Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I began to enjoy the afternoon immensely. It was a delightful room and I felt slightly exhilarated, as if I were intoxicated on tea. Stanley had promised me that Sabrina could do a lot for me if I became friendly with her, and I seemed to be succeeding pretty well. She knew just about everyone, and though fortunately unliterary herself she really had quite a little influence — friends among all sorts of artists and writers. I began to be dangerously elated and I talked and laughed and brought out all my best conversational tricks. I pictured many more such afternoons to myself, maybe just Sabrina and me alone. She was beautiful enough, certainly.

Just as I had reached this pitch Sabrina turned to face me moving her body and placed her right hand on the left arm of her chair. I was watching her face and for a minute I was just conscious of the pale shape of her hand extending below the gold cloth. Then she suddenly lifted her fingers with one of her quick movements, and I quite involuntarily looked down at her hand. I had already noticed her left one — this appeared just the same hand, small and fine. Why did I keep on looking? There was something queer about that hand — I couldn’t tell right away what it was. There was no mark, no deformity. Good God! — the woman had a man’s thumb! No, not a man’s, — a brute’s — a heavy, coarse thumb with a rough nail, square at the end, crooked and broken. The knuckle was large. It was a horrible thumb, a prize fighter’s thumb, the thumb of some beast, some obscene creature knowing only filth and brutality.…

Well, I looked away very quickly and attempted to think of something light, something joking to say. But I was horrified. In the midst of that charming, sunny room, that friendly atmosphere, I was frightened. Something mysterious and loathsome had crept out of the night and seized me as I sat there drinking tea. Lord! and there I’d been — all ready to fall in love with the woman. I might even now; I still looked at her face and admired, although I could feel the perspiration of fear on my forehead. I tried not to look again, but I couldn’t keep my eyes turned away from her hand, as it lay there innocently enough on the chair arm. Was it my imagination? I looked — and saw on the back of the thumb, where it lay in the sunlight, there was a growth of coarse, black hairs.…

Finally Stanley said that it was time for us to leave. I stood up and my knees felt as if I had been sick and in bed for a week. Sabrina was smiling and I knew I could not keep myself from smiling back, from responding to her beauty. For a second there seemed to me something corrupt about that beauty. What was that phrase? “Flowers of Evil”—yes. And yet when I looked into her eyes I found my sinister thoughts denied and made ridiculous. “Will she shake hands?” I thought. “She didn’t when we came, maybe she won’t now. I simply can’t.” But Sabrina smiled and held out to Stanley her left hand, as a French woman does. It must have been her custom because he took it naturally enough and I did as he had done, bowed over her left hand, while her right hung at her side. She asked us to come again and Stanley accepted for us while I stood with my eyes fixed on her face, or Stanley’s face, anywhere except down at her right side, frantically longing to be gone.

However, I went back again, like a fool, led on by that woman’s unimaginable beauty and personality — and the thumb, too, for all I know, though I certainly tried to forget it. I felt that I had been wrong if I thought there was anything unnatural about Sabrina. Surely she was no more than she seemed — a charming, intelligent woman who had the misfortune of one ugly thumb. We talked so well together; we were, or might have been, so much at our ease. “Damn that thumb,” I thought, “I’m going to see as much of her as I can and maybe I’ll forget it.”

But it wouldn’t work. Every time I saw her I felt more and more a peculiar shivering fascination that made me look down at her hand, to those lovely fragile fingers and that horrible misshapen thing that was one of them. Yet I couldn’t blame her. She was the most natural thing in the world — the trouble must be with myself. Some morbid streak in my imagination, I supposed, something that took the slightest suggestion of horror and magnified it until my whole mind was filled with awful thoughts and dark shadows. “Now this time see that you don’t get theatrical,” I would say. Then I would sit beside Sabrina, just she and I alone, and I would begin again that struggle against the insidious spirit that seemed to overcome me when I was with her. I thought of dreadful things — if she should be in an accident, if something should happen so that her thumb would have to be taken off. I might have fallen in love with her — I surely would have, had not all my emotions been so bewildered and fevered with horror. I had never touched her in any way except always, at leaving, that slight pressure of her left hand. My mind dwelt upon what it would be like to touch her — to take that hideous hand and hide it in my own. I realized that all this was bound to lead me into something wrong, but I couldn’t seem to escape it. I kept on going to see her, knowing every time that sooner or later I would yield to my curious desire and touch that thumb — and I hardly cared what might happen when I did.

She asked me to see her more and more often and at last I realized that whatever was the meaning of my tangled emotions about her, she was in love with me. I couldn’t talk to her so easily after that and there used to be long silent places in our conversations. She would sometimes look at me with a sad, almost frightened look, and then I would swear at myself and wonder why in Heaven’s name I didn’t leave her as gracefully as I could and never come back. But there I would sit and brood, as if bound fast in some black prison, my eyes half turned away from her right hand which lay in the folds of her dress.

One afternoon in September I went to see Sabrina for the last time. She was in the same room where I had first seen her — the room hung with silk and lime-colored curtains, with a pale, soft sunshine coming in at the windows. She had on the same golden dress, and I’d truly never seen anyone look so beautiful as she did. She sat there, quiet and somehow arranged, with her hands in her lap. I was making desperate efforts to keep hold of myself, but every second I could feel a dark, choking rush of something — rage — madness — I don’t know what, rushing up from those unholy wells I guessed were in my heart. I sat quite near her. I longed to ask her to forgive my silence, to explain the thing — I thought that then I might have sat beside her calmly and have forgotten the old fear. I had just about decided to, when she moved so that her right hand was in the light, right under my eyes. I felt myself staring, but I couldn’t stop. Her thumb, that heavy, horrible thumb — it was a monstrosity. I put out my hand slowly and laid my fingers across the back of her hand. It was cool and soft — and then I felt that rough, swollen knuckle, those stiff, coarse hairs against my palm. I looked at Sabrina quickly and I found that she was looking at me with a peculiar tender look in her eyes and what I could only describe as a simper across her mouth. I have never felt the disgust, the profound fear and rage of that moment. She thought — well — she thought I was going to tell her I loved her.

I suppose that anyone except a fool, that is except myself, would have escaped forever from the dread and disgust of that moment. I suppose that anyone else who had seen that look in Sabrina’s eyes and that emotion so unconcealed upon her face would have been — delighted. I don’t know. I can’t even find the right words for my own feelings or an apology for my actions. Perhaps it was because I suddenly felt tired, sick to death of the whole affair. I’ve argued it out over and over again and pictured the whole thing, but I can’t make the ending any different. “Ridiculous,” you say, “morbid.” Anyway, I got up and left her without a word and I never went back.