A Special Providence

  And no sooner was she standing in the tall, windswept grass of the hillside than she was crying again, but this time there was no pleasure in it. All she could think of was another poem Willard Slade had liked:

  Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

  She stood in tears amid the alien corn …

  Well, she was sick for home, all right; and she didn’t mean New Rochelle or New York or Cleveland or Cincinnati, and she certainly didn’t mean Paris. She was sick for Plainville, Indiana, and for her dead mother and father and for all her sisters – even Eva – and for a lost and innocent time when everybody knew she was the baby of the family.

  Chapter Two

  After Bethel there were three trying but hopeful years in Greenwich Village. They moved to a different studio apartment each year, Alice seeking a new peace and a brave new foundation for her career with each move, and it wasn’t until the end of the third year that all her loneliness dissolved with the advent of Sterling Nelson.

  Never, in the most wistful of her longings, had she imagined that a man like Sterling Nelson might exist for her. She had long been resigned, in fact, to the idea that no man would ever exist for her again, not in any kind of responsible, durable way; she had come to accept the probability that the rest of her life would be spent in what Natalie Crawford called “a state of single blessedness.”

  Natalie Crawford was her neighbor on Charles Street, a twice-divorced, childless woman who had some sort of job with an advertising agency, who burned incense in her apartment and believed in her Ouija board and liked to use words like “simpatico,” and who habitually found respite from her own state of single blessedness with any man she could get her hands on. Alice didn’t like her very much, or at least didn’t wholly approve of her, but for lack of other friends she had come to rely on her – to spend excessive amounts of time with her and attend her frantic parties, and even to borrow small sums of money from her at times when she couldn’t make her income stretch through the month.

  And the ironic thing was that one of Natalie Crawford’s parties should have been the occasion of her meeting Sterling Nelson. He was nothing at all like most of the men Natalie knew – men who drank too much and delighted in their rudeness and got into raucous quarrels. He was tall and dignified and aristocratic, with graying temples and a little graying moustache; he was talking quietly in a small group of other nice-looking people she had never seen before, aloof from the mainstream of the party, and from the moment she saw him she wanted urgently to find some way of breaking through all the noise and smoke and getting close to him, of reaching out to touch the sleeve of his handsome suit (for he was beautifully dressed in tweeds that could only have come from England) and of letting him know that she was different too.

  But a dreadful man named Mike Driscoll, who had recently been fired from a publishing house, had her backed into a corner and was demanding to know how she felt about the C.I.O., and she had scarcely escaped him before she got involved in a drunken argument between Paul and Mary Engstrom. “Do you know what you are when you’re like this?” Paul asked his wife, who had been supporting him for nearly a year since he’d lost his job on the New York Sun. “I mean seriously, do you know what you are? Because I’ll tell you.”

  “I don’t have to take this, do I, Alice?” Mary said. “Is there any reason why I have to take this from him?”

  “Listen, God damn it. You know what you are? You’re a God damn little snot-nosed Jewish bitch, that’s what you are.”

  And that was when she heard Natalie’s voice rising up behind them. “Come along over here,” Natalie was saying. “I want you to meet these nice people. Paul and Mary Engstrom; Alice Prentice. This is Sterling Nelson.”

  And the first thing he said to her was the least expected, nicest, and most encouraging thing she could have imagined: “I hear you’re an artist.”

  She talked to no one else for the rest of the evening, and Sterling Nelson talked to no one but her. He was indeed English, and from his quiet, reticent talk she learned several other things about him: that he was in New York to represent a British export firm – a businessman with far too much sophistication to take his business seriously – that he was an art lover, and that he had evidently traveled all over the world. (It wasn’t until later that she found out more specific and still more impressive details: that he’d been decorated as a submarine commander during the war and had later held important positions with the Colonial Service in places like Burma.)

