Part 9

She felt herself as a sharp weight set in softness. So she was upheld: but she was free. There was a bar between herself....--I am true!... and these warm falsehoods Clara had set her in.

--Saved me by them! I know that. You are all Lies about me, yet me who am true you have saved. Without you what could Clara’s naked love have done? Without you wouldn’t she be dead as I was? Your milk, your covers, your warmth ... lies: O my still bed, O sun that falls about the grey of my shoulders like a lawn of Spring upon an autumn earth--bless you, for there is quiet in you yet, and it has let me think.

... When I am at last all in thought, I am in the way of the end. To end is to be healed. I understand that. Life is a wound that only life can heal.

--I might have died without beginning! You, lies, saved me. What does that mean?

She lay back in her chair and the mirror fell to her lap.--I have lost so much hair ... black, lovely ... don’t think of that, that is not thinking! All you must fall as the hair fell. Fanny’s eyes closed. She slept.

* * * * *

She came to waking with her head forward and her hand upheld, watching her face in the glass. Clara was in the door.

--Did my looking at her asleep ... how she has grown old!... make her raise the glass like that to her shut eyes? Then they opened. Clara was afraid of the displacement her thoughts might make: she moved in her room and sent out words in it as if the air were tight with some subtle, feeling substance easily overflowed.

“How are you, dearie?... Been sleeping?”

She laid a bunch of violets in Fanny’s lap.

Fanny smiled, her eyes and her hands clasping the flowers thanked her.

“I’m so much better. Where have you been?”

“Just shopping.”

Fanny had asked no such question before. Clara sensed beneath it the significant stir of her friend’s mind once more into the outer world. The outer world! What was going to be when Fanny once took note of her own world? She could not talk, for she was afraid. She drew a chair beside her in the sun, and held her hand and was still.

“You are looking better. I have a broiler for you. _Now_ you must begin to _eat_.”

Her stress stroked a wish: Fanny should eat long, must lose herself for a long time in eating.

“I have been thinking,” Fanny said. “The sun’s so good, I’d like to walk in it.”

“Dearie, it’s cold and raw out.”

“I know it is.”

“It’s only good in a warm room ... like this.”

“I know.”

Fanny’s hand clasped over Clara’s, silencing her. They sat in silence. With gazes long and almost parallel they thought of the sun that was good only in a warm room.

“My room,” thought Clara.

“Whose room?” thought Fanny....

“Clara tell me, ... you were not shopping. Why can’t you tell me where you were?”

“Dear, when you’re well--“

“I am well now. A little weak, but well. Didn’t you say yourself--“

“I’ve been with him.”

“You needn’t hide it. Don’t you think I know?”

“Yes, Fan. But it’s all so untrue, since you are here.”

“He must be good, never to come around.”

“He knows all about you ... and he won’t come--until I tell him it’s alright. He _has_ been good. He has left me alone. Well--he knows if he didn’t--“

“Tell him to come,” said Fanny.

Clara jumped up. She was afraid and uncertain. She knew not why she was so. “I must see about dinner.” She tossed off her hat and was gone.

* * * * *

It was a little flat. The dining room, the living room, the bed room, were compact and warm in dull brown, rose, blue. They were retiscent rooms, stiff proper little places furnished as with sedate conventions. Naught of vice, naught of abandon about them: they had no strength but they were full of ease. Like married old ladies, they were at rest on something very sure. Fanny did not understand them. But in her fever she had taken and used them as a babe its nurse.

Fanny and Clara ate, almost in silence. Fanny’s half chicken ... she made her friend take the other half ... was a luscious problem. She must eat it fast ... before it got cold or spoiled ... it held her like a spell in its succulent evanescent glow. It lay in the white plate the color of sunstone.

“Since I have been here,” she said, “no one has come to your place. No one. You’ve broken up your whole life because of me. Dear Clara ... that’s a hard thing for me to know.”

“I’ve had no time for my friends. I’ve had too anxious, too wonderful a time, nursing you, Dear.”

“I was very sick?” Fanny smiled. “When I looked in the glass today I knew that. I’m an old woman, Clara.”

The girl shook her head. “Don’t talk that way!” Her eyes were full on Fanny with a joy that was not denial. She did not mind. “You are not old,” she said. “But you’re mature ... somehow I suppose, next to all us, you must seem old to yourself. You are ripe, Fanny. You are glorious.” Her face glowed with the hard repressiveness against her feeling which was her only show of feeling.

