Sometimes out of these soft monotones at Aunt Ella’s there would emerge a note of philosophy that was far from superficial.
“Now, dear child,” she’d once said, “the more that the world outside is excluded, the more the interior world has space in which to increase. Some spinsters enter convents to find this out, but I regard my house as a place of devotion to all that I hold dear, and every evening, soon as I see blackness through the shutters and take my little tablet of morphine, I have Susie set a rocking chair by the bedside and I want you to know that Our Lady has never failed to enter the bedroom almost immediately after Susie goes out. She comes in and She sits down in Her rocker as if it were Her throne in Heaven, and She turns to me and smiles at me so sweetly, lifting her right hand in benediction, that I close my eyes on tears of indescribable peace and happiness, no matter what pains afflict me, and then I drift into sleep. She never leaves till I do…”
Soon after Rosemary’s reluctant return to her mother’s house, she experienced her first menstrual period. When she suddenly found her bed sheets stained with this initial sign of fertility, she had run sobbing out of the house, all the way to Aunt Ella’s on foot, through alleys mostly, until she had reached the outskirts of town, and she had arrived before Aunt Ella had slept off her morphine. She had run into Aunt Ella’s bedroom and collapsed into the chair reserved for Our Lady’s nocturnal visits and had cried out to Aunt Ella, “Oh, Aunt Ella, I’m bleeding!”
“Child, get out of Our Lady’s chair,” was Aunt Ella’s drugged response to this outcry.
Black Susie was now looming in the doorway.
“Miss Ella, the child says she’s bleeding.”
Miss Ella rose up slowly on her mound of pillows as if reluctantly emerging from a protective state.
“Is she out of Our Lady’s chair, Susie?”
“Yes, Ma’am, she’s out of the chair and leaning against the wall and shaking all over.”
“Well, now, what’s wrong with her now?”
“Aunt Ella, I’m bleeding to death!”
“What did she say, Susie? Her voice is so different I can’t tell what she’s saying.”
“She says she’s bleeding to death.”
“I don’t see any cut on her.”
“It’s not on my face, it’s—!”
“Where are you bleeding from, child?”
Rosemary felt as she had felt in a classroom at Mary, Help a Christian when she was asked a question that demanded a spoken answer and she couldn’t give one, and so she resorted to gestures, she covered her eyes with one hand, then slowly and tremulously lowered the other hand to her groin.
Miss Ella was now rising out of her opiate cloud.
“Oh, there, she means there. Is this for the first time, child?”
Rosemary nodded her head several desperate times.
“What did she say, Susie?”
“She nodded her head. Miss Ella. I reckon she means she never had it before.”
“How old are you, child?” asked Aunt Ella.
Susie answered for her; “She’s about twenty. Miss Ella.”
“Yes, well, peculiar. Isn’t it like my fool sister never to have warned her of the curse which usually afflicts a female person five or six years before twenty.”
“We know Miss Sally,” said Susie, in her dove-soft voice.
“Yes, we know her too well. I think she gave this child a debut party on the roof of a hotel, which upset her like this, I think you told me so, Susie.”
“No, Miss Ella, not me, I never tell you nothing to make you worry.”
“Then I reckon Our Lady must have told me, but what I want you to do is draw a warm bath for her while I explain the curse to her and then I want you to go to a store that has that package of gauze that is used to cope with it.”
“Don’t worry, I will. Miss Ella.”
When Susie had left the bedroom. Aunt Ella drew a long breath.
“Dear child, this thing, the curse, without it the world would not continue and personally I think that would be a blessing instead of a curse. But we can discuss that later. What you do now is go and take a warm bath while Susie fetches the gauze, the, the—gauze…”
The morphine drew her comfortably back into sleep and, hearing the water running in the bathroom, gently, soothingly, slowly, Rosemary moved that way.
When Susie returned with the gauze pad, she helped Rosemary to secure it, performing this help so discreetly that Rosemary didn’t suffer too much embarrassment from it. Then she led Rosemary into that downstairs bedroom once occupied by Cornelius Dunphy. There was lovely fresh linen on the four-poster and four large snowy pillows. But what Rosemary most noticed in the room was that a rocker had been set beside the bed, in just the position, at the same angle, of the rocker in Aunt Ella’s bedroom, the one reserved for the nightly visits of Our Lady.
Susie closed the shutters more firmly.
“Now, child, get into bed and 111 be back in a minute with a glass of warm milk and one of your Aunt Ella’s tablets.”
And it was not until Susie’s departing footsteps faded from hearing that Rosemary knew what had happened to her. Aunt Ella had taken her captive. For a moment she thought of resisting. Then one of those jet planes flew over the house and when Susie came back with the milk and the tablet, Rosemary said: “A thunderstorm is coming.”
“Yes, child, but don’t you worry about it, it’ll pass over soon, it’s already passing over. Now wash down your tablet with this warm milk and don’t be surprised if that Lady who visits your Aunt comes in here to set a while with you in this rocker your Aunt Ella had me put by the bed.”