  The trouble was that she couldn’t stop her voice, or even control it. Helplessly, she heard herself saying one inane or pretentious thing after another while his polite, lightly sweating face continued to nod and smile and the rest of the room swam around them in a dizzying blur. All she knew was that if she stopped talking he might go away, and then she began to fear that if she stopped talking he might be better able to notice all the things she knew were wrong with her: her dress, which was neither new nor wholly clean and which she was almost sure was visibly wet under the arms, and her hair which badly needed combing, and the fact that she was wearing too much lipstick too hastily applied. She wanted to escape to Natalie Crawford’s bathroom and work on herself at the mirror, composing herself, but if she did that there was a terrible chance that he’d be gone when she came back; so there was nothing to do but stand there, gripping her warm, sticky drink with both hands, and go on talking. Then suddenly the people he’d come with were gathering their coats to leave, and he cordially excused himself and was gone. And no sooner had the door closed behind him than Natalie Crawford was bearing down on her through the smoke. “Isn’t he wonderful?” Natalie demanded. “I can’t imagine where they found him, but isn’t he marvelous?”

  And Alice began sidling away, trying to leave before Natalie could say he was simpatico; all she wanted then was to get her own coat and get out of here, to go home alone and make sure Bobby was all right and then go to bed and weep, and that was what she did.

  So it was much, much more than a delightful surprise when she picked up her ringing telephone the very next day and heard: “Mrs. Prentice? Sterling Nelson here.”

  When he came to visit her studio she was a little anxious that he might not like her sculpture, but he was kind and respectful about the few pieces she dared to show him, and soon she found herself wholly at ease. She knew she looked better this time – she had bought a new dress for the occasion and spent a long time over her make-up – and her self-confidence was so improved that she let him do most of the talking. She was aware that most of what few things she said came out exactly right – cool but promising – and one or two of her phrases even seemed to strike him as witty.

  He took her to the sidewalk café at the Brevoort, where nobody had taken her for years and which she now decided was the finest restaurant she’d ever been to in her life. Sitting at that elegant table as the final glow of sunset gave way to darkness, with their heads just visible to passers-by beyond the neat little potted shrubs, she kept hoping someone she knew would walk past and see them there: she even hoped for strangers to notice them and to wonder, enviously, who they were.

  Then he took her home to his own place, which turned out to be a spacious apartment on Gramercy Park that was filled with wonders. Its walls were heavy with books and with dark paintings of kinds and periods that she wouldn’t ordinarily have responded to, except that each was so clearly a gem in its own right, framed in gilt and lighted with a little museum lamp. “This is a Poussin,” he was saying, “and this over here is a Murillo, one of the early Murillos. I’ve always liked the Spaniards of that school; of course I expect you know a good deal more about these things than I do.” But the pictures were only the beginning: every piece of furniture was a valuable-looking antique – Moorish and Italian and French – and there were two charmingly roughhewn three-legged chairs that were primitive relics of Elizabethan England. The mementos of his years in the
Orient included a heavy ivory-hafted sword that he called a “Burmese dar,” and one long wall of his bedroom was emblazoned with a great bright tapestry that he explained was a “purdah.” “If you follow the figures in it, you see, it tells a kind of pictorial narrative: it’s meant to portray the rite of exhuming and reinterring the fingerbones of Buddha. Whole thing’s a bit garish by our standards, I’m afraid, the colors and whatnot; that’s why I’ve consigned it here to the bedroom.” He was standing in the bedroom doorway when he said this, pouring brandy into two snifters, and he looked up briefly and shyly while she studied the purdah. “Hate to part with it, though. It was given me with a good deal of ceremony when I left the colony, as a sort of token.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s garish at all,” she said, accepting one of the snifters. “I think it’s beautiful.” Then she moved delicately past him to re-explore the other rooms, while he hovered close behind her. “Really,” she said. “Really, Sterling, this whole apartment is beautiful. All your things are so different from each other, and yet you’ve managed to make them all harmonize. Oh, that’s not the right word; that sounds like an interior decorator or something. What I mean is that you’ve made everything – made everything whole. You’ve achieved – you’ve achieved—” But Sterling Nelson gave her no chance to finish telling him what he had achieved. He had taken the brandy glass away from her and set it down on a table; he had taken her by the shoulder and turned her around and kissed her hard and full on the mouth.

