Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith Page 20

  Agnes watched his hands come together on the keys, the fingers striking with precision, like arched hammers. He had rather unattractive hands, she thought, not at all what she considered a pianist’s hands should be. They were short and squarish and their backs round with muscle. Then, aware that he was playing something, she forced herself to listen. “Bach!” she said.

  “First prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier.”

  “Yes!” Didn’t he think she knew that much? When he had finished she asked, “Do you know any Chopin? I adore him.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said casually, and began a Chopin nocturne—the very one she had been practicing!

  “Exquisite!”

  “It’d sound better if the piano didn’t ring so. The felt’s worn down apart from the tuning, you know.”

  Agnes hardly heard. She had never listened to the nocturne played with such thrilling clarity, such surety of rhythm. She felt herself grow taut from head to foot. “Oh, now you look right!” she whispered.

  Klett smiled suddenly at her. It was the first time she had seen him smile like that, his face lighted with his own music, with a ­half-preoccupied tenderness in his eyes. In the close-fitting jacket his arched back, which bent with his playing, his head, round in back and balanced with the crest of hair in front, made a study in reposeful concentration.

  “You belong at a piano! You are like a bird that has left off beating its wings—to glide in air!”

  He laughed appreciatively. Smiling, lifting his hands high, he played the Chopin Mazurka in A. The tassels danced on the pink lamp. He held the pedal down until Agnes felt swept away on melodious clouds of ringing, echoing, ear-dazzling sound. She wondered what the neighbors, the Carstairses and the Hollinses on the other side, thought of the burst of music coming suddenly at dusk from the Steinach home.

  “Klett!—Excuse me.” Margaret’s voice was drab and ugly, from another world. She stood halfway down the stairs. “Klett, you know that’s the very thing I don’t want you to play yet.”

  “All right,” Klett said, looking down at the keys he still lightly touched. But he had stopped the melody abruptly.

  “Awfully sorry, Agnes.” Margaret gave an apologetic laugh. “You don’t know it yet and you’re just hammering in those mistakes for all you’re worth. Play anything else, Klett.” She went back upstairs.

  Agnes smiled and wrung her hands. “Isn’t that annoying!”

  Undaunted, Klett had begun a quiet Bach praeludium. He continued with something Agnes thought was Scarlatti, though it might also have been Bach.

  “Lovely!” she said once or twice, but Klett did not look up or smile again. Agnes was content to watch him, absorbed in his own easy continuous playing, though she kept wishing he would pay some attention to her.

  “Anyway, last year at the fall concerts I found one Scarlatti on the program gave more headaches than all moderns put together,” Margaret was saying, adding another pat of butter to her baked potato. “Mummy, I didn’t tell you what happened to Schindler this summer. You know, the assistant professor of violin with the horrible temper?” She burst out laughing.

  Agnes laid down her fork and looked at her sister almost tearfully. She might have allowed their guest to talk, but there she was babbling on and on, so busy stuffing herself she would never notice a look. Agnes ­didn’t like her new housecoat so much after all, she decided. It was too tailored, not the least in her style, as certainly a sister should have known. Margaret had brought it from San Francisco and, suddenly remembering it, had insisted that Agnes try it on and wear it to supper. Upstairs the maroon flannel and white piping had looked deceptively trim and attractive. Now, looking down at the broad cuffs above her slender hands, she felt it had been part of a deliberate scheme to make her hideous. Small wonder that Klett had not troubled to talk with her! She wished she were in bed in her old satin dressing gown, even if its lace was torn. Who appreciated anyway what it cost her to come down to supper, when almost every day of the world Alantha served three meals to her in bed?

  “Oh!” Agnes gasped in a tone of surprise and outrage.

  “Darling!”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Steinach.

  Agnes had bent her head low over her plate. The searing vertical pain along her spine spread into both hips. It was hot, unreasonably cruel, yet tingling like something not quite there. It made a familiar pattern, like an inverted T with a fuzzy crossbar. “It’s—all right.”

  “Can I do anything, Miss Steinach?” Klett asked, half standing.

