Читать книгу Wallflowers - Temple Bailey - Страница 4

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The gray-haired woman whom young Fiske had seen on the porch was Madge Claybourne. The two girls were her twin daughters. They had gone to a party. She would have the whole evening to herself. She welcomed the thought of solitude. She loved her girls, but there were times when she liked to be alone. And in these crowded rooms there was no place for withdrawal.

She went in through the long window, leaving it open that she might get the air. Then she snapped off the upper lights, leaving only a low lamp on her desk for illumination. It was a big desk, too large for the room. All the furniture was too large, massive stuff in walnut. A great table pushed against one wall, a heavy mirror over the table, two oil portraits in heavy frames, heavy chairs. In a bigger space one felt that the furniture might be effective. It needed high ceilings, a wide expanse of polished floor to set it off. These diminutive quarters demanded graceful things, gay and impermanent.

Mrs. Claybourne got out of her dress and put on a thin negligée. She made a pitcher of lemonade and set it with a glass beside her on the desk. Then, cool and comfortable, she wrote a letter:

“Sally, my dear:

I have just come in from my balcony. Or rather it is the fire-escape with a safety ladder which leads to another balcony. We are three floors up, midway in this big apartment house, and I have left the long window open so that I may get the air. Washington in June! Oh, Sally, Sally, I want to see ‘my own boughs blowing’! There are trees here, but the pavements are hot, the streets sizzling, the air dead.

“But this is no way to begin a letter. In the main I am content. I’ll talk about that later. The thing that is most on my mind at the moment is Stephanie Moore’s party. You remember I told you she had not paid any attention to the note which I wrote just after we came here. Well, quite unexpectedly yesterday, she called me up. She said she had heard her mother speak of me so many times and of our days at school together. She said she had been out of town, which would explain her not hunting us out before this, and she asked if the girls would waive formality and come to a little dance given tonight to a group of her young friends.

“The girls were utterly thrilled by the invitation, and for twenty-four hours they have been madly getting ready. And now they are off, and I am so glad to have them go. Life hasn’t been cakes and ale for them, and they have had more than their share of hardship. But we have weathered all storms, and shall weather those ahead of us, so I am not going to think about it, or dwell upon it, for nothing is ever helped by worry.

“The girls looked, to my prejudiced eyes, lovely. But I am not sure they were satisfied with themselves. Theodora says they lack the right stamp, whatever that may be. It seems to me that most of the young women who pass through the court below my balcony are appallingly alike. And if there’s any stamp it’s a rubber one. They all have slim boyish figures, round bobbed heads, and they wear their skirts chopped off at the knees, so that they have the look of little girls who have been made tall by some magical process like Alice in Wonderland. Many of them are wearing this summer striped cottons and silks, and they are as fresh and crisp as sticks of candy. I can’t tell one from the other, and I am perfectly sure that if I were a man and wanted to choose a wife, I’d be driven to play the old game, ‘One, two, three, out goes she, right in the middle of the dark, blue sea!’ Do you remember? The one who was pointed at when we said the last word was ‘IT.’

“Well, other times, other manners. Doady says that my ideas are archaic. Perhaps they are, and perhaps these candy-striped little creatures make good wives. When I see them coming back and forth in the mornings from the market shops, I marvel at them. Not many of them keep maids as the girls of our time did. Labor is too expensive. To save their pennies they patronize the non-delivery shops and bring home their own meat and bread and cabbages and tomatoes, and their little paper cases of cottage cheese, and pickles, and potato salad. It is as good as a play to watch them. The court is a grassy one, with a fountain-hose in the center, and the children of the candy-striped little mothers bathe under the hose on these hot days. They wear gaudy one-piece suits, red and green and blue and yellow, and they are as quaint as elves and as gay as butterflies.

“Oh, it is a far cry from Windytop, Sally. We could put all the rooms of our apartment in one of the old house. Yet if I ever voice my sense of homesickness, Doady says, ‘Well, at least this isn’t falling down on our heads.’ Which is one way to look at it, of course. We are fortunate to be here at all. But it seems to me sometimes that it would be heavenly to hear the rain drip through the leaky roof, or the storm rattle the shutters. Our apartment hasn’t any shutters, just screens and awnings, and a French window which opens out on the balcony.

“It is really a smart little balcony. It is about as big as one of the wire baskets old Mandy used to fry things in. Painted green and very spick and span. And there are forty-five others exactly like it. Everything is clean and compact and well-cared for, and there are flower-beds and flowering shrubs to beautify the court. The building itself has something the look of an English country-house with its gray gables and gray stone trimmings, and one feels there should be open country beyond. But there isn’t any open country, there is just a forest of other apartment houses, and in this one street are living more people than in the whole of my home town in Albemarle.

“I feel stifled sometimes in the city, but the girls love it. At least, Doady does. I am not so sure about Sandra. She laughs, pokes fun at all our makeshifts, but withholds her opinion. Our living-room is, you see, a bedroom at night, our dining-room is a slice off the kitchen, and the girls’ room is simply a cubby-hole, with two tiny beds in it. My own bed shuts up on the back of the living-room door in the daytime and is pulled down at night. When it is down, it literally fills the room. Sandra calls the nightly transformation ‘shifting the scenery.’ The whole thing seems to me rather like living in a tenement. No privacy. Apparently it has the stamp of approval for people of modest income, but it is incredible that any one can stand the close contacts for any length of time. No wonder divorces are rampant in this generation!

“My dear, you mustn’t think I am unhappy. I thank the good Lord every day for the comfort of my Government job and my regular pay day. I’ll try to make the best of things until the girls are married, and then I’ll come back, and if Windytop hasn’t fallen down in the meantime, you and I will live there together, and let the rain drip and the shutters slam, and adore it!

“Write as often as you can. It is like a breath of fresh air from my Virginia hills to hear from you.

I am ever your own,

Madge.”

Having finished her letter, Mrs. Claybourne put a stamp on it and tucked it in her bag ready to mail in the morning. After that she took a bath, put her hair up on pins, drew down the bed from the back of the door, made herself comfortable on her pillows, and with a reading lamp adjusted, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a book which one of the girls had brought from the library.

But her mind was not on her book. It was on her daughters, gay at their party. She could see them surrounded by partners, Sandra’s eyes shining. Theodora’s cheeks burning. Once upon a time she had been like that. How long ago it seemed! She had worn a rhinestone pin high in her hair, copper-colored like Sandra’s. And her first ballgown had had a bustle! She smiled to herself at the vision she had conjured up. And how she had waltzed with Bob Claybourne! And now all that was gone, and some day her girls, those lovely young creatures with shining eyes and burning cheeks, would be dull and gray like herself, and glad of the comfort of an evening alone in a let-down bed!

Oh, well, she mustn’t indulge herself in self-pity like the heroine of a Freudian novel. The end was not yet. There might be years ahead for all of them at Windytop. And if not ... perhaps the good Lord would make Heaven something like their old home ... with Bob coming in with the roses he had gathered.

She fell asleep over her book and dreamed, not of Heaven and her husband, but of her darling daughters dancing with winged feet! Partners fighting for their favors! The world theirs for the asking!

It was late when she waked. She picked up her book and began to read, but she found her dreams interposing between the pages. She had a feeling that at the very moment her lovely daughters were in the midst of triumphs. She could hardly wait for their coming. They would have so much to tell her.