“Come, now ... to bed.”

She helped her to undress, diffident but sure: the gestures of a nurse swathed in a mist of sentiment of a bridegroom. She smoothed the covers: she placed a hand on Fanny’s brow pressing her head within the pillow, folding the soft quilt at her chin. She did not kiss her other than so, with her hands. But once, in those gigantic days of the shadow of the Church, of the shadow of what else that had come and was to come! had Clara’s lips touched Fanny.

* * * * *

Fanny lay in Clara’s bed ... for a month Clara had slept beside her in a cot. And Clara, by the low table lamp that drooped above her shoulder shedding a bloom upon her neck, read aloud a story....

Words were like pebbles against an iron wall. They rang upon a sudden sense in Fanny of the bed she was in. Bed large and deep with hangings of lavender, bed all about her like strong arms of a mother she had never known yet hers!... Clara sharp within it ... sharp breasts, sharp thigh, sharp tenderness of stomach: and the vague black manform looming!... this bed about her. Its arms were warm and were hostile. There was care in them, mother’s care, and yet they had no sense in their great balm of what she was they shielded. Fanny lay ... the words of Clara reading against her were futile ... in the arms of an alien creature who had given her birth. Being of shame, being of denial of herself, and yet she was its thing. Fanny knew the ineffable rightness of her lying there, of her healing there: of this monstrous mother. From this she must suck life, from this which was of alien flesh and spirit she must build herself. Strange angry mother ... her own!... holding her life and lifting her above it.

Words of Clara were little clangors, shells of sound far off. Fanny lay ... Clara’s bed! Clara’s bed and his!... enswooned in great arms muffling her and feeding. Very white....

She saw black earth, earth breaking against rock. In a crevice of stone through loam, through rotted brush and last year’s leaves she saw a root, swollen and livid-red, thrust a small green shoot: upon it pendant a cupped bud like a pearl. She saw in a Spring of sweeping clouds above a steaming earth, a blood-root blossom....

The clouds were gone, there was mist. There was earth lost in feathery warm mist. There were bursts of trees budding ... the feathery mist ... the blood-root.

* * * * *

Waking she saw this room.

Clara’s cot empty. With covers thrown back it held in its sheets the impress of her body. Shades drawn. A purblind light soiled from its passage through the grey-brick airshaft lay on the blue and lavender like smut. A gilded radiator buzzed and spat....

Fanny heard Clara in the kitchen getting her breakfast. The negress maid did not appear before eleven: and this morning Clara was going to New Jersey to see a married sister who was very ill.

She stood in the doorway. The sooty shade of the room lay in her face, filling the folds of resolution under eyes, beside her mouth, with a harsh darkness.

--She is not well. She is not happy! Clara looks herself.

--And the room--it is itself.

Fanny felt salience in the ugly morning ... for the first time felt salience about her.

--It’ll go. You’ll put up the shade. You’ll cover up these beds ... sheets speak. Some of the sunlight from across the way will filter in. Sun lies sometimes. These true shadows for seeing where I am will go. Fanny could not smile.

“You’re still half asleep,” said Clara. “Want to sleep some more? Lucy could get you breakfast later on.”

“No. I’m awake. You bring in the little table. Let’s breakfast together.”

“In here?” Clara’s smile softened the shadows in her face.

“Yes. Right here. Do!” ...

She felt she must face this room, this heavy stifled room, this weighty fact of where she was and with what. She must eat this room with her breakfast....

It was hard to swallow. Her throat was dry and was full. Above her the chandelier came down in a tawdry twist of gilt from the dim ceiling. The gilt flaked, and she saw black iron.

“Does it taste good?” asked Clara.

She looked at Clara.--God, how dare I pity her! You are good. What you have, you have given me.... “Yes, Dear, it tastes good. You made it. It tastes of your hands.”

They ate ... the breakfast, the room.

“Give me your hand!” Fanny clasped it across the table. A bit of toast it held fell in the sudden sally and the butter smeared the palm. Fanny opened the palm, she held it full against her mouth. She kissed the grease and the flesh.

“I am eating you,” she spoke.

Clara’s eyes were frightened. So she laughed.

“You dear!... Could you eat some more toast?”