  She shook her head. And indeed the pain had already gone, so suddenly she could almost doubt it had been. It always departed suddenly, but left her so weak, so stricken. “Upstairs,” she whispered.

  “I’ll help you, Agnie,” Margaret said.

  Agnes teetered to the right, however, and took the arm Klett proffered. She left the dining room with bowed head, the new housecoat trailing the ground, like one on the way to an executioner. She might almost have been willing to go to an executioner on Klett’s arm, she thought, he carried himself so beautifully, with such pride and court­liness.

  In answer to Mrs. Steinach’s summons, Dr. Reese arrived at eight-thirty. He was the family doctor, had officiated at both Margaret’s and Agnes’s births, and since Agnes’s semi-invalidism seventeen years before had called twice or thrice weekly at the house.

  “Caught me right in the middle of dinner, Mrs. Steinach,” Agnes heard his voice from her bed upstairs. “Hello, Margaret! Saints alive! I haven’t seen you—” Now he kissed her, Agnes supposed. “How’s my girl?”

  Their happy pain-free voices blended to Agnes’s ears until she could no longer tell what they said. She closed her eyes and made her body rigid as Dr. Reese entered, with Margaret behind him.

  “Well! How’s my patient?”

  His face was unusually radiant, and suddenly Agnes felt strong dislike for him. Ordinarily he was calm, serious, and rather formal. Now he seemed positively silly. His knees jutted awkwardly above the incongruous little potbelly as he walked. His gray head shook more than ever as though he did some foolish dance. Agnes did not reply to his question.

  “I’m afraid she’s had too much excitement, Dr. Reese. It’s all our fault,” Margaret said.

  “Well, well,” said Dr. Reese, holding Agnes’s thin limp wrist.

  Agnes turned her eyes miserably to one side, and saw Mowgli on his pillow before the gas stove, his tousled white head lifted a little, eying Margaret the intruder resentfully. She wanted to snap the thermometer between her teeth. Surely her inner fury would send her temperature higher. Why had Klett gone? But then if Dr. Reese was being so silly, and she might have known he would be, seeing Margaret again, Margaret who had never been sick a day in her life—

  “Come in,” Dr. Reese called to the door.

  Klett entered with a glass in his hand. “Mrs. Steinach asked me to bring this up,” he said solemnly.

  Agnes knew what it was, sodium bicarbonate for possible indigestion after the large supper. Only she hadn’t eaten it, she really hadn’t! She stirred her legs impatiently beneath the covers.

  “Pains?” Dr. Reese asked.

  Agnes nodded.

  “Dr. Reese,” Margaret began concernedly, “you know there must be something one can do—or find out—”

  Dr. Reese squinted his eyes, pursed his mouth. Agnes noticed he dandled his watch, got out the sedative powder more bustlingly than usual. He turned a professional face to Margaret as he poised the powder envelope over the glass. “My dear, we’ve done everything humanly possible. Our plucky patient here . . .” He looked at her, then back to Margaret, nodding. “Your mother knows our efforts, our failures and our successes.”

  Agnes relaxed and stretched her feet into the cool corners of the bed. Dr. Reese’s presence was reassuring. He was, she knew, on her side.
She looked at Klett, who stood with hands folded in front of him, like a young knight resting on his sword, earnest, attentive. He could not have behaved more fittingly, Agnes thought, more like a gentleman.

  “Fever?” asked Margaret as the doctor read the thermometer.

  Dr. Reese only looked up at her with an ambiguous sour expression. “Just try to sleep, my dear,” he said to Agnes. “No reading tonight, eh? Not Ivanhoe or anything else.”

  Agnes nodded. Then, as they all turned to leave her room, “Klett?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you . . . play something quietly for me?”

  “Of course.” He smiled, his face brightening as it had downstairs.

  “But not for very long, Agnie,” Margaret told her. “You do need rest.”