She tucked Rosemary into the bed and padded to the door very quietly. As she opened it she smiled at the captive maiden and said, “Miss Ella will expect you to stay for supper when you wake up, and, honey, I don’t think she’d mind you staying on here for good.”
November 1973 (Published 1974)
Das Wasser Ist Kalt
S“eated opposite her in the second-class compartment of the Rapido from Rome to Naples was a youngish American woman who kept exchanging looks with Barbara which were obviously relevant to the two young Italian officers between whose muscular thighs the woman was tightly sandwiched. Barbara knew that this female compatriot was intending to start a conversation with her and despite her loneliness, Barbara wanted to avoid it. On the other hand, she would have liked very much to have tried out her bits of Italian with the young officers, and so she pretended not to observe the woman’s glances and allowed her eyes to encounter the officers’ as often as she could without being downright flirtatious about it.
The American woman across from Barbara was now speaking in a disagreeably shrill, Midwestern voice:
“These two soldiers know each other, they came in here talking together, and yet one of them sat down on one side of me and the other sat down on the other side of me and as you can see—”
“I beg your pardon,” said Barbara, “but these young men are not soldiers but officers and I think it’s a mistake to assume that they don’t understand any English.”
“I just hope they do!” snapped the Midwestern lady.
“Why?” enquired Barbara.
“Don’t you see how I’m being squeezed between them, why it’s simply outrageous, each of them is pressing a knee against me. Oh, I should have known it was a mistake to go on ahead of my husband to Naples. You see, he was expecting a phone call there from a partner in his real-estate firm in Topeka and has no trust at all in phone calls being transferred to—”
“Oh, what a lovely landscape!” exclaimed Barbara to shut the woman up.
“Hmpf,” was the woman’s response, and there ensued a suspension of conversation between them for which Barbara was grateful.
The Italian officers exchanged slight laughing sounds, just barely audible. Then one of them leaned across the woman between them and offered the other officer a cigarette; in doing so, he permitted the motion of the Rapido to sway his shou
lder against the Topeka woman’s tight-bra’d bosom.
“Don’t you dare!” shrilled the woman.
Still leaning against her, the officer looked into her face with an almost comical air of surprise.
The woman gave him a definite shove.
Then he said, “Scusa, scusa, Signora,” but with a smile that Barbara had to concede was fairly impertinent, since it was both sensual and mocking.
“I think,” said Madam Topeka, “that I will call the conductor!”
“Aren’t you taking it a bit too seriously?” Barbara said to the furious matron.
“Not a bit, not a bit. I’m sick of it, I get it all the time in this country.”
“Count your blessings,” thought Barbara, and to her astonishment she found that she had spoken this thought aloud.
“Well!”
“Yes?”
“Perhaps it would please you to be seated between them.”
“Actually, yes, it would.”
At this point Barbara removed from her purse a little notebook which served her as a travel journal and made a penciled notation in it.
“I am going mad.”
It was only four words, the notation, but it took her a while to write it and to consider its truth. When she closed the notebook, the compatriot woman had extricated herself from her seat between the two officers and taken a position in the corridor, and one of the young officers had risen and was leaning out of the open window of the compartment with a beatific smile as if the sunset view had totally removed him from any carnal connection with things on earth.
The other young officer was smiling at Barbara. One of his hands had dropped between his thighs. It was not displeasing to her, the way the large fingers of the hand, big-knuckled and hairless, occasionally curved inward to touch his groin very lightly.
Am I really going mad? she thought to herself, which is the only way to think on such a subject.
The officer looking out the window now turned from the sunset to face her.
“Lei è sola, Signorina?”
“Ah, si, sola. lo sono sola per questo—”
(She started to say “momento” but stopped just short, substituting a smile for the word.)
“English?”
“No, I’m American, from Georgia.”
“Georgia is?”
“Yes, it definitely is. Otherwise it escapes definition.”
“Parla italiano?” he enquired, looking puzzled.
“Un poco, un pochino!” she answered brightly, lifting a little English-Italian phrase book from beside her.
“Oh, you study.”
“Yes.”
“Dove vai?”
“Does that mean where am I going?”
“Yes, where?”
“I am going to Naples for the night and leaving tomorrow for Positano where I hope to stay for the rest of the summer.”
The officer seemed to understand most of the statement.
“Positano, bello.”
“Yes, I’ve heard it’s lovely with wonderful swimming.”
“You like swim?”
She reverted to Italian, saying, “Si, mi piace molto.”
“Water cold, ancora.”
She was about to say that she liked cold water, that she found it stimulating, but the Rapido emitted a very loud whistle and then made a violent jolting motion, and Barbara cried out as the jolt of the train shot a dreadful pain up her spine.
Solicitously, the officer touched her shoulder.
“Nothing, nothing,” she whispered, and surreptitiously took a codeine tablet…
She was not quite certain whether it was two or three days later that she was seated at a small table, preparing to write some postcards that bore scenes of Positano and the Amalfi Drive. This haziness about time would be a troubling matter if she allowed herself to consider it. She did have the option of attributing it to the sedative tablets that she had kept herself under since that shocking return of her spinal affliction on the train to Naples.
