’t so many men now. They had thinned out recently, leaving this one, the one she was out with now, in almost full possession of the field. Not that Stella was any the less attractive. She seemed not to age at all, to lose none of the vibrance and sheen of her loveliness. It was merely that there was something special about this man, and Stella responded to him with a particular intensity that was obvious and discouraging to competitors. The night of his first appearance at the house, after he was gone, she had come upstairs and into Kathy’s room, and she had sat on the edge of Kathy’s bed with the moonlight falling through die open window and across the lower part of her body and her hands folded in her lap in a posture of unusual quietude. Her voice, issuing from upper shadow, embodied wonder and speculation.

“He’s like Lonnie,” she said, “and I never thought to find the like of Lonnie on this earth. His voice, his eyes, the way his lips draw back from his teeth when he smiles. More than all this, though, it’s the way he looks at things. At life, I mean. I’m afraid he’s not very good, not good in the way people expect a man to be good, and neither was Lonnie. Maybe I have an affinity to men who are not very good. If I fall in love with this man, he will make me very happy, and through no fault of his own he will probably make me very unhappy, and that will be like Lonnie, too.”

Lying in darkness, out of the moonlight, Kathy said nothing. She lay there and suffered and said nothing, and after a while Stella got up and went away.

So here was danger, real danger, an invasion of the center of life. In the face of it, Kathy felt impotent, without weapons to defend her position or to repel the invader, and she was sustained only by a virulent, corrosive hatred of the man who was the threat. His name was Felix Brannon, and he was, in fact, a man whom many women might have loved. He was not tall, exceeding Stella’s height by less than an inch when she was in high heels, but there was a lean grace in his body that made him seem taller than he was, an easy coordination of flat muscles. He wore suits that were conservative in cut and pattern, and there was in his personality something restrained and modulated, something held back, an overt subjection to law or lawless elements. His hair was a shade lighter than copper, cut very short, almost cropped. His skin was dark, retaining faintly the mark of shallow pocks, but his eyes were, rather startlingly, pale and brilliant blue. He had money, apparently a great deal of it that came from sources he never mentioned, and he drove down from the city, over a hundred miles north, in a black Cadillac trimmed with much glittering chrome. How he and Stella had met was something Kathy never learned. Nor did she care, now that the meeting had occurred and could not be prevented. Now she was Interested only in how they might part, and she was disturbed, actually made ill, by the pervasive fear that they would not part at all.

In her room, she sat and waited for them to return.

The room was dark, and she sat in a chair by the window and looked out into the soft night. She was seventeen then, and she had just finished high school, and it was a night when a pretty girl of seventeen who had just finished high school should have had in her mind something far different from the aberrant fear and corrosive hatred that were in hers. On the trellis below her window, the Paul’s Scarlet roses, flowers of brief life, still bloomed like bright blood in the darkness. On the air that stirred came the sigh, the restless rustling of young leaves. At a distance, someone laughed.

A car turned the corner and came down the street along the curb. From her position at the window, she followed its progress until her span of vision was cut off by the house. Out front, a powerful engine revved briefly and died. She heard laughter and language and footsteps and a key in the door. The center of life was in peril.

The Negro woman had long ago quit staying nights, Kathy being old enough to stay alone, and now there would be no intervening sound of her departure before the other familiar sounds of a man and woman entertaining themselves. Kathy sat and waited for them to begin, but tonight they didn’t. Instead there was the sound of Stella on the stairs and in the hall, of her voice, light and errant and a little intoxicated, in the doorway to the room.

“Kathy?”

“Yes. I’m here, Stella.”

“Have you been in bed?”

“No.”

“Are you dressed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’d like you to come down for a minute, darling.”

“I don’t want to come down, Stella.”

Stella came into the room behind the significant scent and stood behind Kathy’s chair. “Why not? Only for a minute. Won’t you do such a small thing for me?”

“I’m sorry, Stella. I don’t feel well. I have a headache.”

This was true enough. She frequently had headaches, and the frequency had increased since the appearance of Felix Brannon. But she would have claimed the headache even if there had been none.

Stella said, “I’m sorry you have a headache, darling, but this time I’m going to insist. Just this once, just for a minute. If it weren’t so important to me, I wouldn’t have asked.”

The peril came closer, breathed its cold breath into her heart. She stood up and said, “All right, Stella. If you insist.”

They went out into the hall and down into the big living room where Felix Brannon stood with his legs apart and his burnished, handsome head cocked a little to one side as he watched them approach. He was holding a highball in one hand. He lifted the glass and drank and set the glass down on a table at the end of the sofa. He smiled a little, watching them.

Kathy kept her eyes averted. She refused to look at him. She thought that if she looked at him she would be deathly sick. She looked instead at the radio-phonograph beyond his shoulder.

“Hello, Kathy,” Felix Brannon said.

“Hello, Mr. Brannon.”

“Oh, come, now. Skip the formality. Just call me Felix.”

“Felix, then.”

“As a matter of fact, there’s another name you can call me after tonight.”