  Agnes lay then and waited. How swiftly time would pass, she thought, if there would always be Klett in the house! With a feline movement, she turned herself to brush with her fingertips the two or three books atop her bedtable. Somehow she always wanted to plunge immediately into reading after Dr. Reese’s visits, but tonight she did not. Why, with Klett in the house even Ivanhoe seemed almost dispensable! What need had she now to read of chivalry and romance, of tournaments and fanfare, gonfalons borne on stirrup-set staffs, the smash of armor, and the kiss the mortally wounded knight blows his mistress in the stands? Nevertheless she took the book and laid it on her bosom, composed her hands gently upon it, and fancied herself Rebecca as she appeared in some of the illustrations, jet of hair and white as snow, her figure pliant even in heroic posture as on the battlements of Torquilstone. There was, therefore, no hope but in passive fortitude, and in that strong reliance on Heaven natural to great and generous characters, Agnes thought, memory supplying with perfect accuracy the sentence she felt best suited this moment. But Agnes was, in fact, rather plump. Her long limbs suggested gauntness, yet her body itself was broad and even covered with flabby flesh on the lower ribs. It was as though years of lying in bed had flattened her as some types of fish are flattened one way or the other from intense pressures.

  It was an old high school text of Ivanhoe that she treasured, its navy blue cloth and pasteboard covers splayed at the corners, the edges of its pages adorned with nicknames and initials, a skull and crossbones. In the back were questions on each chapter, and Agnes had read the book so often she could answer every one. Now, waiting for Klett to begin, the image of herself as the beautiful Rebecca took form in her mind, in long white dress and barefoot. She had been cast as Rebecca in the stage play the graduating class of Central High School was to give, but her breakdown had come only a few days before, had in fact prevented her from taking some of her final examinations. Suddenly, with a pang, Walter Mergental’s face, healthily round and tanned, smiling, the face of an idealistic twenty-two-year-old medical student, rose above the white collar of an intern’s tunic, and just as suddenly she knew why she had thought of him—Klett had reminded her! The roundness of their jaws was the same, and though their eyes were quite different, Walter’s blue and Klett’s brown, they both had the same curve at the back of their heads, the same rise of light brown hair above the forehead. For an instant, Agnes did not know whether she felt ecstatic or miserable. She had not thought of Walter in years. She did not want to think of him. They had been engaged, but a few days before her graduation he had come to her and broken it off, giving no reason except, stammeringly, that he did not think he loved her enough. She had wept inconsolably for days. Foolish child that she had been! She had not wanted to see anyone, not even her closest friends. It had been a complete nervous breakdown, even Dr. Reese had admitted that. He had been worried enough then! Foolish, foolish child! No, she would not think of Walter again. He was married now, with four children. Would she want four—No, she would not think of Walter.

  But what was keeping Klett? She listened but she heard no piano. Someone came up the stairs.

  Margaret opened the door slowly. “Agnie? Asleep?”

  “No. Good heavens, no.”

  “Klett’s finishing his supper. Wouldn’t you go to sleep better without music? He’ll play all night with a little encouragement.”

  “Let him. I love it.”

  “All right.” She laughed softly. “Agnie, haven’t you got too much heat with the floor vent and the gas stove, too?”

  “I like it.”

  “How about covering up and letting me change the air? All it needs is a fresh—”

  “The warmth is good for my back,” Agnes said, but she sounded shorter than she intended. “Dr. Reese said so himself.”

  Margaret’s face flushed, Agnes did not know whether from the heat or irritation. She watched Margaret walk to the dresser, look at the photograph of them with their mother on Lake Michigan beach when both of them wore pinafores. Suddenly Margaret’s presence galled her. She wished Margaret might drop in a faint. No one had asked her to come in anyway.

  “I think Dr. Reese is leading you on,” Margaret said quietly, without looking at her. “Don’t you see it?”

  “What?—What on earth do you mean?”

  “Oh, I know he’s the family doctor and a fine old gentleman and so forth. But I think he’s very fond of visiting the Steinach house.”

  “Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Margaret.” And indeed, Agnes found her mind quite blank.

  Margaret turned away. “Then forget it. Can I get you anything?” she asked at the door.

