Collected Stories

  Passengers were guests. Would they care for coffee? And fresh doughnuts, or powdered bismarcks? Or would they prefer whiskey? The afternoon papers hadn’t been available when they left Chicago. They did, however, have Barrons_ and the Wall Street Journal._ The seats were luxurious—as much legroom as you liked, excellent reading lights. Here was the panel with its many switches. Neither of the passengers cared to read just now.

  The pilot said, “We’ll be landing at Midway, and you’ll get a helicopter ride to Meigs.”

  “Well, this is more like it,” said Victor. “You see?” She translated “You see?” as an assertion that he had not misled her. He had sent for her, and he was returning her to Chicago. He had the power to make good all assurances. He raised his whiskey glass. We’ll drink to you and me. Something like a smile passed over his face, but he was also ruffled, moody. His eyes, those narrow canals, were black with mortal injury. None of these powers—summoning special machines, commanding special privileges—really seemed to mean a thing. Doodads for a canary’s cage. “Oh, yes, you’re a pilot yourself,” he remembered.

  “Not one of these planes,” said Katrina. She held up her wristwatch to the light. Ysole would have left the house by now.

  Suddenly the silence of the cabin was torn by a furious roar. Nothing could be heard. The plane bumped across the icy seams of the field. Then came the clean run and they were (thank God!) airborne. Their course would take them southwest across Lake Michigan. It was just as well in this weather that the water should be invisible. The parlorlike neatness of the cabin was meant to give a sense of safety. She tasted the coffee—it was freeze-dried, it was not hot. When she bit into the jelly doughnut, she liked the fragrance of the fried dough but not the cold jelly that gushed out.

  He may have had no special intention in giving her the Cщline book to read. If so, why did he bring it up now? And what of the dowager Beila, to whom Vanessa had recommended the book on homosexual foreplay? They were_ a bookish family, weren’t they. But this was to misread Beila completely. You could no more think of her that way than you could think of Queen Victoria. And Victor did not encourage discussions of Beila. Sometimes he spoke of “wives of a certain kind.”

  “Perfect happiness for wives of a certain kind is to immobilize their husbands.” The suggestion was that a man in his seventies who had barely survived Mass. General and had a bad leg was a candidate for immobilization. You could as easily immobilize Niagara Falls. A perfectly objective judgment of Beila, removing all rivalry and guilt, was that she behaved with dignity. When it looked as if Victor was not going to make it at Mass. General, Beila had asked him whether he wanted to see Katrina, who was hiding in one of the waiting rooms. Victor did want to see her, and Beila had sent for her, and had withdrawn from the room also, to let them take leave of each other. Then Katrina and Victor had gripped hands. He seemed unable to speak. She wept with heartbreak. She told him that she would always love him. He held her hand fast and said, “This is it, kid.” His tongue was impeded, but he was earnest and clear, she remembered. And since then, she thought how important it was that her claim to access should be affirmed, and that his feeling for her should be acknowledged. It wasn’t just another adultery. She wasn’t one of his casual women. Before death, his emotions were open, and she came—when she rushed in she was bursting. Her suffering was conceded its rights. Their relationship was certified; it took a sort of formal imprint from the sickroom. Last farewells. He was dying. When he released her hand, meaning that it was time to go—too much for him, perhaps, too painful—and she went out sobbing, she saw the distant significant figure of Beila down the corridor, watching or studying her.

  Well, what had Beila’s generosity achieved, when Victor was on his feet again? It only made matters simpler for the lovers. Then this creepy, rabbinical, fiddling, meddling, and bratty daughter advised a mother in her late sixties to learn to tickle and to suck, use advanced techniques of lewdness. (“For two cents I’d throw her fiddle right into the lake! Little bitch!”) Beila needed all the dignity she could muster. And especially with a husband whose description might be: “Others abide our judgment, thou art free!” Finally Victor himself bringing up the ultimate, hellish judgment on “love”—that love was something _dщgueulasse.__ Like spoiled meat; dogs would walk away from it, but “lovers” poured out some “tenderness sauce” and then it became a dainty dish to set before the king—handing Katrina such a book to read.

