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- Herausgeber: Olympia Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
ELLEN HUNTER: Well married; Educated; Intelligent; Sensitive; Introspective; And bored. Until Zanic came into her life. She didn't like his ugliness. She didn't like his raw strength. And she fought with every tense nerve of her senses the brutal peasant vitality she found so delicately seductive.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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The Fascinator
Theodora Keogh
This page copyright © 2007 Olympia Press.
CHAPTER ONE
It was a few days before Indian summer and the sky was blue. It reached between the buildings and outlined them with an incredible azure. On Manhattan Island these blue days are miracles. Unattended, unforeseen, they dawn over the tidal river; they set across the Hudson. They flower untroubled by the city's breath, the staining breath of man.
Yet Ellen's breath, as she walked along Fifth Avenue, left no visible stain. It did not show before her face as it passed lightly and silently between her lips. She was walking rather slowly with her hands in a muff and looked demure, even old-fashioned. Ellen wore no hat and the swirling gusts of autumn wind blew her hair about. At one moment she would be mysterious, with falling locks around her eyes, and then, in an instant, the lines of her face would spring out bold and clear and the mass of her short hair would streak back as though fingers had pulled it behind her ears.
Autumn is the time of year for exalted thoughts. The languor of summer, the crushing nostalgia of spring are left behind, while winter is a vague area, like the blank spaces on a map. Such thoughts mount up into the azure which receives them as though they were birds. The falling leaves lend them a measure of sobriety and of regret, but do not maim their soaring wings.
Ellen was making good resolutions. She sometimes tried to better herself in this way and today was perfect for it. And I'll read at least one book a week this winter,” she was telling herself with virtuous relish, “a good book, that is, on a subject which Sandy chooses for me so we can have discussions, and I'll be more motherly to Janey and not act like one woman to another, and I'll be tidier and perhaps”—here Ellen quickened her pace from joy— “perhaps if I do all these things they'll let me have a son.”
Ellen said 'they' because she did not believe in God, but she had never quite been able to purge herself of the sensation that someone was watching over her, or rather, around her, everywhere, and that this presence would barter for the good of her soul.
The Hunters—Ellen, her husband Sandy, and their daughter Jane—had just returned to New York for the winter. During the summer they had rented a cottage near the Hudson, and Sandy had commuted by means of a community motor boat for businessmen. Ellen, for one, was glad to be back in the city. They had been leading such a quiet life that the very crowds in the street acted on her blood like wine. It was a complete change. What with the fresh sparkling morning, the hurrying people, and her resolutions, she felt light-headed. Ellen shrugged and pressed her hands together in her muff, a sign of excitement and happiness. As she walked she looked into the windows of the big stores that line the Avenue. Here innumerable goods were displayed. Startlingly new, they showed from store to store a similarity which seemed to take no thought of disguise. Then too, the women who shopped in them formed a sort of army and wore its uniform proudly. Sometimes those who went to less expensive shops tried to imitate this uniform, but they were easily found out. A glance sufficed. The army was clad in furs—stoles, this fall—in open-toed shoes with high heels, and in precious stones squarely set. As for the gowns beneath the furs, Paris had laid a hand on them somewhere, but it had not helped much.
Now and then a creature who was utterly different would appear among this throng: a stern Spanish woman, for instance, of the Moorish type, drawing her brows together; or a cheap little tart, like a flower in a red skirt; or else the demure Ellen with her pale face and yellow eyes. Male glances shifted toward these oddities, since even Solomon, so it is told, yearned for strange women.
Ellen entered one of the shops at last, but not without noticing in the windows that she was being followed. Who cared? Inside the shop-which was very well-bred in tone and had that reputation on the Avenue-she paused to look around, and then, almost indolently, bought some gloves and a scarf. Taking the elevator, she went up to the third floor where there was a special little shop inside the big one. It was supposed to be exclusive and it was certainly expensive. Ellen bought all her dresses here, for Sandy's earnings as a young attorney were comparatively modest and he allowed Ellen to accept a dress allowance from her mother.
The woman in charge of this shop within a shop had been to school with Ellen. Her name was Geraldine West and she liked to be called GW because it made her feel important. Big executives were often called by their initials. It meant one didn't have the nerve to call them by their first names, but they nonetheless escaped the stigma of Mr., Mrs., or Miss. It was at once snobbish and comradely, a sign of the times and of their success therein.