--How do I know what I eat? God, you insult us. If we must feed on dirt Why give us love of the Clean? Why give us fear of the dirt If we must feed on dirt? Since we must eat and eat Why give us knowledge?... What do I eat? If I must feed on You God, why do I forget?

* * * * *

The whole day alone, she promised to herself. Lucy in the other rooms would intervene a little: nothing was perfect. Yet Fanny felt that this was good. She was at ease in her armchair. Soon the sun would sweep into her place. And Lucy had the musical quiet of her folk, she really did not interfere more than a cat might ... a useful cat who would bring her her lunch on the portable table and her drops every three hours. Lucy had a soothing grain, almost like sunlight ... a sort of saffron practicable sunlight.

“Ev’thing a’right now, Mis’ Fanny?”

“Yes, Lucy. Thank you.”

The girl swayed on her little haunches, holding her hands across her breast.

“It’s gone to be a fine day. That’ll mak’ you fine, Mis’ Fanny, right soon again.”

“I wish I was as fine as you.”

“Aw Mis’ Fanny!” Her hands beat out in protest ... glad gaunt hands stripped by their work of flesh, and yet the music of them lived in their bone and their gesture. Lucy went off, her soft shoes patting like the cushioned feet of a tamed panther.

The door closed to the kitchen; Fanny was alone. Lucy would seek her den and fill it with steam and suds, wrap a red rag around her head and fall to work with an occasional cry like a wild beast musing: lost in a sort of virginal ecstacy which Fanny loved, of work and dreaming.

--She’s diligent! If she were German, wouldn’t I say: No one but a German could be so thorough? And she’s a negress. White blood yes ... but it dilutes, that’s all, the mellow flow of her life. O you superior Lucy! Yet she’s colored.

Fanny thought of the ugly prejudices which still lay rooted in her mind. She could praise Lucy if she patronized her too. Take away the condescension and at once she looked into a pool, misted by childhood fears and girlish passion, of black distrust.

--No use thinking of all that. I believe I had a mind: it might have amounted to something, too. A woman’s mind at work ... as a woman’s mind ... not as a lawyer’s or a doctor’s ... like some men’s minds: what’d the world have said to that? Well, it’s too late. My mind is a wreck also. It keeps on going, like an engine, broken and off its track, ploughing the earth and itself. Going ... and going. Who knows though? Perhaps it is not off its track. Perhaps my way is not a two-rail track over a flat plain land. There are other dimensions.

--O I must have faith! That is the terrible thing ... how in my weakness my faith went also. Faith and strength seem to go together. That’s a good sign, is it not? Proves faith is not born of weakness. My faith takes _power_. It’s hard work. Come back!

--There is nothing else. It is inevitable. Like a tree that grows. And has its seasons. What does it know about them? ‘Now I burst into blossoms ... now I am in leaves ... now I am stark and cold.’ I am ashamed. Weak failure! Rescued by Clara, living on Clara, in a flat some man gave Clara. Shame!... Well, it is Winter. Didn’t Leon know that it all meant something?... Did he foresee a thing like this? What would he say?... Harry was wrong. O I am sure of that. I am the answer to Harry. What did he know of Scripture ... of Jesus? We have taken Christ and his name. What have we done with him? What more than the Jews who refused him? Are they Christ, themselves?... Why do I think so tenderly of Jews?

--Leon? One man.... If Edith were his, not Harry’s, would she love me? You are nine years old, my beloved. I can see you. I can see you so clear because I see you naked. What clothes have you on today, going to school?... Mrs. Parker’s School. That wouldn’t change. Motherless child, you have a mother. Can’t you feel ... O you must _feel_ your mother!...

--Suppose she could see her mother! No ... not with your young eyes. How could they understand? Fanny shrank in her chair....--Thank God, I am hidden away.... But my name? Let it stand. Some day perhaps, since she is my own, she may have eyes that can see me....

--No. Never! That is all past.

She knew that this was past. She knew there was in her still living, that which could not bear that it was: a part of her that held the memory and hope of her child close to her breast, sucking yet giving her warmth.

--My little girl! As you grow, you become smaller beside me. For I grow so much faster. My little girl! Will you catch up with your mother?

The mother saw her naked. She was willowy supple, tender like a flower. Her flesh was cream and crisp, it was like the meat of a fresh peach.