  That wasn’t what he had been like in Mass. General, with death on top of him.

  It occurred to her that his aim was to desensitize her feelings so that when he died—and he felt it coming—she would suffer less.

  But he did play rough. A few years ago he had suggested that Joe So-and-so, a nice young poet, very pretty, too, no ball of fire, though, was attentive to her. ‘Do you think you might like him?” That may have been a test. Just as possibly it was an attempt to get rid of her, and his estimation of So-and-so’s talent (no secret that there was_ no talent) also told Katrina how he ranked her on a realistic scale—a dumpy sexpot, varicose veins, uneven gum line, crшme de Chantilly inner thighs but otherwise no great shakes. Her oddities happened to suit him, Victor. But there were idiosyncrasies, and then there were real standards. Since his miraculous recovery he had made no offensive matchmaking suggestions. He even seemed to suspect, jealously, that she was looking around, in the glamour world to which he had introduced her. She wouldn’t have been surprised if, by insulting Wrangel and trying to make her a party to the insult, Victor had tried to eliminate this celebrity producer as a rival. He was a very cunning man, Victor. This afternoon’s sex, for instance, had it been desire or had it been payola? No, no; even Dotey said, “You’re his only turn-on.” That was the truth. She brought Victor to life again. The caresse qui fait revivre les morts._ The man’s sexual resurrection.

  The door of the cockpit was open. Beyond the shoulders of the pilots were the lights of the instrument panel. The copilot occasionally glanced back at the passengers. Then he said, “It’s getting a little bumpy. Better fasten those belts.” A patch of rough air? It was far worse than that. The plane was knocked, thumped like a speeding speedboat by the waves. Victor, who had been savagely silent, finally took notice. He reached for Katrina’s hand. The pilots now closed the door to the cockpit. Underfoot, plastic cups, liquor bottles, doughnuts were sliding leftward.

  “You realize how tilted we are, Victor?”

  “They must be trying to climb out of this turbulence. In a big plane you wouldn’t notice. We’ve both flown through worse weather.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  The overhead light became dimmer and dimmer. Various shades of darkness were what you saw in Katrina’s face. On Victor’s cheekbones the red color seemed laid on with a brush. “They couldn’t be having a power failure—what do you think, Victor?”

  “I don’t believe that.” As was his custom, he sketched out a summary. It included Katrina and took the widest possible overview. They were in a Cessna because he had accepted a lecture invitation, a trip not strictly necessary and which (for himself he took it calmly) might be fatal. For Katrina it was even less than necessary. For her he was sorry. She was here because of him. But then it came home to him that he didn’t understand a life so different from his own. Why did anybody want to live such a life as she lived? I know why I did mine. Why does she do hers? It was a wicked question, even put comically, for it had its tinge of comedy. But when he had put the question he felt exposed, without any notice at all, to a kind of painful judgment. Supposedly, his life had had real scale, it produced genuine ideas, and these had caused significant intellectual and artistic innovations. All of that was serious. Katrina? Not serious. Divorcing, and then pursuing a prominent figure—the pursuit of passion, high pleasure? Such old stuff—not_ serious! Nevertheless, they were together now, both leaning far over in the banking plane; same destiny for them both. He was her reason for being here, and she was (indirectly) his. V
anessa, for female reasons, put Katrina in a rage, but her knees (sexual even now) gripped the violin protectively. He had often said, conceded, that the obscurest and most powerful question, deeper than politics, was that of an understanding between man and woman. And he knew very well that Katrina had formed absurd visions of what she would do with him—take him away from Beila, then serve him for the rest of his life, then achieve unbelievable social elevation, preside over a salon, then become known after his death as a legendary woman of wide knowledge and great subtlety. This mixed Katrina, a flutter of images, both commonplace and magical. Before her this man of words was,_ at times, speechless. He doted on her because! Because she_ was just within the line separating grace from clumsiness, because_ of the sensual effect, on him, of her fingers, because_ of the pathos of her knees holding the violin. She held him better than any fiddle. And now will you tell me what any_ of this has to do with the ideas_ of Victor Wulpy! What had made him really angry with Wrangel was that he had said most ideas were trivial—meaning, principally, that Victor’s own ideas were trivial. And if Victor could not explain Katrina’s sexual drawing power, the Eros that (only just) kept him from disintegrating, Wrangel did have a point, didn’t he? Katrina, as a subject for thought, was the least trivial of all. Of all that might be omitted in thinking, the worst was to omit your own being. You had lost, then. You heard the underground music of your ancestor Hercules growing fainter as he abandoned you. All you were left with was lucidity, final superlucidity, which was delayed until you reached the border of death. Any minute now he might discover what the other side of the border was like.