Geraldine greeted Ellen by drifting swiftly forward. Or was it a drift? Geraldine was never certain. No matter how much she practiced, her own rather stumpy walk lurked somewhere behind it all.
“Ellen!” she exclaimed. “How nice to see you again.”
“Hello, Gerry,” said Ellen indifferently and without smiling.
'Bitch,' thought Geraldine angrily. 'I've always hated her, and what an ego to wear no make-up and no hat either! She's not that young and pretty.'
Geraldine herself was heavily painted, and although virtue was almost a sickness with her, she looked ready to walk the streets. There was, however, a dry caked quality to her face; nothing glistened, just as nothing glistened in her courageous and virgin heart which the fashion world had begun to wither. Ellen and Geraldine were the same age, in their late twenties, yet Ellen had a youth that, in the other, was missing or gone by. Ellen's eyes sparkled. Her skin shone where it was stretched over bone—that thick camellia skin tinged with ivory, which did not tan easily, which never blushed. Ellen's lashes and eyebrows were lighter than her hair and because she never darkened them they gave her a candid Quaker look which was belied by her sinuous gestures. Then too, there was a deep curve in the set of her lips. This curve was remarkable in a mouth that was not thick, and it was pointed up today by the fact that she wore no lipstick.
“I suppose you've come to get a few glad rags,” said Geraldine in a bright but rather dragging voice. “I've been thinking of you lately and I have my eye on several.”
“I'd like to see an afternoon dress,” said Ellen, looking vaguely around the smart little salon with its stuffed chairs. There was a table at one end, generally used for a display of some sort—gloves, or sweaters, or imitation glazed china figures.
Seeing Ellen's glance turned in that direction, Geraldine said: “Aren't they divine?” And she added in the manner of one who holds a trump card: “Zanic's, of course.”
Zanic was one of those phenomenal people who, after many years of obscurity, suddenly strike it rich. He was a sculptor. His talent was in the simple, manly, and even strong quality of his work, but this talent was no longer apparent. To become popular he had had to forget it, and he had done so seemingly without distress. In a world bounded by the abstract and the photographic, there had been no place for it. Zanic's work now was a sort of Pierre-Louys version of antiquity. It was flavored as well by the current ideal of America. Women, fighting in the commercial world, encased in their girdles and their uplifts as in armor, loved Zanic's conception of them. Men simply thought it sexy. It stirred up their faltering virility crushed by financial worry or by the reports of sexologists.
Ellen had never heard of Zanic. Now she went over to the table and fingered the little china objects with a smile; girls whose length of neck and thigh was improbable, gazelles who resembled women. The Arcadian wistfulness was like a sweet syrup poured over them. It amused Ellen to imagine her husband's horror were she to bring one home. Sandy was devoted to the arts in a serious and intellectual way. Ellen's gaze now flicked Geraldine as if to say mockingly: 'What a gullible fool you are,' but although her eyes spoke, there was no thought behind them, none for Geraldine, anyway.
“Come on into the dressing room,” said Geraldine, “and I'll bring you a selection.” She led the way briskly and Ellen followed with her indolent walk.
Left alone in the little booth, Ellen pulled the dress over her head and turned around like a cat. The mirrors on three sides of her reflected the perfections and imperfections of her form now clothed only in a silk chemise. This garment, which had been made by hand in France, and worked with many difficult points and stitches, was now old. Nonetheless it was very becoming, and beneath it Ellen had negligently gartered her stockings above her knee.
There was something delicate and feline in Ellen's figure. Its very faults seemed attractive. But there was nothing faulty in her small, perfect bosom which tilted upward and needed no support.
Geraldine returned with several dresses over her arms. 'Oh, God,' she thought with irritation, 'why can't she wear a girdle and slip, like everybody?' 'Everybody' meant those other chosen few who came to buy their dresses in the personal-service shop. “You're a big girl now. You should wear a foundation,” she said, as though making a joke.
Ellen glanced through the mirror into Gerry's face whose painted mouth was set in a smile. “It's different when you're married,” she said, “and have to look nice undressing.” She said it without malice, but Geraldine would never have believed it, and thought the words shocking as well as mean.
Ellen chose one of the dresses quickly and a seamstress was called for alterations. “I want it for this afternoon,” said Ellen, “because I'm going to a cocktail party.”
“You shall have it,” Geraldine agreed, “and if you're going to Ray Sullivan's by any chance I might drop in, so we'll see each other there.”
