The Favorite Game Read online

  “Why?” she demanded.

  The boy didn’t know why. He had expected to be accepted or refused, not examined.

  “Because you’re pretty.…”

  He said it like a question. Shell turned and ran. The grass seemed suddenly white, the trees white. She dropped the flowers meant for the fountain because they were white and dirty as bones. She was a spider on a field of ash.

  “Primavera,” said Breavman when he heard the story. “Not Botticelli — Giacometti.”

  “You won’t let me keep anything ugly, will you?”

  “No.”

  Besides, Breavman could not resist adding to his memory the picture of a delicate American girl running through the woods, scattering wild flowers.

  Shell loved the early morning. She asked for the room with the big east window which had been the nursery. She was allowed to choose her own wallpaper. The sun crept over the calico bedspread. It was her miracle.

  Apparently life was not all Robert Frost and Little Women.

  One Sunday morning she was in her mother’s bed. They were listening to a children’s programme. Gobs of snow, the size of seeded dandelions, were drifting diagonally across the many-paned windows. Shell’s hair, gathered by a black ribbon, lay tame and smooth over her chest. Her mother was fingering it.

  On the air a child was singing a simplified aria.

  “Daddy’s so silly. He says you’re all growing up so fast that the house will be too big.”

  “He’ll never leave his fish and chickens.”

  Her mother’s fingers had been leisurely twining and intertwining but now only the thumb and forefinger were at work, a few strands of hair between them. The movement was that with which the bargain hunter tests the fabric of a lapel, but more rhythmical and prolonged.

  She was smiling faintly and looking straight into Shell’s face but Shell could not make contact with her eyes. The movement made the hair impersonal. It didn’t belong to Shell. The blanket was moving. With the other hand her mother was doing something beneath it. The same rhythm.

  There is a kind of silence with which we respond to the vices, addictions, self-indulgence of people close to us. It has nothing to do with disapproval. Shell lay very still, watched the snow. She was between the snow and her mother, unconnected to either.

  The announcer invited all the boys and girls out there to join the Caravan next week, when they would take a trip to the far-off land of Greece.

  “Well, aren’t we the lazy things? Up you get, Miss Dainty.…”

  Shell took a long time getting dressed. The house felt very ancient, haunted by the ghosts of old sanitary napkins, exhausted garters, used razor blades. She had encountered adult weakness with none of the ruthlessness of a child.

  When her father, coming in red and jolly from walking in the woods, kissed her mother, Shell watched very closely. She was sorry for her father’s failure, which she understood was as much a part of him as his passion for miniature houses, his gentle interest in animals.

  It was not too many years before her mother began to exercise the inalienable rights of menopause. She took to wearing a fur coat and sun-glasses in the house at all times. She hinted, then claimed that she had sacrificed a career as a concert pianist. When asked on whose behalf, she refused to reply and turned the thermostat lower.

  Her husband kept her eccentricities on the level of a joke, even though her attacks on her young daughters were occasionally vicious. He allowed her to become the baby of the house, kissing her as usual before and after every meal.

  Shell loved him for the way he treated her mother, believed herself lucky to grow up in this atmosphere of married affection. His patience, his kisses were tiny instalments on a debt she knew he could never cover.

  A damaging consequence of this neurotic interlude was a rivalry between Shell and her sister. Their mother developed and encouraged it with that faultless instinct which people who live under one roof have for one another’s pain.

  “I can’t remember which of you hurt most,” she reflected. “Good thing you weren’t twins.”

  Shell’s father drove her to school every morning. It was his idea that the girls go to different schools. This was a wonderful part of the day for both of them.

  She watched the forest go by. She knew how happy he was that she had inherited his love of trees. This was more important than her own delight, and it ushered her into a woman’s life.

  He drove very carefully. He must have been unwilling to turn his head to look at her, he had such a precious cargo. He mustn’t have quite believed he had anything to do with her, she was so lovely, and he must have wondered why she believed the things he told her. When she was sixteen he gave her a car of her own, a second-hand Austin.

  The school was a continuation of the house. There were many trees and trimmed bushes, many weathered buildings or buildings constructed to appear weathered. The enrolment represented an impressive concentration of old money, so no one could accuse the authorities of pretensions when they disguised the new junior residence with an Early American façade.

  Its curriculum was not designed to produce artists, revolutionaries, or ceramicists. A Wall Street version of the little red schoolhouse, it trained girls to ornament society rather than question or subvert it.

  Shell was formal. She sat on the grass with a book in front of the library and arranged her dress over her knees.

  Let us say the dress was white and the book one of the interminable dialogues of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and let us say that this time her hair was bound in braids.

  If she wished to think about something she laid the book down carefully and leaned on one arm; perhaps with one finger she absently turned a page.

  She knew she represented something immortal, she was sure. She was the girl in front of the building. Her age in the foreground, her fifteen-year-old body, her hair in the intermittent wind, were instruments to praise the weather and the old stones. She knew this, so she composed her face.