The mother saw her clothed. She stands in a blue gingham frock, almost hidden away by a blue and white checked apron. But the black stockings were there and the tight sleeves and the loved white neck. A dark braid fell across her shoulder, tied with a stiff blue bow.--Her hair is not dark! Mine ... mine is black. Smile at me. _Where is her face?_

Fanny was troubled: she saw her child again. She wore an apple green mulle dress very clear and clean as it hung straight from her shoulders. The loved white neck! pulsant with breath of her child. She curtsies. There was a flounce at the hem: and at the end of the puffed sleeves was a ruffle. Edith’s bare arms! She wore white stockings, little canvas pumps.--She is thin!--_And her hair? and her face?_

Fanny shut her eyes and her hands waved with pain before them. She knew these dresses were her own! She saw her child in her own girlish frocks.... And her hair? It was golden ... but it would get dark.--As dark as mine?

--Does she have my frocks and my hair? Through Fanny’s mind passed dresses she had worn: for romping and for dancing, for lessons and for parties.--I have forgotten not a single one. Are Edith’s really the same?

She was moved. She moved against her emotion.--I do not see her! _Your_ dresses--not her _face_! Has she the same frocks? Fanny knew this could not be.... She knew there still lived within her that which needed to play with the sweet fancy that it was.

“But no,” she murmured. “In no way be like me! Edith ... to save you from that ... come, look at your Mother!”

With her daughter’s eyes, Fanny beheld herself.--I am not hateful. She was a little woman, breaking and bewildered with flood of a world within her heart. She was a little woman tortured in the uses of a Hand that would not leave her alone.

--But I don’t see an end.... _There is no end._ I do not see a growth.... _There is no growing._ ... Let me rest here quiet. I am still weak. Too weak to assemble my thoughts. What if the room is Clara’s ... Clara’s lover’s (is there at least love here?) What do these things mean, beside the truth that I am quiet?

The sun sent a sudden shaft under the cornice of the opposite house. It lay in a cold glare, gradually milding, on her.

So Fanny gave up thinking.--Why am I so hungry, having done nothing?

Lucy cleared the table ... folded it.

“O it was good, child!”

“Thank you, Mis’ Fanny.”

“No, Lucy: leave the table. Bring me the cards.”

“Yes, Mis’ Fanny.”

Fanny played _Canfield_. And even this was beyond her. She was amazed to find that she had placed a red Jack under a red Queen: over there was a black Three under a Five! “I am skipping chances and making horrible mistakes.”

She shook her head. “How dull I am!” She was helpless against it.--Stupider than Lucy. Duller than the stupidest person in the world. She smiled. She knew that the reason was that she was filling with a Light.

--When I was pregnant with Edith, sometimes I was like this.

She fell back in her chair, and shut her eyes.--What is it this time? She slept....

The bell awoke her. Her nerves jangled bright and disparate like the three tones of the electric bell. Lucy appeared.

“Why Mis’ Fanny ... it’s some frien’s o’ Miss Clara--“

Fanny’s words were swift action. “Did you send them away?”

“No ’m, I didn’t yet. Ah--Ah tole ’em ter wait. Should Ah--?”

“Let them come in. Tell them Miss Clara’s friend is here and will be glad to receive them.”

Lucy stood suspended in the unheard-of formal words of this lady whose value she sensed. By her face, she understood. She went out.

Fanny’s awareness was sheer above the drowse of her chair. Her eyes commanded her face: they were suddenly young.

* * * * *

The door opened. Two women ... Lucy shut them in, and they were three together.

One was a girl, short in her coat of black velours, all black except the gleaming face under black eyes, black toque: all round and yet her eyes watched Fanny sharply. Hostilely. Beside her a tall lank woman, very blonde, rose like the embodiment of the strange stroke in the round girl’s eyes.

They stood, Fanny got up.

“You must come in. Clara’s away for the day. But I’ve been so eager to meet Clara’s friends.”

The taller one nodded.

--What does she recognize, that she nods, in my words?

“My name is Sennister--Susan Sennister. This is Miss Liebovitz.”

Fanny took a hand, white in its feel beneath the long glove, and took a hand small like a child’s, warm and ruddy: gloveless.

“Do sit down.”

Miss Sennister looked at her companion. “Guess we got time, Tessie?”

“Sure we have,” she smiled. “We really came to have a glimpse of you.” Her smile was rounder.

“I’m glad,” said Fanny. She looked at Susan Sennister, to make her also smile. It would help matters. Miss Sennister smiled. But the smile did not help. It hurt.