  Within a very few weeks his apartment had become the warm center of her world. There were difficulties – it would have been too good to be true if there hadn’t been – but there were times when it seemed that no difficulties in the world could fail to be resolved if only good fortune allowed her to stay with this wise, calm, splendid man.

  The main difficulty was that Sterling Nelson had a wife in England from whom he wasn’t yet technically divorced, and he sometimes talked of the brief voyage he would have to make next fall to make it final. She never knew what to say when he mentioned that, but he always managed to make it clear that the whole business was a matter of tiresome legal details, to be taken care of and dismissed with as much dispatch as possible.

  Another difficulty, at least at first, was Bobby. She knew it was only natural for Bobby to resent her spending so much time away from home, and she understood too that Sterling, with no children of his own, might find himself uncomfortable in the presence of a child. Even so, it troubled her that they were so awkward with each other. Bobby was always good about saying “Hello, Mr. Nelson” and “Goodnight, Mr. Nelson,” and it always pleased her to see them solemnly shake hands, man to man; but one evening Bobby made a terrible scene. He had been tense and irritable all afternoon, claiming his stomach hurt, and he kept getting in her way while she was trying to dress; then he sat down in the middle of the floor and started to cry and said: “I don’t want you to go out!”

  She didn’t know whether to scold or mollify him; she tried both, which only made him worse. “I hate Mr. Nelson!” he cried, fighting her off when she tried to put her arms around him, and he was still in the full heat of his rage when Sterling came in and stood watching, looking bewildered.

  “Sterling, I’m sorry about this. He’s just – he’s upset because I’m – because we’re—”

  But Bobby, hiding his face in shame at being seen in tears, scrambled up and ran tragically to his room and slammed the door behind him.

  Sterling sat down uneasily. “Is he sick?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He said his stomach hurt, but I think it’s mostly just a tantrum.” And she looked helplessly toward the slammed door.

  “Bit old for that sort of nonsense, isn’t he?” Sterling said.

  “I suppose he is; I don’t know. But the point is I have been spending a lot of time apart from him, and he feels – I think he feels neglected.”

  “Mm,” Sterling said, shifting his feet and folding his hands in his lap. “Well. In any case I expect Mrs. what’s-her-name can look after him tonight, can’t she? The woman who sits with him?”

  “I suppose so.” But she still yearned toward the silent bedroom door. She could picture him flung face down across his bed, exhausted and ashamed and alone in the deepening shadows, too miserable now even to cry, and she knew he would be waiting for her. “Sterling,” she said, “why don’t you fix yourself a drink, and I’ll just go in and talk to him. I won’t be a minute.”

  “ ‘Talk’ to him? I must say I fail to see the point of that, Alice. Wouldn’t you just be starting up the whole silly business again?”

  And then her own voice came close to tears: “Oh, Sterling, please try to understand.” It was the nearest thing to a quarrel they’d ever had, and as her voice rose before his blinking face she was touched with panic: what if he couldn’t understand? “I can’t just leave him in there, don’t you see? Oh, if he had a father it’d be different, but I’m all he has in the world – can’t you see that?”

  In the end they took him out to dinner with them, to the Brevoort. He had washed his face and put on his best clothes, and in the aftermath of hysteria he was by turns chagrined and over-exhilarated. At first they couldn’t get a word out of him: he hung his head and kept avoiding Sterling’s patient, kindly eyes; then all at once he started talking as if he would never stop. He had made a mess of his dinner plate, mixing everything together with his fork into an unsightly mush, and he explained this procedure at shrill and elaborate length.

