Part 11

"Put that paper away," said Betty Thomas in her fresh, ringing voice. She wore a grey skirt and a burnt-orange sweater that moulded to the ample curves of her bosom. "I'm going to make Nancibel play some Bach or something with me... You people are getting morbid sitting around with these dirty yellow sheets all day."

"You're right, Betty," said Nan. "Will you have some tea?"

Betty Thomas shook her head, smiling.

"D'you mind if I open the window, though? The air's splendid outside, cold and smells of spring."

Nan had brought out her violin.

"Let's play ... I haven't practiced for three days."

Fanshaw sat by the window shivering a little in the cold air. The sound of the violin being tuned rasped on his ears. Then they started playing a solemn, circular tune that made him think of a minuet, and today made him twitch all over with impatience. He got to his feet and tiptoed out. Something about the two girls' absorption in the music annoyed him. He walked down the stairs and strolled across the Fenway where a few nursemaids were wheeling babies about in the late afternoon sun.

He crossed a bridge over a railroad track. The sound of a train whistle in the distance sent a pang through him of helpless nostalgia for travel and railway carriages and the smoke of stations and the unfamiliar smell of hotel rooms. He got so little of all he had longed for before he died, Fanshaw was thinking; and what I long for, how little of it shall I get! He felt tears welling up within him.

At the corner where he waited for the Brookline car some workmen were repairing the track. Under baggy blue shirts the muscles of arms and shoulders moved tautly. A smell of sweat and rank pipes came from them. Wenny would have wanted to be one of them, redfaced spitting men with skillful ugly hands. The men who had dug the grave had been like that, men digging everywhere were like that; strange how through all the tense idiocy of the funeral, and Wenny's father and mother very solemn and professional, and the father's little speech to the effect that he believed as he believed in God Almighty that his son had not died a suicide but had been done to death by some low companion or other, he had felt that the only people there Wenny would have liked were the two hickory-faced men with spades who filled in the grave, their thick backs bending and straightening as they shoveled in the reddish dirt. Fanshaw suddenly pressed his lips hard together as he remembered the undertaker's man in black broadcloth unscrewing the silver handles from the coffin before it was lowered into the grave, and Wenny's father in black broadcloth eloquently reading the burial service, and the rattle of the first shovelfull of dirt and stones on the coffin.

The car stopped in front of him with a shriek of brakes.

Fanshaw sat stiffly in the rattling streetcar that smelt of cheap perfume and overcoats and breathed out air, staring unseeing out of the window.

"O, Muriel, isn't that suicide case dreadful?"

A girl's voice from the seat ahead roused him. Two blonde girls in tamoshanters were bending over a newspaper.

"That boy never killed himself, I'm certain," said the other girl.

"Do you think he was murdered?"

"Yes, deary, I do, by the husband of the woman he had wronged ..."

"But, Muriel, he didn't wrong anybody ... He killed himself for grief because a Back Bay beauty spurned his love."

"Lot o' piffle, that stuff ... I wouldn't kill myself for any man."

"O, but Muriel, you might. Think, if he was a duke or something in disguise and dreadfully handsome, with curly hair and a strong, silent face."

"Like fun I would. Have a peppermint."

"O, but Muriel, don't you think it would be just wonderful to have something like that happen ... a suicide or something? Of course it'ld be just terrible, but ..."

A smell of chewed peppermints filtered gradually back to Fanshaw. The streetcar had speeded up noisily, so that he could no longer hear what they were saying.

* * * *

"I wonder, Nan, if death doesn't make one feel how very acutely one is alive, the thought of one's own death, or the death of someone beloved," Fanshaw said, turning suddenly to Nan, seeking out her eyes. It had been on his tongue all day, but somehow he had not been able to say it till now. He was tingling hot with the excitement of saying it.

"Or do you mean that we feel in ourselves the dead person alive?" Nan's eyes flashed green in his.

"No, no, Wenny wouldn't have meant that."