“I have been sick.... Probably you know. And Clara’s been an angel.”

“She is an angel,” said the tall woman, as if Fanny had not meant it.

“O ... she’s a good thing,” said Tessie Liebovitz. Her black eyes lay on Fanny’s.--There is no misunderstanding! They were soft. “We love Clara,” she said. “We say yes ... just automatically ... to Clara’s friends.”

“Thank you,” Fanny looked sternly at Susan Sennister. “That’s a beginning at least.” She wanted to smile. This woman was so very stiff. She must be very stern.--How can I tell? What are they?... She went on: “I say Yes to the friends of Clara--but with all my heart.”

“Have you been here long?” asked Tessie.

“Very long!”

“We heard her speak of you, before she brought you here,” said Susan. Then she settled back in her chair. Something within her was released. She pulled off her gloves. Her shoulders slackened. “That don’t prove anything, of course.” Her smile was different ... sweeter in its hurt. “Clara’s like all of us. We are good pals. We have a lot of secrets ... trade secrets we chew over. That gives us an air of being close. But a real confidence ...? Not us!”

“O I don’t know,” said Tessie.

“That’s just it--you don’t.”

There was a pause. Fanny was in the sun ... feeling herself within it strangely, unfairly warmed against these two. She wanted to warm them.

“Won’t one of you take this chair? The sun’s so good.”

“We’ve had more of it than you,” said Susan Sennister. “Stay where you are.”

There was another pause filled now with three smiles that were unstrained.

Fanny’s head was light.--My! I am weak. There was a dim strip weighing above her eyes, on her brow. Beyond, in back of her head, she was light. So that her head seemed tilted toward her eyes. She saw these women.--I can be comfortable with them! They are strong: they could comfort her. Tessie Liebovitz chatted. Her own lips moved. She said nothing. But they were moist....

Then she saw: Long black earth. A man was standing still. He had gnarled hands, all else of him was young. He had clear-grey eyes, he had bronzed hair and beard. His cheeks were hardened by hot winds, but his lips that were free of the beard were soft and red against the showing of white skin.

She saw him clear upon the long black earth.--_He is Jesus!_

Many people passed him. She did not see them. But she saw the eyes and hands of Jesus go forth quietly to each.... They passed. The eyes and the hands of Jesus came back to themselves. The earth was harder and harder. The earth passed by him. Villages and cities passed. Altars were shut against his hands. Priests were shut against his eyes. The houses of the great passed him shut. And the earth grew blacker....

The earth was very black. A tree, blasted by lightning, thrust its ruin against a purple sky. The earth was very black. And Christ stood on it underneath the sky, and far from the solitary tree that twisted leafless over the horizon. Christ raised his arms, but his eyes looked down upon the barren earth. He was changed. He was twisted like the tree. He was shaped like the tree. Like it he was broken and bent from stanchioning purple sky above a barren earth. But he was white. And his beard was red. He had no hands, he had lost his hands even as the tree its leaves. His feet were buried underneath the ground.

A woman was before him. In a scarlet robe, against her breast, she held a boy.

“Lord,” she said, “this is my child. He drives me each day into the Marketplace with paint on my lips.”

“Why do you call me ‘Lord’?”

“Are you not Lord of us all?”

The black earth bloomed. Jesus was gay, he was a clear young man. With his two hands he touched the shrouded hair of the woman and it streamed like chrysoprase.

“Your child has blessed you,” he said.

She parted her robe, it was green also: it fell away and she was naked before Jesus. Her belly was silken smooth, her breasts thrust up like buds in a new Spring: she had born no child and she had known no man. Before Christ her body was sweet like a lily at dawn.

Fanny pressed her brow with her two hands, and saw the quiet women. They had stopped talking. They looked at her deep, and their voices had lagged away.

“O ... you will have tea!”

“Thank you, No. I’m afraid--we tire you. We’d better go. You’re not too strong yet.” Susan Sennister got up.

Fanny was warm in their understanding, and was ashamed. “O don’t go! You make me feel--I’m a bad substitute for Clara. Please!”

Susan sat stiffly, then she relaxed.

“You know,” she said, “it seems to me I’ve seen you before.”

“And I’ve seen you!”

“When was that?”

“O ages,” said Fanny.--Am I mad? “Before we were born? And you too, Tessie Liebovitz. You were singing.”