“No harder than I have to,” he said, and everyone smiled.
“And Arthur Langdon?” asked Mr. Waite, who was not immune to the general convulsive emotional quality of the hour. “How is he?”
Natalie, who had been full of things to tell her father about Arthur Langdon, said, “Well, I haven’t seen much of him lately.”
“Been working pretty hard, I guess,” her father said. Too late, because she was out of practice, Natalie found the irony in his voice, but she had already answered too carefully, “Well, not as hard as I should.”
“How about we all have some coffee and cake?” Mrs. Waite asked, looking brightly around at all of them.
“Thank you,” Natalie said politely.
They filed out into the kitchen, using their tenuous family relationship as an excuse for not having cake brought to them in the living room, but each one waiting civilly for the others to go through doors first.
“It is so good to have my little girl back home again,” Mrs. Waite whispered when she said good night to Natalie.
* * *
At the college on Thanksgiving Day they had turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and peas and mince pie and small candies in paper baskets; at the Waites’ on Thanksgiving Day they had turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and peas and mince pie and small candies in Mrs. Waite’s best silver candy dishes. Except for the fact that if she had been at the college she would not have eaten at all, Natalie found being at home not much better. The Thanksgiving dinner was one prepared solely and lovingly by Mrs. Waite, tended and planned and rich in delicate touches, and was eaten by her family in ill humor and weariness; as though, in fact, it were an ordinary meal. It was served at three on Thursday afternoon, a time when no one was ordinarily hungry, and was preceded by cocktails, a ceremony which made Natalie and her brother stare at one another, since neither of them was quite prepared for the immoral spectacle of the other’s drinking in the bosom of the family.
“Taken up liquor in your old age, Nat?” Bud asked Natalie, and she answered him childishly, “What about you? Keep a bottle under your pillow?”
Mr. Waite glanced away, and Mrs. Waite beamed at them, pleased to see her two children talking together as though, she seemed to think, they were not brother and sister at all. The two children, suddenly aware of this, fell immediately silent, and Mrs. Waite said brightly, “Well, all together again. We must drink a toast to our own little family.”
Mr. Waite regarded his wife without expression for a minute, and then lifted his glass and said solemnly, “To our own little family.”
Looking around, at her tall daughter and her masculine son, at her husband, at her full dinner table, Mrs. Waite said meltingly, “Where will we all be next year?”
“Dead, perhaps?” Mr. Waite suggested helpfully.
“Don’t say that,” Mrs. Waite told him, “I don’t even like to talk about it.”
“Let us flatter ourselves,” Mr. Waite said into his glass, “that I may be the survivor.”
* * *
On Friday morning Natalie came to her father, as usual; not knowing until the last minute that he awaited her in the study, she was only reminded of it by her mother’s fearful grimaces and gestures. As a result, when she knocked at the door and heard him say, pleased, “Come in,” she felt that she had an unworthy advantage of him in that he would be humiliated if he knew that she had forgotten when he remembered. She grinned at him when she closed the door behind her and said, “This is what I’ve been waiting for.”
“Natalie, my dear,” he said, and smiled back at her across the desk. This was his real greeting; neither the encounter at the bus nor the toast before the Thanksgiving dinner were communications to Natalie from her father; it was when he looked at her across his desk and saw the door shut behind her that he recognized her at last.
“Well,” she said, and sat down.
“Well, Natalie,” he said.
They sat without speaking for a minute, her father looking down at his hands on the desk, and Natalie knowing with pleasure the feeling of the study, of the books, of her father, and hearing faintly an echo which made her almost smile (“What if I told you that you were seen?”); after a minute she said, “Did I write you about Arthur Langdon?”
“No,” he said, his voice quiet so as not to disturb her possible revelations, “what about him?”
“I keep thinking of the time I went to see him in his office and it reminded me of coming in here to talk to you, and he made such a fool of himself.”
“And I?”
Natalie laughed. “I’m really glad to be back,” she said. “It’s hard to say it, though.”
“Is everything going well?”
“No,” Natalie said, considering. “Not at all well, I guess. I’m doing very badly.”
“How?”
“In everything.”
“Anything you need from me?”
“No, not right now. Later, perhaps.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
This is not going right, Natalie thought; how much he wants to know, and what shall I tell him? Daddy dear, I am a failure, I hate college and I hate everybody? Or is that just what he expects? Does he have an answer for that, even?
“I’ll tell you when I can,” she said.
“Right,” he said. “Working?”
Funny, Natalie thought, when anyone else says, “Working?” it means are you getting anything done, really—are you going to classes, passing your exams, finishing your biology notebook, have you got a job, is the plumbing business picking up any, is there a spot for you in a new Broadway production, are you earning any money? When my father and Arthur Langdon say, “Working?” they mean is anything happening inside you that might possibly interest them, like yeast working in bread. “Sure,” she said.