Ray Sullivan was a well-known fashion photographer. Geraldine did not really think Ellen was going there, but she wanted to make Ellen's party sound stodgy by comparison and to show that she, GW, was in the swing.
Ellen disappointed her. “That's the name, I guess,” she mumbled, struggling into her dress. Then she ran her fingers through her hair which was naturally wavy and fell into place at once. “He's a client of Sandy's,” she said.
Geraldine saw her to the boundaries of the salon which was her territory and, after Ellen was out of sight, said to her salesgirl: “Can you believe what some people think they can get away with? That mousy woman!”
And the saleswoman answered: “Goodness, GW, I feel naked before I put on my face in the morning.”
“And I bet she didn't even know who Zanic was,” said Geraldine. “The way these married friends of mine let themselves go!”
Ellen, sauntering out into the street, was struck once more by the matchless temper of this fall morning. Everything stood out so clearly: the women in their furs, the brilliant cars, the heavy buses. They seemed to have a lucidity, an extra dimension, somehow. That man, for instance, leaning against the wall, with his ugly livid face and a rose between his teeth. The flower, which he had bought nearby, was of a dark and brilliant red. Its blossom lay against his cheek like another divinely beautiful mouth set beside his own. The difference was grotesque. He stayed there immobile, leaning against the window of the store, and looked into Ellen's eyes.
To hide a pang of hysteria or dismay, Ellen put her muff up to her face. Then she turned and walked quickly off.
CHAPTER TWO
Ellen and Sandy Hunter lived at Seventy-fifth Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. Their apartment was on the third floor of No. 161 and stretched from back to front. The house had once been the rather modest dwelling of a single family, the kind of a place a couple took when they were starting to make money and hoped to go on to better things. It was a house of passage, a place to alight between the flat-over-a-store of early marriage and the sumptuous dream of reclaimed Riverside or Fifth Avenue. This, of course, was before cities got overcrowded and before the cost of living put private houses more or less out of reach. Yet No. 161 had retained its character even now that it was broken up into flats, floor by floor. It remained unloved, gloomy, dry, merely a step towards better living. Its only attraction was an atmosphere of hope which mingled with the air in its rooms. As houses go, it was neither old nor new, comfortable nor wretched, beautiful nor ugly. Built of a yellowish grain that had never been stone, it was five stories high and had a sooty terrace on top with a room leading out to it which was now termed a penthouse. Ellen had often coveted this penthouse which had more character than their own floor. The Hunters had three rooms, not counting the kitchen and bathroom. The largest room was in back and was Janey's nursery. It looked out on a drab little yard consisting of black pebbles and a solitary locust tree. The caretaker's wife was the only person ever seen in the yard and she had once used it for hanging her washing. As the tenants had objected, she had stopped but she had taken a revenge. She was now rigorously strict about the yard. She would allow no dogs in it and no children. She had even forbidden the beautiful Angora cat belonging to the second floor tenants, who was so discreet that he might have been an angel. Thus the yard had become a dead place and a place of strays. Even the tree seemed to gasp for air beneath its blanket of soot.
Outside one of the windows was an old-fashioned fire escape. By leaning out and over it one could see other yards, each with its high wall and each following the trend of the block. Those near Lexington were almost gardens, while those on the other side of No. 161 were increasingly filled with refuse and festooned with washing. The exception was the school playground next door. Here, if one were far enough up, one could watch the decorous games (not play) of the children, with nuns weaving amongst them. Halfway down the block from Lexington Avenue a Roman Catholic church stretched its grey walls and a big stained-glass window was lit up at night for Janey's pleasure.
At the front of the Hunters' flat there were two rooms: one very small, where Ellen and Sandy slept, and the other a fair-sized living room. The kitchen, which had once been a pantry, and the bathroom were in between and opened onto the hall.
Ellen had returned from her shopping and now stood at the living room window, watching for Janey to come home from her nursery school. The children from the Roman Catholic school next door were playing in the street during their recess—rather, the boys were playing, and the girls, like a different kind of animal altogether, were talking and whispering in groups. Ellen wondered if it was their religious education that had turned their attention prematurely inward, had made them more aware, more afraid, more secret and inhibited so that they would no longer romp and jump and throw their limbs about.
Above the shouting of the boys at play there sounded interminably the rumble of the Third Avenue El. Everybody said the El was doomed. They had already cut the ends off it. Personally, Ellen was sorry, and she took it whenever possible.