They sat on Fanshaw's overcoat, their backs against a rock. Behind them were patches of sprouting emerald grass in the clefts of rocks and rows of shingled cottages, shutters still fast for the winter. At their feet the surf hissed and rattled on the pebbly beach. The sea was slate-grey with an occasional whitecap. From the deep indigo line of the horizon cumulous clouds steamed up heavy and flushed with spring, with a hint of rain in their broad, shadowy bases. In the back of his mind Fanshaw was remembering the scalloped wavelets and the blown hair and the curves like grey rose petals of Botticelli's waveborn Venus. What was the Latin that went it: Cras amet qui numquam amavit...? No, how ridiculous.

"What did you think of his father, Fanshaw?"

"O, impossible, completely impossible."

"I wonder ..."

They were silent a long time looking out to sea. Fanshaw leaned back with halfclosed eyes, conscious of Nan beside him, felt vague rosy contours, slender and leaping like the figures on a black-figure vase, dancing within him. He was very happy.

"Nan, I wish I could paint."

"Who's stopping you?"

"I suppose that sort of thing is pretty futile nowadays ... It would have been fine, though, to have been born in a time ..."

"Wouldn't Wenny have been angry hearing you say that?"

They turned towards each other and laughed.

"Wenny could have done anything ... Think that all his life should be gone, like a glass of wine poured on the ground."

"Such a Biblical metaphor." Nan laughed deep in her throat. "Maybe you and I are the ground, Fanshaw, who can tell?"

"Tares and thistles probably ... Don't you wish we were the lilies of the field?"

"That makes me think of the Reverend Jonas ... I wonder if all of poor old Wenny's troubles didn't come from that. Wasn't it a case of ... what's the quotation about the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge?"

"Don't you think it's a little vulgar to know the Bible so well?"

They both laughed. Down the coast the sun had burst through the clouds. The spreading rays brightened on the sea to great patches of heaving silver. Far out the sails of a schooner shone out suddenly like mother of pearl.

"O, isn't it superb here this afternoon, Nan? And think that I didn't want to come."

"I like it ... Suppose we stayed forever."

"After all the hideousness of this Spring?"

"Let's not talk about it... I won't remember it. What's today?"

"I think it's the twentieth."

"Well, for me it's May first. I won't be cheated of my spring. I'm just going to begin it all over again. And practice! Fanshaw, if you only knew how I was going to practice!"

"Look down the coast now ... With the dark clouds and the rays from the sun and the sailboat and everything, isn't it exactly like one of those funny old English engravings? Seascapes they used to call them. Even to the musty color."

Nan's arm was against his arm. She had taken off her tailored jacket, and her round arm, faintly brownish against his grey tweed, was bare from above the elbow. She wore a sort of tunic of dull red silk with a little black embroidery on it that left a deep V at her neck and fell suavely over her slight breasts as she leaned back against the rock. A dizzying flush went through him as his eyes followed the shadowed curve of her neck to the sharp chin and up the oval contour of her cheeks. Her lips were parted. Suddenly he found her eyes, green and grey, very solemn, looking into his. His heart was thumping like mad in his chest. He gulped and looked away over the sea that was green and grey like her eyes. A quick inexplicable chill went down his spine. It was a moment before he could speak:

"Nan..." He paused, his tongue dry, "Nan, don't you think we need our tea?"

"Yes, come along," she said hoarsely, and jumped to her feet.

"I was getting a little chilly." Fanshaw bent to pick up a pebble to hide his flushed face. He threw the pebble as far as he could out across the surf, caught up his overcoat and followed Nan. She had already started across the rocks. They walked round the edge of the harbor towards the town. Under the grey sky slightly marbled with sunlight the shingled sharp-roofed houses scattered unevenly among lanes and low picket fences looked out hostilely through the small panes of their windows at the sprouting tulips and hyacinths in their dooryards.

"Are we going to the redheaded woman's?" said Fanshaw after a while.

"Where else can we go?"