  She must be still so that the unknown elderly man crossing the other side of the quadrangle, if he happened to glance towards where she was sitting, would see the perfect thing, the quiet thing, the girl before the preserved doorway, the scene the heart demanded. It was her responsibility. Therefore she was serious, and the world was crumbling into plastic.

  She loved the horizontal afternoon light. It seemed to come right out of the shrubbery, and, for precious minutes, right out of the ground itself.

  She must find a way to sit in that light.

  2

  Breavman was furious. He didn’t want to move the bed. He wanted to climb into it, hold her, and go to sleep.

  They had driven all day. He didn’t know where they were, probably Virginia, and he didn’t know the name of the tourist house.

  The woodwork was brown and perhaps the loose circus wall-paper hid sinister bugs. He was too tired to care. The last hundred miles her head had slept on his shoulder and he vaguely resented her defection from the ordeal of the road.

  “What does it matter where the damn bed is? We’ll be out of here by eight in the morning.”

  “I’ll move it myself.”

  “Don’t be silly, Shell.”

  “We’ll be able to see the trees when we wake up.”

  “I don’t want to see the trees when we wake up. I want to look at the dirty ceiling and get pieces of dirty plaster grape-vine in my eye.”

  The ugly brass bed resisted her. For generations of sleepers it had not changed its position. He imagined a grey froth of dust on the underside. With a sigh he presented himself at the other end.

  “I offered to drive,” she said to excuse her energy.

  But he couldn’t bear to be conducted through the night, helpless by the side of the speeding driver. If he had to find himself hurtling down a highway, neon motels and hamburgers arresting him absurdly like those uncertain images that were always flashing in his mind, he himself wanted to be in charge of the chaos.

  “Be
sides, there’s something irreverent about moving this stuff around.”

  She pushed hard, knuckles white on the brass bars.

  It struck Breavman that they were the hands of a nun, bleached, reddened by convent chores; he had always thought them so delicate. Her body was like that. At first she might be mistaken for a Vogue mannequin, tall, small-breasted, angular, and fragile. But then her full thighs and broad shoulders modified the impression and in love he learned that he rode on a great softness. The nostrils of her face over-widened just far enough to destroy the first impression of exquisite harmony and allow for lust.

  Her remarkable grace was composed of something very durable, disciplined and athletic, which is often the case with women who do not believe they are beautiful.

  Yes, Breavman thought, she would have moved it with or without me. She is the Carry Nation of Evil Chintzy Rooms and I am the greasy drunkard smirking over my stack of Niagara Falls souvenirs. She learned to wield her axe three hundred years ago, clearing a New England field for planting.

  Now the bed was beneath the window. He sat down and called for her with two open hands. They held each other softly and with a kind of patience as if they were both waiting for the demons developed in the silence of the long trip to evaporate.

  At last she stood up, a little too soon, he thought.

  “I’ve got to make the bed.”

  “Make the bed? The bed is perfectly well made.”

  “I mean at the other end. We won’t be able to see anything.”

  “Are you doing this deliberately?”

  He was surprised at the hatred in his voice. Nothing had evaporated.

  She turned her eyes to him, trying to get through. I must read what she wants to say to me, I love them so much, he thought in a flash, but his anger overwhelmed him. He looked at the baggage to threaten her.

  “Lawrence, this is where we are. This is our room for tonight. Just give me five minutes.”

  She worked quickly, a kind of side-to-side harvest dance, and the sheets flew as if they were part of her own dress. He knew that only she could change the chore into a ritual.

  She puffed the pillows where their heads would lie. She removed one of the blankets and draped it over a hideous armchair, reshaping it with a few tucks and folds. Into the closet she lifted a small drum table complete with doilies, vase, and a broken trick box from which a scissor-beaked bird was meant to dispense cigarettes. She opened the wicker basket he had bought her and withdrew their books, which she placed carelessly on the large table beside the door.

  “What are you going to do about the sink? There are cracks in the porcelain. Why don’t you pry up a couple of floorboards and hide it under the carpet?”

  “If you’ll help me.”

  He would have liked to rip it from the wall and cause it to disappear with a magician’s flourish, a white cigarette gone, a gift for Shell. And he would have liked to wrench it from its grimy roots and swing it like a jawbone, completely demolish the room which she had begun to ruin.

  Shell put out his shaving kit and her own secret case of cosmetics which smelled of lemon. She opened the window with a little touch of triumph, and Breavman could hear leaves moving in the spring night.

  She had changed the room. They could lay their bodies in it. It was theirs, good enough for love and talk. It was not that she had arranged a stage on which they might sleep hand in hand, but she had made the room answer to what she believed their love asked. Breavman knew it was not his answer. He wished he could honour her home-making and hated his will to hurt her for it.

  But didn’t she understand that he didn’t want to disturb an ashtray, move a curtain?

  One small light was burning. She stood in the shadows and undressed and then slipped quickly under the covers, pulling them up to her chin.