  He had heard planes making stress noises before, but nothing like the crackling of metal about him now, as if the rivets were going to pop like old-time collar buttons. Wings after all were very slight. Even in calm blue daylight, when they quivered, you thought: A pair of ironing boards, that’s all.

  “Victor, we’re banking the other way…. I’ve never seen it so bad.”

  No comment. No denying the obvious. The plane tumbled like a playing card.

  “If we go down…”

  “It’ll be my fault, /got you into this.”

  There was a moment of level flight. Victor wondered why his heart rate had not increased. He didn’t hold his breath, he was not sweating, when the plane dropped again.

  “You don’t even mind too much,” said Katrina.

  “Of course I mind.”

  “Now listen, Victor. If it’s death any minute, if we’re going to end in the water… I’m going to ask you to tell me something.”

  “Don’t start that, Katrina.”

  “It’s very simple. I just want you to say it….”

  “Come off it, Katrina. With so much to think about, at a time like this, you ask me that}_ Love?” Temper made his voice fifelike again. His mouth expanded, the mustache widening also. He was about to speak even more violently.

  She cut him off. “Don’t be awful with me now, Victor. If we’re going to crash, why shouldn’t you say it?…”

  “You grab this opportunity to twist my arm.”

  “If we don’t love each other, what are we doing? How did we get here?”

  “We got here because you’re a woman and I’m a man, and that’s how we got here.”

  An odd thought he had: Atheists accept extreme unction. The wife urges, and the dying man nods. Why not?

  In the next interval they felt the controlled lift of the aircraft. They had found smoother air again and were sailing more calmly. Katrina, still in suspense, began to think about gathering her storm-scattered spirits.

  “We may be okay,” said Victor.

  She felt that she was less okay than she had ever been. My God! what a lot of ground I lost, she was thinking.

  The cockpit door slid back, and the copilot said, “All right? That was a bad patch. But we’re coming up on South Chicago in a minute.” A spatter of words, an incomprehensible crackle, came from the control tower at Midway.

  Victor was silent, but he looked good-humored. What a man he was for composure! And he didn’t hold ridiculous things against you. He was really very decent that way. _M*ASH,__ for instance. He couldn’t say, “I love you.” It would have been mauvaise foi._ Death staring you in the face was no excuse. She was going back and forth over her words, his words, while the plane made its approach and its landing. She was mulling all of it over even when they whirled off in the helicopter, under the slapping blades. The way girls were indoctrinated: Don’t worry, dear, love will solve your problems. Make yourself deserving, and you’ll be loved. People are crazy, but they’re not too crazy._ So you won’t actually be murdered. You’ll be okay. And with this explanation from a dopey mother (and Mother really was stupid), you went into action.

  Victor said to her, “You see how these executives do things?”

  “What is it, about six o’clock? I’ll be two hours late back to Evanston.”

  “After they drop me, they can run you home. I’ll tell them to. Do me a favor and take the fiddle home with you.”

  “All right, I will.” Tomorrow she’d have to bring it to Bein and Fushi.

  She didn’t like the look of him at Meigs Field. Another time it might have excited her to land here. The blues of the ground lights were so bright, and the revolving reds so vivid and clear against the snow. But Victor was very slow getting out of the machine, which made her sore at heart. A fellow shook hands with him. That was Mr. Kinglake, who handed them into a big car. They came out between the aquarium and the museum and proceeded, all power and luxury like a funeral livery, to Randolph Street, and north on Michigan Boulevard to the 333 Building. Victor, keeping his own counsel all this while, squeezed her fingers before he got out.