Seventy-fifth Street between Lexington and Third was, like the yards, in complete harmony with No. 161. It was a transition, a path leading from poverty into, not wealth, but un-poverty. The houses near Lexington were fairly large and some even had garages beneath. A few trees lined the sidewalks. Towards Third the houses grew darker, grimmer, with fire escapes on their front sides and meager shops on their ground floors. The trees, as though withered by the blast of the El, grew first stunted and then stopped altogether. The sidewalk itself became rougher, made of slate slabs instead of cement, and the restless dust upon the surface of the slabs was never swept away.
Ellen pressed her nose against the pane like a wistful child; a trick, in fact, that she had practiced since early years. Ellen's nose was amusing rather than pretty. It was flawed by a little cleft in the end of it, and when she laughed the nose laughed too. The top wrinkled and the nostrils quivered convulsively.
She caught sight of Janey walking with the maid Abigail. Janey wore a scarlet velvet coat that had once belonged to Ellen herself, and her short red velvet arm was stretched up to meet Abigail's brown wool one. The coat was very brief, so that Janey's legs, like match sticks only paler, gave an impression of almost frantic energy.
Soon the door opened and they were in the flat.
“You've been squashing your nose again,” said Janey. “It's all square.”
Janey had an extremely high voice and spoke in a manner which her mother sometimes found affected. She had a little triangular face with dark eyebrows over blue eyes, like her father. Her skin was white and fragile. It had none of the thick camellia texture of Ellen's, and was threaded by the network of her veins. At four years old she was very coquettish and had a sort of melting approach as though all her bones were wax. But she could be capricious too, sly, and even witty.
Ellen did not love Janey without reserve. She recalled a cleaner break between childhood and womanhood herself and was irritated by the extreme femininity of this baby girl. Yet Ellen tried to treat her daughter with respect. “Did you have a nice morning, darling?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” said Janey, “but Billy was very rude.” Janey pronounced it 'wude' and Ellen could not help correcting her.
“Rude, r-rude, not wude,” she said, crouching down to be on a level with her child.
“I think wude is nicer,” said Janey, lowering her eyes.
“Nobody likes affected children,” said Ellen, helping Janey off with her coat.
“Daddy likes me,” said Janey. “He likes me to say wude.”
This was so true that Ellen had to laugh. Sandy looked fatuously upon his little girl.
Janey, seeing her success, gave a flirt to her whole body, like a bird after its bath, and ran off to Abigail in the kitchen. Ellen rose, holding the small, scarlet coat in her hand. 'I must have been treating her woman to woman again,' she thought, 'since she answered me that way.'
A feeling of idleness, a mainspring in her character, came over her and the exaltation of the morning drained away. It was as though movement itself generated energy in Ellen's body, and perhaps it did. Only by activity could the slow pumping of her heart be speeded up, and then her step would quicken, her eyes would shine, she would throw back her head and laugh. Because Ellen had energy when it was needed, both mental and physical. She had a quick mind and was perfectly coordinated in a muscular way. Yet when there was no demand on her, she relaxed. She would lie on the bed, sleep or read a magazine, sunk in the somnolent lethargy of a cat. At such times the whole rhythm of her blood was slow, for Ellen had a lazy heart's beat.
The austere Abigail disapproved. Ellen would let her come into the room as she was lying down, where another woman would have pretended occupation. Ellen, in fact, had very little shame, that stifling curse of many sensitive natures, and from this one might deduce that she was not sensitive. It was hard to tell. Lying on the bed with her hands relaxed, Ellen's eyes would narrow and in their yellow depths a dream would struggle with repose.
“Are you unwell?” Abigail would ask sternly. Then by way of a reproach and to make herself more bitter, the servant would pick up the gloves, the coat, or even the dress which Ellen had let drop where she had taken it off. “Why do you do that, Abigail? It's extra, not paid for at all,” Ellen would ask in an idle voice.
“Because I don't like to see untidiness, Mrs. Hunter. It's a bad example for Janey.”
“On the contrary, Abigail, it's a good example. My mother was too neat, and always fussing about it. That's why I'm so messy. And Janey will revolt in turn and be the opposite from me.”
“I don't know where you get your ideas,” said Abigail. “It just beats me.”
But both Abigail and Ellen enjoyed these talks, otherwise Abigail would not have entered Ellen's room where, strictly speaking, she had nothing to do.