  It’s a better room for her, Breavman thought. Anyone else would have thanked her. She deserved a goose-feather bed with the sheets turned down so bravely-O. Which I cannot give her because I do not want the castle to cover it, with my crest carved above the hearth.

  “Come.”

  “Should I close the light?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now it’s the same room for the both of us.”

  He got into the bed, careful not to avoid touching her. He knew his mood had to be attacked. Like the chronic migraine sufferer who doubtfully submits himself to the masseur who always cures him, he lay stiffly beside her.

  She had known his body like this before. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three days and when he came back his body would be like that, armoured, distant.

  Sometimes a poem would catapult him away from her, but she learned how to approach him, equipped with what he had taught her about her body and her beauty.

  It was a refusal to be where he was, to accept the walls, the clock, the number on the door which he knew, the familiar limited human being in the familiar limited chair.

  “You would have preferred it even dirtier,” she said softly. “Maybe even roaches in the sink.”

  “You never see them if you keep the light on.”

  “And when the light is off you can’t see them anyway.”

  “But it’s the time between,” Breavman said with developing interest. “You come home at night and you switch on the kitchen light and the sink is swarming black. They disappear in seconds, you do not follow too closely exactly where they go, and they leave the porcelain brighter than you ever imagined white could be.”

  “Like that haiku about strawberries on the white plate.”

  “Whiter. And without music.”

  “The way you talk you’d think we had fought our way out of the deepest slum.”

  “We have, but don’t ask me to explain or it will sound like the cheapest nonsense from an over-privileged bourgeois.”

  “I know what you mean and I know that you’re thinking I can’t possibly know.”

  She would reach him, he was certain. She would uncover him so he could begin to love her.

  “The mansion is as much a part of the slum as your horrible sink. You want to live in a world where the light has just been switched on and everything has just jumped out of the black. That’s all right, Lawrence, and it may even be courageous, but you can’t live there all the time. I want to make the place you come back to and rest in.”

  “You do a wonderful job of dignifying a spoiled child.”

  It was not that things decay, that the works of men are ephemeral, he believed he saw deeper than that. The things themselves were decay, the works themselves were corruption, the monuments were made of worms. Perhaps she was his comrade in the vision, in the knowledge of strangerhood.

  “You didn’t want to touch a thing when we came in here. You just wanted to clear a small corner to sleep in.”

  “Love in,” Breavman corrected.

  “And you hated me for remaking the bed and putting us where we could see the trees and hiding the ugly old table because all of that meant that we couldn’t simply endure the filth, we had to come to terms with it.”

  “Yes.”

  He found her hand.

  “And you really hated me because I was dragging you into it and you would have been free if you’d been alone, with morning a few hours away and the car parked outside.…”

  God, he thought as he turned to her and closed her eyes over all he remembered of her, she knows everything.

  3

  Miss McTavish was a tall, mannish Bryn Mawr graduate, ’21, who secretly believed that she was the only one in America who really understood the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  She also believed that the academic world was not worthy of the true Hopkins and was therefore reluctant to discuss her theories. The same superiority kept her out of the universities. She did not wish to participate in the donnish conspiracy against Life and Art.

  The same superiority plus a grotesque nose kept her out of marriage. She knew that the man sufficiently intense, wild, and joyous for communion wit
h her would be unavailable for domestic life, having in all probability already consecrated himself to the monastery or mountain climbing.

  She saved her passion for the poems she read in class. Even the most cynical students knew that something very important was happening in those moments when she seemed to forget them most. Shell listened like a disciple, knowing that the poems were all the more beautiful because Miss McTavish had such a funny nose.

  Miss McTavish liked to think of the Neo-Gothic library as her private home. On the way to the card index she floated over the bent heads, like a hostess presiding at a feast.

  One evening, standing underneath the tall stained-glass windows, she said something very strange to Shell. The glass images could not be seen, only the bumpy lead separators. If mahogany wood could be made translucent and used as a filter, that was the colour of the light in the large quiet room. It was winter and Shell had the impression that snow was falling, she wasn’t sure, not having stepped out since late afternoon.

  “I’ve been watching you, Shell. You’re the only aristocrat I have ever met.” Then her voice choked. “I love you because I wanted to be like you, that’s all I ever wanted.”

  Shell reached out her hand as if she had just seen someone wounded in front of her. Miss McTavish recovered instantly from her state of exposure and seized Shell’s extended hand and shook it formally, as though they had just been introduced. Both of them bowed slightly several times, and it appeared to an observer that they might be just about to begin a minuet. The image they made occurred to both of them and they laughed in relief.

  It was snowing. Without speaking they agreed on a walk. The pine trees beyond the Quadrangle were dark, lofty, and narrow as the windows in the library, shelves of snow on the limbs separating them from the night into rows of upright fish skeletons.

  Shell felt that she was in a museum of bones. She had no sense of the outdoors at all, but imagined herself in a sinister extension of the library. And she was already summoning the resources of pity on which she knew she would have to draw.