  Klett, Agnes wanted to say. You can send Klett up after he plays. But she knew her sister was trying to keep them apart, was pettily but fiercely jealous that she and Klett had liked each other. “Nothing,” she said.

  She waited with her eyes tightly closed, waiting, waiting until she thought she could not wait a second longer, when the first notes of Chopin’s Minute Waltz, light and lightly played, found its way to her ears. Then she smiled and relaxed. He is here now, playing for me, she thought. She saw him in profile as she had seen him downstairs, the light from the pink-shaded lamp falling on his forehead, which bulged between the brows and again in two lobes near his hairline. This was Klett, the Chopinesque young man who would one day win tumultuous applause in Carnegie, in Albert Hall, in the capitals of Europe, who would one day write in his memoirs of the strange and beautiful semi-invalid for whom he had played in the autumn of his nineteenth year. He would describe poetically the poetic mood she inspired in him, perhaps, perhaps, the beginning of a love for her.

  Now he played one of Wagner’s Wesendonk songs. Träume . . . and now Im Treibhaus. She must remember to thank him, to let him know she recognized them. How lovely it all was! And on her piano!

  Agnes awakened to bright sunlight in her room, and remembering the day before, remembering falling asleep to Klett’s playing, she smiled and wriggled deeper into her down pillow. Absently she ran her fingers through her long hair so it would spread about her head, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, she always thought. And she got up and started toward the cheval glass, changed her mind and went first to the basin in the corner, where she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She looked at her teeth in the mirror. They were better-shaped than Margaret’s, she thought, and very white, though hardly different from her skin. She put on lipstick and powder at the dresser mirror, then returned to the cheval glass, which she unpinned and set in her bed, propped against one of the pineapple-topped footposts. She amused herself for several moments in taking various poses with her head and hands. Favorite was the partially averted face, eyes drowsily half closed, one hand across the top of her blanket and the other arm out and relaxed at her side.

  “Miss Agnes?”

  “Just a minute, Alantha!” She took the mirror back to the chest, fastened it, then called, “Come in,” and walked slowly back to her bed as though from the dresser.

  “How’re you feeling this morning, Miss Agnes?” Alantha smiled, mechanically bu
t warmly enough, as she did every morning. She set the breakfast tray on the metal support that pulled from under the bedtable.

  “Much better, thank you, Alantha.” She found herself, actually, interested in the breakfast tray, and did not mind that Alantha noticed. “You might tell our guest, Mr. Buchanan, that his music last night was delightful!”

  “I will when he comes back,” Alantha said. “He’s taken Miss Margaret and your mother to town in the car.”

  Agnes thrilled as she had when he played her piano. “Has he really?”

  “Oh, and he told me to say he hopes you feel well enough to come downstairs today and play the piano with him,” Alantha told her as though repeating his very words.

  “Did he!”

  An hour later, Klett knocked and came into her room with a bouquet of pansies. He looked happier, Agnes thought, more sure of himself. And once more his wide, boyish smile seemed to change his whole being.

  “Good morning! Alantha told me you were awake. Do you like these? They’re very late ones.”

  “How like one of the Barrett brothers you are!” Agnes smiled, holding the bouquet beneath her chin. It was the fulfillment of an old desire, to see striding toward her a clear-faced young man like one of the Barrett brothers who had flowed in such abundance, with such an air of devotion, into Elizabeth’s sickroom.

  “Do you think so?” Klett smiled back, obviously pleased.

  “Why, even your clothes are like theirs! You are like something out of another century!”

  In the cheval glass that Agnes so often gazed at herself in, Klett touched his silk cravat quickly, tugged down the rather short Tyrolean jacket, while Agnes smoothed out her hair again upon the pillow. She knew well enough how she looked at that moment, centered in the four-poster bed made more massive by her own slenderness, so that her thin oval face, the focus of the entire composition, was almost hard to find, like the frailest white flower in a dancing field. She saw Klett’s eyes linger shyly over the expanse of pale blue counterpane until his eyes met hers and she reassured him with a smile.