  “I don’t really like peas, you see,” he said, “and I don’t like this kind of potatoes and I don’t much like this kind of gravy, so you see what I do is, I just mix them all up together and then they don’t taste so bad. I always do that whenever I get a whole bunch of different kinds of food I don’t like, and it makes everything taste a whole lot better. Just mix ’em all up together, and you don’t even taste the things you don’t like. I mean it tastes good this way …” He went on and on, while Sterling stoically endured the monologue, while Alice tried ineffectually to quiet him down and people at neighboring tables glanced over in open irritation at the spectacle of such an ill-behaved little boy.

  He didn’t stop talking all the way home, except to break away from them on the sidewalk to demonstrate his prowess at leapfrogging fire hydrants; he didn’t stop talking, in fact, until Alice had managed to get him into bed and put out his light and shut his door.

  Then she said, “Oh, Sterling, thank you so much. I know it was awful for you but you were – really, you were wonderful.”

  And after that, Bobby became more and more a participant. They didn’t take him to the Brevoort again, but they began going to the Brevoort less frequently themselves. More often Alice would fix dinner for the three of them at home, and they’d usually wait until Bobby was in bed before going to Sterling’s place. Sterling didn’t seem to mind; he was consistently kind and fatherly and stern without ever being harsh, and he seemed to enjoy the increasing evidence of Bobby’s attachment to him. One evening he brought an illustrated book for boys, British Submarine Service in the Great War, and Bobby sat silent and spellbound, turning the pages, while Sterling explained the pictures and told tantalizingly cryptic anecdotes about his own submarine service. And Alice, watching them from the kitchen doorway, allowed herself to indulge in a happy daydream of the three of them together forever, of Bobby grown tall and disciplined and calling Sterling “Dad.”

  When the heat of the city grew unbearable that summer, Sterling sent them both away for a week to a cool lake in New Jersey, where they learned – or almost learned – to catch perch and sunfish with the rod and reel that Sterling had equipped them with, and where they sat for hours under a great shade tree while Alice read aloud from Sterling’s volume of Great Expectations. And when the vacation was over and she felt that neither she nor Bobby could face the wretched city school system again, it was Sterling, one unforgettable night in his bedroom, who first suggested she might consider moving out to Scar
sdale. He knew about Scarsdale because one of the items his company imported was lead-casement windows, which had enjoyed a vogue in the wealthier, Tudor-style homes of that town before the Depression. “Matter of fact we’re still doing a fair amount of business out there,” he said. “Seems to be a little isolated pocket of prosperity. In any case I understand the schools are first rate; be a good thing for Bobby. And of course the town itself is charming – green grass and fresh air and all that; get you away from all the bother of the city.”

  “It sounds lovely,” she said, “but I’m afraid I could never afford it. George keeps saying I’m ‘living beyond my means’ as it is.”

  “Well, but some of the rentals aren’t as high as you might think, Alice; it’s a curious thing. Some of the older houses along the Post Road are rather rundown, and they’re vacant – as long as they’re vacant the owners are losing money, willing to lease them quite cheaply. It’s a thing you might be wise to look into.”

  “You make it sound so easy.” But that was one of the wonderful things about Sterling Nelson: he could make any difficult thing sound easy, and the only other man she had ever known who could do that was Willard Slade. All the others, George, for example, had made easy things sound difficult.

  “Might well be simpler than you think,” he said, sitting up on the edge of the bed and reaching for his dressing gown. “Pay a reasonable price and still have all the advantages.” He walked across the room to get a cigarette and refill their brandy glasses, and when he came back, she allowed herself a thrill of girlish pleasure at how handsome he looked in his dressing gown. On any other man it would have been a bathrobe, but the way Sterling wore it made it a dressing gown. He sat on the edge of the bed again and looked at her, still silently inquiring if a move to Scarsdale mightn’t be a good idea. And because his eyes were so considerate she was emboldened to tell him why the plan held so little appeal for her. She reached out and smoothed the silken lapels over the hairs on his chest.