"Nowhere, I suppose, but she does give one such small cups." His voice faltered as he spoke. What a waste of breath were all these trivialities when he ought to be telling Nan ... If he could only catch the proper note, mock-serious, flippant, as one would have made love to a marquise with powdered hair in a garden by LeNotre. And Wenny had loved Nan. Fanshaw was trying to imagine some sulfurous boiling passion. He saw Wenny brown and flushed, sweaty and dusty like a runner after a race, break through all this stage scenery of New England houses and trees and sea, tearing it apart with hard knobbed fingers the way he'd pulled down the window curtains one night when he was drunk. Wenny's face dead, purple-splotched under the sheet on the marble slab at the Morgue. And Nan and I going on, springtime and autumn, breakfast and luncheon and dinner.

They had reached the teahouse. A coldframe under the window was full of violets. They settled themselves at a little table, breathing deep of the fugitive scent of the violets.

After all, Fanshaw was thinking, does it bring any more to kick against the pricks? A certain position in the world ... He could hear his mother's tremulous voice: Your beautiful, lovely career. Perhaps it's best for Wenny that he died. Wenny grown old, sodden, drunken, losing his fire and his good looks; Verlaine's last absinthe-haunted days; Lord Byron, a puffy-faced Don Juan; the verdict of history. Circumspectly, with infinite grace, they went about life in the eighteenth century, never headlong, half-cocked. Nan and I can be like that.

"Delicious, isn't it, to smell this mixture of tea and violets?" he said.

"I was thinking," said Nan, "How wonderful if he were only here. Isn't it silly?"

"I was thinking of him too," said Fanshaw.

And Wenny loved Nan. Yet, was it any more unbearable for him than just now when I looked in her eyes and a light like the light bursting out from the center in that Greco Nativity shot all through me? Never to have held a woman in your arms and kissed her. Pent up aching rivers ... Called for madder music and for stronger wine.

The redhaired woman leaned over to put a plate of toasted muffins on the table. Her round breasts hung heavy against the thin muslin of her blouse There was a faint rancid smell from her armpits.

She doesn't wear corsets; sloppy that modern style. Here comes the bride, here comes the bride... Make a formal declaration. A marriage license engraved with cupids and hearts. Wobbling from side to side ... Sukie Smith and I walking round the block singing that one Fourth, smell of lindens, and people laughing at us and asking if we meant it, until Mother stopped us. Here come the groom, straight as a broom!

"What a comfort tea is, Nan. I feel my tongue getting loose again. I wish we could talk about ourselves a little."

"I hate it above anything, but let's ... Do you know, Fanshaw, I think sometimes that the more people see of each other the less they get to know. You can tell a stranger anything, but a friend ..."

"It's awfully hard to say anything about what I really feel ... If we only had the Eighteenth Century code of badinage."

"On ne badine pas avec l'amour."

Fanshaw felt something like terror chilling his spine. He was tapping with a teaspoon on the table. Nan looked straight at him with narrowed eyes.

"That's what I meant, Nan, I ..."

"But why not after all?... Why not play with love to keep it from playing with us?" cried Nan wildly. The radiance of her eyes hurt like a too bright light.

"O, Nan, what are we going to do about ourselves, you and I?"

"Fanshaw, whatever happens, remember that my music is terribly important to me."

"But life is more important to us than anything."

Nan put her hand out to him suddenly across the table. He pressed it gently with long, white fingers. He felt his carefully balanced restraint tottering. When he was very small once he had tried to balance himself on the fence of the back yard above a rosebush in flower, and somehow the drone of the bees and the fragrance of the dull carmine flowers had made him dizzy, and he had lost his balance and tottered and swung his arms wildly. Then he had fallen and lain crying on the path among the fallen petals, his face all scratched and bloody from the thorns. He patted her hand gently. Neither of them spoke.

"Dear Nan," he began when the silence had got to swirling fearfully about his head.

"There are the Turnstables," said Nan sharply. "They are coming in here."

They got to their feet. Mrs. Turnstable, in a long motor coat, came up to them, followed by her blonde son and daughter.

"Why, Nancibel, how delightful to run upon you here. And how do you do, Mr. Macdougan? Why, this is luck ... Isn't it delicious here today. Our first real spring day."

"Hello, Cousin Nancibel."

Chairs scraped. Another table was pushed up. Under cover of the clinking of more teacups being brought and Mrs. Turnstable's musical voice talking about what a dreadful spring it had been, Fanshaw sat silent, feeling his frenzy of excitement ebb deliciously. This was saner. Control. Control.