This morning had brought the first relief without tablets. Of course she couldn’t be confident that the relief would last long, but that was another matter that it was better not to consider. And so she started her postcards.
“From my breakfast balcony I look down upon a veritable sea of bougainvillea.”
She read that over before continuing the message and she decided that it sounded a bit too prettily spinsterish; it might be what the heroine of an early E. M. Forster novel would put on a postcard from Italy, and she was not like that, at least she hoped that she wasn’t. Still, she had only half a dozen cards and the pictorial side of this one was too good to waste; it was a picture of a medium-sized dog of no specific breed, seated with its jaws hanging open on the verge of a sea cliff along the Amalfi Drive and beneath the dog was a caption that said II Cane Incantalo Della Divina Costiera, which meant “The dog enchanted by the divine coast.” What made it so funny was that the dog had a look of shocked stupefaction, more as if it were staring into the pit of hell than at anything divinely enchanting. Well, it would do for Miss Frelich, she’d miss the humor of it but she would not be at all put off by the reference to the “veritable sea of bougainvillea” observed from the breakfast balcony.
Doggedly she went on with the postcard message.
“I am not sure whether I have been enjoying ’II Dolce Farniente’ for two days or three in this charming little pensione close to the beach. The continual murmur of the sea is working a miracle on my insomnia. I slept three hours last night, which is almost record-breaking for this difficult past year.”
She heard a knock at the bedroom door, so at this point she hastily scribbled, “affectionate regards, Barbara.” And then she drew her dressing robe more decorously about her thin breasts and called out, “Avanti.”
The young man, hardly more than a boy, who had delivered the breakfast tray had now returned to remove it. She observed something that was a bit too much. The fly of his trousers was almost half unzipped.
“Prego,” she said coldly when he asked permission to remove the tray. Then, as he leaned over to lift the tray, she made the still more disturbing discovery that the fly of the trousers was not unzipped at all, that the momentarily exposed metal had merely caught the light in a way which had given her that mistaken impression. And it was alarming that the gleam of a metal zipper should have caused her to think it unzipped. Why, my Lord, it was a betrayal of latent sexuality of an almost hysterical nature. She felt she had to say something to the young waiter to compensate for the coldness of the “Prego” with which she’d received him.
“Che bella giornata!” she exclaimed with a flurry of fingers among the gauzy material which she had drawn closer about her breasts.
“Un po di sirocco ancora” he answered.
“Po de what?” she enquired.
“Sirocco, il vento d’africa.”
“Oh, d’africa, sirocco, sì, sìl”
He lingered with the tray between them.
“II vento d’africa porta sabbia della Sahara.”
“De what? Oh, Sahara!”
He rubbed thumb and middle finger tight together.
“Molto fin e rossa!”
“Sì, Sì, fine red sand from the Sahara is blown in by the sirocco!”
“Tutto è coperto con questa sabbia rossa.”
Then he jerked his head with a grin that exposed perfect young teeth between rose lips set in the smooth olive of his skin. And as he turned to move away, she felt, and it made her shudder with a reaction that she’d rather not classify at the moment, the slight brush of his hips against her shoulder, oh, my Lord, so intimate, so warm, or did she imagine that soft brushing warmth of him, too? A vision of him unclothed sprang into her mind. It lingered, despite her shamed resistance, till he’d left the room, and she recalled how she’d unwillingly noticed in Rome how the young men strolling about had so often a hand thrust in a pocket and seemed to be feeling their privates, unconsciously masturbating a li
ttle as they moved in pairs across the piazza on which her pensione had been located. And then her recollection went back further, way back to nine summers ago when she had spent a week in Manhattan and visited each morning the big Fifth Avenue library, assembling further material on the French poets Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire whose works had been the subject of her Master’s thesis. It had been a successful thesis although Miss Lily had gossiped about her interest in decadent French poets instead of wholesome American poets of the Southern states. However, this was not what her recollection of the stay in Manhattan was centered upon but on a thoroughly non-scholastic thing, an experience in a subway she’d taken at Columbus Circle intending to visit the Battery, where she had hoped to see the aquarium and the Statue of Liberty. On the subway she had sat in a car that was sparsely occupied and which had continued to empty as it neared the Battery till finally there was no one in it but a drugged-looking young man of Latin appearance. He had gotten up as if about to get off in the lower Village, but when the train pulled out of the stop he had lurched over to her bench, breathed in her face, examining it with his unfocused eyes as if searching for something of value which he’d lost, and then he had leaned further toward her and inserted his hot hand under her skirt and for some reason she had not cried out as he worked his fingers under her panties and had started manipulating her vagina. This action had paralyzed her. She had remained in a slightly slouched position through several stops of the subway train while the manipulating young fingers slowly inserted themselves, worked themselves into her spasmodically constricting and opening uterus, massaging the passage to moistness and finally to an ecstasy of wet burning.