Abigail and Ellen lunched together at the table in the living room; the kitchen was too small to eat in. Janey was by then in bed and supposedly asleep for an hour. Sometimes Ellen, who was fond of wine, would buy a bottle and press Abigail to drink some. But Abigail never would. She was Irish and had seen father and husband disintegrate through drink. The servant was a good-looking, middle-aged woman, slim, with grey hair. Her only visible fault was a terribly shiny nose. Ellen longed to tell her about it yet she never had. Abigail put vanity in the same category as wine. She was very religious and went to Mass each morning before coming to the Hunters.
Sometimes, to tease Abigail, Ellen, dressed to go out, would ask: “Abigail, do I look nice?”
“If you mean decent,” Abigail would answer, “then I must tell you your dress is too tight behind.”
“I don't mean decent. I mean nice,” Ellen would insist. “Nice. Pretty, glamorous, attractive.”
“Those words are no concern of a married woman, if you want my opinion.”
“Yet you're forever telling Janey how pretty she is.” Ellen would try and draw Abigail out.
“Janey is a little girl.”
“And what about when she's sixteen?”
“Sure she'll have a right to look pretty then too, and be told so by all until she's married.”
Ellen pounced. “Ah Abigail, how immoral! That's just a man trap you're setting with virgin bait. You want her to attract a man in the most disgusting way, like a pot of honey with bees and then, once he's caught, no more honey. It's glue instead. Why shouldn't a woman be desirable after her marriage? It's her duty.”
“Words, sinful words! You're very fond of them, aren't you, Mrs. Hunter? And of twisting them around until the wickedest ones are in front.”
By such conversation, trivial and absurd, their relationship flowered. For Ellen had it in her to like this kind of talk ('servant talk,' her mother would have called it). She far preferred teasing Abigail with her narrow thoughts to conversing on intellectual subjects with her husband's friends or women of her own age and upbringing.
Today, curled up on her bed, Ellen felt the sensation of life slipping away from her—a tide running over her, over her eyes, over her brain, over her youth. It was not unpleasant and she was not unhappy. 'After all,' she thought, 'I have done very well so far. Sandy, Janey, a life many people would think perfect, and a future too. There are still so many things to long for in the world.' But she could not think of them at the moment and the tide kept on flowing, muffling the slow beat of Ellen's heart.
CHAPTER THREE
Sandhurst Hunter came home at six, just as Ellen was bathing her child. He hovered at the bathroom door awhile, admiring the tender little body that he had helped to make. Janey was very pretty in her bath and stretched out her arms to her father.
“I have a balloon,” she said, “but it's on the ceiling.”
“That's fine,” said Sandy.
“It isn't fine,” contradicted Janey impatiently. “It's on the ceiling.” Janey often found her father incredibly stupid, even if she did love him the best.
Sandy, smiling vaguely, went away to the front room where he poured himself a drink and sank onto the sofa with a sigh.
Sandy was a tall, thin man, but not very well built; he had a narrow chest and a slightly protruding stomach. He looked well in clothes however, almost elegant. As for the rest, he had one of those Gothic faces which seem to be produced by colleges in America. He had sharp features, slightly too ascetic and fine-drawn, yet regular and well-cut. His blue eyes looked through glasses of which one lens was the stronger. The glasses were tortoise-framed and added an almost frivolous note to his face, but they hid Sandy's one beauty: thick, long, dark eyelashes which contrasted with his light-colored hair.
Sandy was a good man, too, a hard worker and perfectly honest. He was also slightly overstrained, pulled too tight for his age. To be in his position in the law firm, to make what he was making and to keep his future in view, Sandy had to work long hours every day. A wartime setback of three years had cost him secret and valiant efforts. There were parallel scars on his left fist where he had gnawed himself to keep awake at night, and he had ruined his blue eyes forcing them to focus when they were crossed with exhaustion.
These struggles are known by those whose education and career have been martially interrupted; who must thrust themselves back into a pliable mould after everything, soul, mind and body, has hardened. In Sandy's case they were augmented by his marriage. He had fallen in love in the classic sense: passionately, purely, once and forever. He thought if he could not have Ellen he would die, and he had won her. She represented all the poetry, all the music, all the beauty of the world for which he now had so little time. Yet he was very clear as to her defects. He found her lazy, ignorant, eve [...]