"O, Mr. Macdougan, have you seen Prunella? Such a beautiful play; I'm sure you'd like it. I've been twice, and I am taking the children tomorrow. So romantic and dainty ..."

"It's a Pierrot play, isn't it?"

"Yes, I was wondering if the veritable commedia del arte can't have been something like that."

"Why very probably."

While he talked Fanshaw was furtively watching James Turnstable's thin pink and white face. The boy was eating toast and staring at Nan with worshipping blue eyes. At length when she turned to him and said: "More tea, Jamesy," he grew red to the ears and stammered, "Please, Cousin Nancibel." An attractive kid, Fanshaw was thinking. O, the cycle of it.

"There'll be lots of room ... We'll all go back to Boston together in my car," Mrs. Turnstable was saying. "Don't you love Marblehead, Mr. Macdougan?"

* * * *

Fanshaw's mother sat by the library window looking out into the garden that was full of the fiery chalices of Darwin tulips.

"Once I'm well, Fanshaw, we must rebuild the garden. There aren't any paeonies. I've always wanted some of those beautiful yellow paeonies in the garden. You must get me some next time you see them in a flower shop."

"I will, indeed, Mother," said Fanshaw from the easy chair where he was reading.

"What are you reading, dear?"

"Just a thing about Umbrian painters."

"Come here and tell me about it... You never tell me anything about your work any more."

Fanshaw moved to the window ledge beside her chair and stared out into the garden.

"Mother," he said, without looking in her face, "what would you say if I were to marry some day?"

"But then we couldn't go abroad this summer, could we, dear?"

"I'm afraid we aren't going to be able to do that anyway."

"Why?"

"Because I'm afraid you won't be quite strong enough, dear."

"How ridiculous, Fanshaw. Of course I'll be well in a couple of months. How long is it now since Dr. Nickerson said I'd be well in a couple of months?"

"It's nearly a year, Mother dear. Of course he did not say that definitely ..."

"You wait and see how quickly I'll get well ... But, Fanshaw, I don't believe in a boy marrying too young."

"I'm nearly thirty, Mother, that's old enough surely."

"Your dear father was thirty-five when he married me. And, Fanshaw, there are so many things we'll want to do together when I get well. And if that girl loves you as she ought she'll wait for you years if need be ... And the expense of the wedding and all that ... O, I think it's an extravagant idea."

"I'll think about it, Mother."

"O, darling, I've got such a headache."

"Here comes Susan with your medicine, dear. That'll make you feel better."

Susan stood over her, showing her long teeth in a smile.

"Here's your tablet, mum, and I'm bringin' ye a cup of malted milk right away.

"Thank you, Susan," said Mrs. Macdougan with a wan frown. "And be sure to make it sweet enough. It was just horrid yesterday." Susan's eyes met Fanshaw's. She smiled tolerantly as she smoothed the grey hair back from the old woman's forehead.

* * * *

There was a Hellenic purity about the sunlight along the river that afternoon, Fanshaw was telling himself, something that made one think of Praxiteles and running grounds at Olympia. The stadium in the distance across the meadows and the white bodies of the rowers in the shells stretching and contracting to the bark of the coxswains stood out like the reliefs on a temple against the azure and silver sheen of the sky and the river. From some birches by the river the notes of a song sparrow tumbled glittering. On the wind came an indefinable mushroom-scent of spring. Fanshaw's mind was full of suave visions of the future that evolved rosily like slow highpiled clouds. He would get a scholarship from the department on which they might live in Italy for a year. Extra money might be made appraising and attributing things for some art dealer. There would be Spain and Greece and North Africa. Magazine articles might appear about pictures and places. They could get a villa somewhere with lemon trees near the sea, breakfast in the morning leaning over the balustrade watching the bronzelimbed fishermen draw their boats up on the beach below; long strolls in the moonlight through overgrown gardens of myrtle and cypress, and Nan, dressed as she had been that night at the Logans (she would always dress that way--like a Renaissance princess), in his arms, silken and shuddering.