The peril was monstrous now, swollen and terrible and panting. Her heart was a block of ice. She continued to look at the radio-phonograph and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Beside her, Stella laughed her errant, intoxicated laugh and put an arm around her shoulders. “Darling, Felix is asking you to accept him as a father. Or would it be uncle? Anyhow, it’s a kind of secondary proposal, and you’re supposed to feel flattered. You’re supposed to say yes, thank you, and let him kiss your cheek.”

He picked up his cue and stepped toward her, and it was a repetition, only worse, of the evening incident by the muddy creek in the shadows of scrub timber. She was aware of sudden darkness and frenzy and violent confusion of sound and action, and when the proximate items of earth sorted and fixed themselves in the return of sanity, her wrists were captured in his strong fingers and she was staring up into glittering pale eyes in a stony, closed face.

Stella’s voice sliced between them. “Kathy! For God’s sake, Kathy, what’s the matter with you?”

She tugged fiercely against his restraint, and he released her suddenly. She stumbled back, regained her balance, and ran out of the room and upstairs. On her bed, she lay face downward, her body racked by dry, convulsive sobs. The sobs tore her throat, detonated against her ear drums. She didn’t hear Stella come after her into the room, was not conscious of her until she felt the touch of fingers on her head. She remained in the position into which she had thrown herself, but after a while the sobs subsided, and Stella’s voice sounded clearly from the darkness behind her.

“Kathy, Kathy, how can I understand you? It’s so simple, darling. So natural. Just a man and a woman getting married. Do you think you will be excluded? It won’t be that way at all. There will be three of us instead of two, no more than that. I’m still young, still pretty, I’m in love. Felix wants to marry me, and I want to marry him. Is that so disturbing? Is that so difficult to understand? If it is, if you can’t understand, for God’s sake tell me why so that I can at least try to understand you.”

She knew, of course, by that time she could hardly help knowing, but the truth was such a monstrous distortion of nature as nature functioned in herself that she found it incredible as well as monstrous, and so she would not accept it. She stood waiting in the darkness by the bed, dreading the response she might elicit, the normal warmth of her heart dispelled by pervading cold.

Kathy rolled over on the bed and sat on the edge, reaching out for the soft white blur of Stella’s hand. “Please don’t marry him, Stella. Please, please, please don’t marry him.”

“But I want to marry him. Why shouldn’t I marry him?”

“You can’t. You just can’t”

“That’s no reason, darling. Surely you can see that.”

“It would be the end of you and me. Nothing would ever be the same again.”

“Nonsense. Felix is very fond of you. He wouldn’t come between us in any way.”

“You don’t understand! Oh, Stella, you don’t understand!”

“I’m sure I don’t. And I want to. Can’t you make me understand?”

Kathy was silent, and the moon looked through the window, and below the window in the June night the scarlet roses were great drops of blood. Her voice returned with a gasp that was pain, real physical pain ripping her throat. “The things you’ll do! All the things!”

“What in God’s name do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I do. Oh, my darling, it’s nothing wrong. Intimacy is natural and good and necessary for men and women in love. It was meant to be that way.”

“Not with him!”

“I’m the one to decide that.”

“Not with him, Stella! Not with him!”

In the darkness, her hand caught between hot, clutching hands, Stella drew a deep, ragged breath, feeling confused and frustrated and bitterly compassionate, and she thought to herself, I’m making too much of it, I’m giving it too heavy a touch, because she’s little more than a child, and a child needs the light touch and laughter, to be shown with sympathy how foolish she is.

So she said with a smile in her voice, “Who, then? Have you chosen someone for me?”

And it was a mistake. It was a question that shouldn’t have been asked, because, although it was never answered, the answer was naked and understood in both their minds, stripped by the question itself, and it was too late to pretend ever again that the answer didn’t exist.

Stella released her hand and stood very still, looking at the naked thing in her mind. She felt ill and, in a vague, unformulated, undiagnosed way, a disturbing sense of guilt. What have I done? she thought. Or what have I not done that should have been done? How does one see these things in time, and what does one do about them when they are seen?

She spoke very carefully. “Felix and I are being married, darling. Tomorrow. In the city. We are driving to the city tonight, and will be gone a few days. Bertha will be in tomorrow as usual. She’ll prepare your meals and take care of the house. If you want her to stay nights with you, I’m sure she can arrange it. When we get back, we’ll talk this all out. We’ll see together how foolish it all is. You and I, darling. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

There was no spoken answer to this question, either, though it, too, might have been considered implicit if one had had the courage to consider it at all, and Stella turned and walked to the door. She turned there and looked back for a moment, and because she was a warm and generous woman, she was filled with sorrow and compassion and the sense of guilt.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, and she went out.

After a long time, the door opened and closed below. The Cadillac started in the street. Kathy sat in the chair above the roses and prayed.

God, let him die, she prayed. Oh, God in heaven, let him die tonight. Let him die, God. God, God, God, let him die, die, die.

The moon climbed slowly the arc of the sky and quit looking in the window. The roses stirred and shook their scent loose in the night. The street light at the corner inscribed a yellow circle on the dark earth. Time quit being one day and became another. Kathy quit praying and went to sleep.

In her chair above the roses, she slept.

Out on the highway, Felix Brannon died. Stella didn’t.

Stella lived for several hours.