There was a short pause, and then her father said gracefully, “I am not so great a fool myself, Natalie, but what I can recognize foolishness in others. I can still remember the almost irresistible impulses toward melodrama which strike one at your age. Please forgive me if I say that I never expected you to be immune to ordinary impulses, although I expect equally that you will be receptive to extraordinary ones. I do, however, feel that you might reserve your sardonic impulses for your mother, perhaps, or for your friends at college, without trying them out on me. I have—please understand me, my dear—too much trouble with my own adolescent hangovers, to feel yours very deeply. This attitude of yours is one requiring only a slight, although basic, change in viewpoint to become a valuable and constructive state of mind, and the sooner you adopt this change in viewpoint, the sooner you may become a profitable member of society. There is—and please believe me—no vital change in personality involved. There is, as a matter of fact, not even any pain. You have only to shift perhaps a quarter turn to the northeast, and your problems are gone. Perhaps nothing more is required than one clear view of your situation and your present actions; it is very possible, you know, to be doing the right things and thinking the perfect thoughts for one’s position, and yet seem entirely wrong because that one faint shading of understanding is missing; perhaps you feel that you are doing badly these days because you do not perceive that you are, in fact, doing very well indeed, and only lack the perception of your own worth to know exactly how well. Perhaps, Natalie, if I remind you what a very worthwhile person you are, it will give you the quarter turn you need.”
“Nothing will help,” Natalie said; even after her father’s mention of melodrama, she could not help saying it, although she did not look at him as she spoke.
“Well,” he said, after a minute, “I had not intended saying these things to you so soon, certainly not on your first visit home. It is of course necessary to achieve a certain solidity in one’s way before taking a shift in perspective to see it clearly. I daresay that by the time I see you again—since, a
s you say so emphatically, you must go back today—you may be readier to listen to me. I should hate to deprive you prematurely of the glories of the suicidal frame of mind, since I am fairly certain that depriving yourself of the ability to feel this way would be more cruel than any sort of physical torture you might inflict upon yourself, so that I can use ‘suicidal’ as a descriptive adjective without really feeling that it implies any action.”
“You’re trying to make me say that I want to kill myself,” Natalie said.
“You need hardly say anything quite so meaningless,” he said tartly, “and I would vastly prefer that you confine your statements to pure descriptions of fact. I think better of your vanity, Natalie, than to believe that two months out of seventeen years could destroy you.”
She was almost irresistibly tempted to tell him all about herself, to justify somehow the facts of herself that he did not seem to understand, and which, so horribly acute to her, seemed to him only to point up a statement about general personalities; she wanted to pound on the desk before him and shout, “What do you know?” walk wildly up and down the room, pulling words from the very air to tell him about herself, and she wanted to shout, and to stamp, and to cry, and yet before she had time to do any of these things she heard ahead of her his calm voice saying, when she had done, “Precisely, my dear Natalie, precisely what I was . . .” And so instead she said, “No one likes me.”
“I hardly blame them,” he said briefly.
When she saw that he was laughing she laughed too, and as he stood up to show her it was time to go, that he had no more, really, to say to her, he added, “I think we understand one another, Natalie, you and I.”
* * *
She had come home on Wednesday night, bringing with her a certain sense of romance, as one who could bring heartbreaking stories of haunted lands, who had seen and heard and touched and known the improbable, the unbelievable (“and in that country I saw as well an image, made of a virgin pearl, and its eyes were diamonds and its hair was beaten gold, and it was set on a block of marble and no one might worship it face to face . . .”) and brought back perhaps small odd things, dug from the bottom of a trunk and mused over, held in two hands lovingly . . . (“This I found at the bottom of a well, and they said it would bring death to any who touched it . . . and this, there’s a story goes with this one—I was lost, and wandering in the jungle, and it had been three days since I had eaten, and six weeks since I had seen a human being, and when I awakened, raging with fever, I saw bending over me . . . and, then, look at this, observe the intricate carving the cipher scratched on the handle—I bought it from an old . . .”) . . . who had seen and heard and touched and known more than might ever be found at home. Who had seen, perhaps, beasts walking like men and jewels shining like stars, and who smiled at certain remembered scenes a million miles away, and stared bewildered at old familiar sights and found the faces of mother and father and brother more strange than the face on a carving made in pearl.
Natalie had not been at home for more than twenty-four hours before she felt that her visit was complete and her purposes served; she had slept once more in the bed politely called hers, she had kissed her mother and father and been mildly surprised by the actuality of her brother, she had tried out the familiar things and found that she remembered them well enough, then it was time for her to be off again. It had rained steadily since she first set out for the bus stop at college, and the damp unkind weather filled the rooms at home with gray cold; she had worn her raincoat home from college and although she had not gone out of the house since, the raincoat still lay across a chair in the back hall crumpled and wet, the floor beneath it muddy where it had dripped all night.