  “Tomorrow?” he said.

  “Sure, tomorrow. And merde_ for luck. Don’t let those people throw you.”

  “Not to worry. I’m on top of this,” said Victor.

  So he was. He had gotten her back to Chicago, too.

  In the cushioned warmth of the limousine, northward bound, Katrina, as she pictured Victor in the swift, rich-men’s gilded elevator rushing upward, upward, felt a clawing at her heart and innards—pity for the man, which he didn’t feel for himself. Really, he did not. Pressed for time. He had too much to think about. All that unfinished mental business to keep him busy forever and ever. He wouldn’t have liked it that she should feel clawed around the heart for his sake.

  And then, had it been right to turn on a man of his stature and stick him with a clichщ? But one good thing about Victor was that he was very light on your venial sins, especially the feminine ones. Still, in that case, he might have obliged her, might have spoken the words she wanted to hear. He didn’t need to worry that she might make use of them later, against him.

  The lake came very close to shore along the Outer Drive and made mad charges on the pilings and the beaches, rushing horribly white out of the hundreds of miles of darkness they had just crossed in the Cessna.

  At Howard Street the white mausoleums and enormous Celtic crosses faced the water. It was a shame to spoil such fine real estate with graves. She disliked this stretch of the road and said to the driver, “This is a favorite speed trap for the cops.” He didn’t wish to answer. “Now please take me to the Orrington,” she said.

  She drove her car home from the garage, and had to park in a rut some distance from the curb because her driveway hadn’t been cleared.

  The house was dark. Nobody there. Her first fear was that Alfred had come and taken the girls away. She let herself into the warm hallway, pushing the handsome heavy white door against the resistance of a living creature: Sukie, of course, the poor old thing, not too deaf to hear the scratch of Katrina’s key.

  Lighted, the living room showed that Soolie and Pearl had been cutting composition paper after school. Probably Ysole had ordered them to do it. Their habit was to force you to give them commands. But where had they gone? Katrina looked in the kitchen for a message. Nothing on the bullet
in board. Nothing on the dining-room table. She rang Alfred’s number. If he was there, he didn’t answer. She telephoned Dorothea and after two rings there came Dotey’s little recording, which Katrina had never heard with such dislike—Dotey being playful: “When the vibrations of the gong subside, kindly leave your name and message.” The gong, to go with the bed, was also Chinese. Katrina said, “Dotey, where the hell are my kids?” Immediately she depressed the button, and when the dial tone resumed, she dialed Lieutenant Krieggstein. No one there. She considered next whether to try her lawyer. He sharply disliked being bothered at home. Just now this was not a consideration. What did matter was that she had nothing to tell him except that she feared her children had been abducted by their father while she was gone…. Gone where? Flying with her lover.

  Sukie had followed her to the kitchen and pressed against her, needing to be taken out. Absentmindedly tender, Katrina stroked the animal’s black neck. The fur was thick, but it was flimsy to the touch. Might as well walk her while 1 think what to do, Katrina decided, and clipped the leash to Sukie’s collar. All the neighbors had been shoveled out; only the Goliger house was still under snow. The dog relieved herself at once. Obviously, no one had thought of her all day. Katrina went to the corner in her slow, hip-rich gait, the hat pushed back from her forehead—so very tired she hardly noticed the cold. Her face was aching with the strains of the day. Had Ysole taken the girls home with her? To the church bingo? That was the least likely conjecture of all.

  Turning back from the corner, she saw a car parking in front of her house. Because its lights shone into her eyes, she couldn’t identify it. She began trotting in her ostrich-skin boots, pulling the dog by the leash, saying, “Come on, girl. Come on.”

  The children were being lifted over the snow heaps and set down on the sidewalk. She recognized Krieggstein by his fedora. Also his storm coat, bulky and hampering, and his movements.