Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Mother!” said Jicky.

“Is it true, Jicky?” she said. “Is it true — I have to be this way from now on?”

“Mother, Scotty’s here with me. You want to see him, don’t you?”

“How can I? Oh, no, how can I?”

“Dearest, Scotty’s your friend—”

This was the test, to try not to gloat when Scotty saw what had happened to Georgia’s looks, to try to feel sorry for him and sorry for her, sorry that the thing he had valued above everything else was gone, sorry that the thing she had been was blighted.

The door opened and he came in.

He gave one swift look as though the bottom had dropped out of something, and Jicky’s heart died within her. He must have cared then, to look that way about it.

Georgia’s voice from the bed, trying to be gay, pleading desperately, then all at once breaking off.

“Is — is anything noticeable? They told me it was the shadow in the glass. Oh, Scotty, I’m so afraid—”

He was standing beside her looking down at her.

“You know better than that,” he said softly. He reached over and put one finger to her brow as if in whimsical camaraderie.

“You’re — you’re marvelous. What did you expect? How could you be otherwise? You think just a little gauze and cotton is going to change you?”

He turned to look at Jicky and there was some kind of detached wistfulness in his eyes she could not fathom. And as they stole out of the room together, Georgia turned her face on the pillow trustfully up to the nurse. “He would tell me, wouldn’t he?” she murmured.

Jicky stood with her back to the closed door. “You’re a brick,” she faltered gratefully. “Poor Mother.”

“A woman will believe what she wants to believe,” he answered.

In the weeks that followed and the months they totaled, he never ceased importuning her to go out with him and she hardly ever went. There was always the shadow of this thing between them. The count had gone back to France, alleging pressing business matters, and was one man very different from another when it came to things like these, Jicky asked herself? Scotty might besiege her with telephone calls and drop in at every turn, but would he have turned to her if what had happened hadn’t — come between? She crushed the thought to her like ground glass and bled herself sick over it.

It was only the two of them now. The dreaded confirmation of her worst fears to be met with in keen strange feminine eyes would still be spared Georgia for a while. Her pleading had to be met too as well as Scotty’s on these occasions.

“Please, dear. Won’t you go with him for my sake, just this once?”

“But there’s nothing I’m fit to be seen in.”

“Wear one of mine then.”

“Oh, what’s the difference? I’ll look like a pig anyway.”

And then Jicky, unhappy to the core, going in to vent her dissatisfaction on him with the particularly ungracious comment: “Mother wants me to, so I’ll go with you.”

At the Lido one night in an atmosphere of cigarettes, aigrettes, and Lehar waltzes, he told her how much he cared for her and she began to cry, blindly furious at herself, without letting him see it, somehow. She would have killed him if he had noticed it. Her chin almost touching her chest, she studied the finely spun web of brilliants that constituted the upper part of her dress, a surface that at close range dislocated the rays of vision and went slightly out of focus, coruscating like some dazzling boiling substance.

This crowd of pretty things around him, such pretty things they were, and he could sit there looking at her guiltily sparkling lashes and talk this way to her? Every jeweled heel that touched the floor spurted its ice-like reflection downward into the heart of the glassy paneling. And women over their partners’ shoulders breathed not air but blue notes that stung their nostrils to a rhythmic frenzy. It was such a good looking crowd, such a good looking crowd. A bandeau of rhinestones and aquamarines fronted Jicky’s brow and behind it a strange swift prayer began to surge.

“Oh, God, make me beautiful in his eyes. Beautiful. In his eyes. In his alone.” And the ultimate admission, wrenched from her with a suffocating sense of humiliation. “Make him love me as I love him.” After which there was nothing more to be prayed for.

“I want you to say that you’ll marry me,” he said. “A man wants all the beauty he can get into his life and so — I want you.”

So he wanted beauty too. But he was not like her, not selfish; he wanted it from outside of himself. The thought of those long-forgotten mornings on the tennis courts came back to her, with her hair wind-blown and just a woolly white sweater on her. So he really found her beautiful after all. In that case, why, she must be, in some hidden way overlooked by everyone else until now. Perhaps in that tennis court sort of way, and without all these brilliants and this paint. It was up to her then. She would have to forget about being beautiful and just be beautiful. For beauty, she had heard, was in the eye of the beholder.

Jicky raised her head and looked at him and at everyone else as though she saw them for the first time. She forgave him everything she had ever done — her doubts and her jealousy and her humiliations. She could have forgiven him anything, for they were both alike in this: they were both beauty-mad.

Georgia was sitting up, the exquisite light from a cluster of electric grapes at the head of the bed tinseling her shoulders, when Jicky stopped in the doorway. This was a new Jicky. She held her head high; she was vibrant with courage and a new sort of vindication that still left her puzzled but was more welcome than she could ever know. The bandeau sparkled but under it you noticed the more lasting sparkle of her eyes. The fringe at her shawl dropped to the floor about her in a sort of gentle silver rain. She stepped into the room, carrying her youth like a chip on the shoulder. She took an amber-backed object from the table and put it in the drawer and shut it from sight.

“For us there’ll be no more mirrors. Mirrors lie.”

“Mirrors lie,” agreed Georgia. “They’ve lied to me all my life.”

Jicky turned around to look at her and the shawl dropped to her feet in a foamy pool.

“Mother, I’m beautiful, and I’m going to marry Scotty. Beautiful—”

She stood gloriously erect for a moment, then crumpled over across Georgia’s knees. Suddenly she burst out crying.

“He thinks I am, so I am. Oh, Mother, help me believe it; help me believe it! There’s beauty in me now, real beauty, where there was only wretchedness.”

They lay with their arms around each other, their cheeks pressed together like two children, staring over at a far corner of the room as though they could see themselves there as they believed themselves to be.

“I don’t blame him. Who could help loving you? Oh, if you could only see yourself as I see you.”

“And you, my dearest, you,” purred Jicky, “you’re beautiful. The most beautiful mother in the world.”

Said Scotty, a woman will believe what she wants to believe.

When he was eighteen, Gerald Jones found out things about himself. A gypsy woman told him, a gypsy woman with gold coins in her ears and cigarette-stained teeth and a cerise petticoat and an apple-green scarf about her head. He came across two of them trudging along by the roadside one day, and had pocket money with him, and noticed that they were noticing him.

“You a very good looking boy,” one of them remarked.

“Oh, sure,” he scoffed, but it didn’t make him angry nevertheless.