Two days before the living-room fire had dried Natalie out, but even the memory of the rain to be waded through, like a dark impenetrable barrier, before she could be again at college, would not dampen her urgent excitement or soothe her. “So you’re not staying for dinner tonight?” her mother asked her softly on Friday afternoon, and the question was a statement about Natalie’s unquiet eyes, her spot before the fire, her hands moving beside her on the rug. And the question was as well a continuation of her mother’s welcome to Natalie on Wednesday evening, meaningless and full of incoherent dread; if her mother had said, “Will you stay on, then, for dinner tonight?” Natalie would have turned quickly and perhaps answered without the constant fearful check she had been keeping upon herself at home, would perhaps have answered, an answer being required, with the sublime impatience which had possessed her while she was with her family these days. If her mother had asked her any question at all, anything to make Natalie speak, the whole quiet forward movement of the day could easily have been impeded, the extra moments consumed might have made Natalie later at the college, and so in some way deprived of something, her mother might have had her answer and not have been the better for it.
Stirring uneasily before the fire, Natalie said, as softly as her mother had spoken, “I’d better get on back.” She knew that behind her, her mother had set her needle down soundlessly in the cloth and was resting her hands on the arms of the chair, staring over Natalie’s head into the fire; Natalie felt rather than heard her mother draw breath to speak, and then resign it. No point in speaking, no reasonable thing to say. It had all been debated endlessly in the second between her mother’s drawn-in breath and Natalie’s involuntary movement that checked it. Her mother had almost said, “Natalie, are you happy?” and Natalie had almost said, “No”; her mother had almost said, “Everything seems somehow to go badly,” and Natalie had almost said, “I know it and I can’t help it”; her mother had almost said, “Let me help you,” and Natalie had almost said, “What can you do?” and that had been the nervous movement of her head that her mother had recognized and which had silenced her before she ever spoke.
After a while, at work with her needle again, Mrs. Waite said, as though they had been discussing lesser matters all the afternoon, “Dear, are you trying to settle down to work?”
“Sure,” said Natalie, because this kind of spoken conversation could be carried on easily without thinking, or truth.
“I’ve told you this before,” her mother said, and her voice added, so many, many times, “I’ve said it before, Natalie, and you know I hate to keep dwelling on it—but you do know that the money sending you to college is really more than your father can afford. We have deprived ourselves of many things.”
Natalie perceived that she was supposed to come to her mother in gratitude, as she had been invited to do many times before, so that between them they might make many false promises, and sketch out brilliant unreal futures, and console one another with imperfect emotions; in all her travels Natalie had not learned how to come to her mother in gratitude, and so she merely turned her head and said, “I know it, and I do remember it. I’ll try to keep out of trouble.”
“Not trouble,” her mother said, as though trouble were murder or robbery or arson, something she could understand and possibly find among her own temptations, “not trouble, Natalie; just try to do better with your studies and with the other girls and even with your professors.”
Strange, Natalie thought, in all his wisdom my father never found from my letters that I get along badly with people; I suppose it’s the first thing my mother fears, just as she is afraid that I have been visited with all her sorrows, because those she is better able to heal in me than she could in herself. It seemed that perhaps her father was trying to cure his failures in Natalie, and her mother was perhaps trying to avoid, through Natalie, doing over again those things she now believed to have been mistaken.
“Everything’s really fine,” Natalie said to her mother. “I’m really doing very well. Everyone says so.” She decided that this last statement smacked too much of eagerness, and turned her head back abruptly to stare again into the fire.
“I haven’t told your father,” her mother said surprisingly.
“You haven’t?” It was the weak, the completely wrong and unnecessary thing to say, but for the moment Natalie was not able to think of any right thing. Her mother was silent for a minute, perhaps to give Natalie a chance to say something intelligent, and then with a little rustling sound she folded up her sewing. The small sounds of her mother’s breathing nearly put Natalie, suspended in the silence her mother did not seem inclined to break, to sleep before the fire, but the realization that her father and brother would soon be home prevented her from relaxing completely. Before they came back she must have her coat ready and her mind made up and be standing near the door, ready for farewells; she hoped that her father would not want to drive her to the bus stop, and was resigned at the same time to the fact that he would not possibly allow her to take a taxi, or, better still, to walk.
“Natalie?” her mother said helplessly, looking at the back of Natalie’s head, and as if her mother had been warning her, Natalie rose effortlessly, proud of the swift movements of her own long body. “You’re getting so big,” her mother murmured. “I can hardly recognize my little girl.”
“Better get ready to go,” Natalie said hastily, moving toward the door and twisting involuntarily as she went past her mother, as though to avoid clutching hands. “Bus leaves at four.”
Her mother started to speak again, but Natalie hurried, and could safely pretend not to hear by the time her mother was ready to say anything. The wet raincoat smell was exciting, carrying with it remotely the institutional smells of the college, a faint echo of a cologne Natalie had never worn in her life; near the pocket was a cigarette burn she had not made; the raincoat was in itself a symbol of going and coming, of wishing and fearing, or, precisely, the going out of a warm, firelit house into the heartbreaking cold.
She tied a scarf over her head and thought that now she would not be able to hear her mother’s last admonitions; when she went back to the fire her mother had risen and was standing where Natalie had been lying, and her father stood next to her mother by the fire. I didn’t hear him come in, Natalie thought, and thought again, I suppose by now I’m out of practice on his coming and going; he and her brother had been to call on people she did not even know, and although they had asked her to go along, she had been able to decline without minding very much; her new acquaintances were all at college and a new acquaintance at home was, after all, so much time wasted.