Fanshaw felt himself flush as he walked with slow strides along the turf by the river.

And Wenny had loved Nan. Perhaps it was through his death they had been brought together. The ways of destiny, Fuerza del Destino, by Verdi. Perhaps they could afford an apartment in one of these places by the river. The Strathcona. Fun it would be decorating it. And Wenny had loved her. That's how I felt towards him, I suppose. No harm, now that he's dead. This afternoon the Attic gleam of rowers in the sun, swallows circling in a blue sky glittering as with mica; if I could paint I would do him against such a background, hair curling crisp about his eager narrow forehead, eyes laughing, lips winesmudged and full, brownly naked like the Bacchus in that picture by Velasquez, defying the world.

Fanshaw was twirling some pink clover blossoms between his fingers, occasionally sniffing at them. The sense of Wenny's presence became suddenly intense to him, as if he could feel the hard muscle of Wenny's shoulder against his arm, as when they had walked together. He closed his eyes for dizziness.

He opened his eyes and looked about him. Round a bend in the river at the end of a silvery blue reach was a bridge and beyond the fantastic pile of the Abattoir with its tall bottle-shaped chimney. A rough smell of singed hides came down the wind. Fanshaw turned into a path up the hill towards a shrubbery behind which showed the crowded obelisks and crosses of the cemetery, crossed a wooden bar and found himself wandering among neatly laid off grass plots and gravestones with the dust of the stone cutting still on them. He passed a mock orange in bloom and remembered how he used to breathe deep the fragrance from the bush at the corner of his mother's lawn in Omaha until he almost swooned from it. That fancy that Wenny had once had that all the tombstones ought to be effaced and cemeteries turned into amusement parks with dancehalls and rollercoasters and toodling calliopes. There was a smell of lilacs ... When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed. Perhaps that was what had made Wenny say that the smell of lilacs made him think of death. Then he was staring at the newest stone:

DAVID WENDELL: AET. 23

The Rev. Wendell, as Nan called him, had thought the Latin was appropriate to a scholar. On the reddish mound new grass fine as hair was sprouting. How little any of it had to do with Wenny. On the next grave a stalk of frail paper-white Madonna lilies trembled in the wind. It was in the time of lilies Pico della Mirandola had come to Florence and in the time of lilies he died, having failed in his great work of reconciling Christ and Apollo. Wenny would have been like that. O, if more people had only known him, if he had lived where there was an atmosphere of accomplishment instead of futility, his name might have rung like Pico's to the last syllable of recorded time.

"How do you do, sir?" came a wheezy voice from behind Fanshaw's back; he turned and found an old man with a pert, wizened face in blue cap and uniform standing beside him.

"A friend o' the party buried there, ain't you?" went on the old man.

"Why, yes, I am."

"I thought I'd recognized ye from the funeral," said the old man brightening up. "I guess you'll be a-noticin' that they's been tramplin' an' settin' on it."

"How frightful! No, I hadn't noticed it. But who would do such a thing?"

"O, they don't mean no harm by it. You see there ain't lights here."

"You don't mean they are body snatchers?"

"Lord no ... It's just young folks. You see, the watchman just can't make his rounds fast enough to keep 'em from grassin' ... 'Ticularly in the spring. It'ld fair surprise ye to see the mashin' and the spoonin' that goes on in the most high-class cemeteries. Yessiree, it'ld fair surprise ye."

"But how do they get in?"

"How did you get in? Ain't no fence at this end."

"You mean they come and make love in the cemetery?"

The old man looked up sideways at Fanshaw and gave a wrinkled wink.

"There's nothin' they don't do, I'm tellin' ye. Worse than the canoes in Norumbega Park for barefaced grassin'. Listen to what happened last night. You know that there tower atop o' the hill? Well, we always lock it up tight, but last night the watchman forgot to, and when the patrolman made his round at 'bout midnight he heard 'em agigglin' and carryin' on up in the tower and found the door was open, an' he went up with his lantern... And they wasn't a bit ashamed or mortified... They just laughed, the fellers and the girls, when he ran 'em out of there ... I don't know what young folks are comin' to in this day an' age ... And they wasn't furriners neither."