The Hair of Harold Roux Page 13

  “You seem so, somehow, right sitting here beside me,” he says. She can think of no answer. The car hums steadily along the smooth, winding old road. He is an excellent driver. “But we know absolutely nothing about each other,” he muses. Then, after a pause, in a low, almost startled voice, as though he speaks to himself, “Except, perhaps, the most important things of all.” He turns his head and smiles at her in the warm light of the dusk and the dashboard instruments, and even as she smiles back she cannot help but feel a warning of danger, for never has she felt this way about a man. Though she works as a junior editor for a sophisticated national magazine, she has never, among all that cleverness and affluence, known a man who gave the impression of such depth and, yes, even sadness, behind his surface charm. She wants terribly to know all about him, but something keeps her from asking.

  The little French restaurant is quaint and charming; the proprietor himself comes to wait upon them (Ah, Monsieur Ravendon! C’est… depuis quand? Un an? Mais c’est merveilleux!). They go on, Allyson’s high school and one year of college French not quite up to the occasion. They both consult her in English. And the meal is delicious, the wine light and clean on the tongue. At their intimate, candlelit table they do speak of each other’s past and present. She tells him of her upbringing in a small Vermont town of white houses and towering green elms—her father a scholar and teacher of modest means, her mother having died when she was a little girl. They are both editors, it seems, he an associate editor in a famous publishing house in Manhattan. He is twenty-six, and (his face darkens, he speaks slowly, painfully) a widower, his wife of two years’ marriage having been killed in an airplane accident a year ago, in Switzerland. There were no children. “I’ve never talked to anyone about it before,” he says wonderingly. “That’s strange. In fact I haven’t talked to anyone very much, except on business, for nearly a year—until tonight.” Suddenly he seems shy, then looks up into her eyes with a grave, considering expression. “When we finish our brandy I’d like to take you to meet my father. He lives just down the road. Will you … Allyson?” It is the first time he has used her name. “Allyson,” he says again, softly, as if trying out her name to see how it sounds.

  She agrees, though she is hesitant. She has only known him for a few hours! Somehow it seems much longer, even though the time has passed so swiftly. And there are depths to this handsome, square-chinned, yet so sensitive man that she cannot plumb.

  They drive a mile or so down a country road and enter, between old, ivy-grown stone portals, a long winding driveway. Finally they come to a huge stone mansion set into its trees. The moonlight glimmers upon formal hedges and gardens. At the massive front door they are greeted by a tall, imperious-looking butler.

  “Master Francis!” he says, in spite of himself letting his pleasure show through.

  “Clifford, this is Miss Turnbridge. Is my father home?”

  Clifford’s eyes widen a little and he bows slightly toward Allyson, his face cold. In his clipped British accent he says, “Your father is in the library, Master Francis.”

  As they pass beneath the high, ornate ceiling of a long hall lined with family portraits, Francis smiles and says that to Clifford he is still, evidently, the little boy he once was.

  The library is a high, wide room of dark wainscoting. Books rise in tiers to the ceiling, and at one end of the room beside a cheery fire, beneath one of the softly glowing table lamps that make cozy islands in the room, sits a silver-haired man. “Father,” Francis says, and the man, Horace Ravendon, gets quickly to his feet and removes his reading glasses. Beaming his welcome, he strides toward them on long, patrician legs.

  “Francis! How wonderful!” He spies Allyson, and his bushy silver eyebrows rise over his kindly blue eyes. “And my! How doubly wonderful!”

  Francis introduces them.

  “My dear, you are lovely, lovely! You have no idea how happy it makes me to see Francis with a lovely girl. He’s been …” Horace Ravendon stops, thinking he’s said too much, but Francis smiles and reassures him.

  “It’s all right, Father, I’ve told her about Sheila.”

  “Oh, well. That’s a sad subject, my dear. But my, you are …” He looks for a second or two into Allyson’s face, and seems a little confused. “Smashing, really! Now, how about some sherry or something? And come and sit down by the fire!”

  While Horace Ravendon pours sherry into crystal glasses, Allyson looks around the room. Above the mantel is an oil portrait of a dashing young officer in Air Force uniform, his silver wings shining above his colorful ribbons, two silver bars on each shoulder. Then she realizes that it is a portrait of Francis. She looks to him in surprise, and, having been watching her, he nods, smiling. “Yes, Father insists upon celebrating my late, unpleasant occupation.”

  “But,” she says hesitantly, “I mean, my uncle is an army officer, and so I think I know … Isn’t that a Purple Heart, and that one … the Distinguished Flying Cross?”

  “Yes, Father made certain the artist got all the fruit salad into the picture,” Francis says, smiling fondly at the old man.

  Horace Ravendon hands them sparkling crystal glasses of sherry. “Never used to wear his decorations. Never could understand it. Distinguished record in the war. Well, I’m proud of it and I’m not going to let it be forgotten in this house!”

  As they sip their sherry, Allyson sees on the end table near her a novel in its bright dust jacket. Never the Sad March is its title, by F. H. Ravendon. She has read it and was greatly moved by this dark, powerful story of war and love … and suddenly the name, Ravendon. “Are you related to this Ravendon?” she asks, picking up the book. “I’ve read it and I was … still am! … deeply moved by it.”

  “Well, yes, my dear,” Horace Ravendon says, smiling an enigmatic smile. “You might say that, yes!” He is trying to keep from laughing, she can see. And then she reads the name again. F. H. Ravendon. Francis? She looks at him, knowing how her admiration must be shining in her eyes.

  “Yes, I admit to that novel,” Francis says.

  “How I’ve wanted to talk to the author!” she says. “How wonderful! I’m afraid I’m gushing or something, and I’m sorry but I can’t help it!”

  “That is my reward for writing it,” Francis says. She looks at him, and he is quite serious.

  And they do talk, long into the evening, later still after Horace Ravendon bids them good night, saying, “You must stay over, my dear children. Clifford will fix you up, Allyson, in the blue guest room. No, I won’t hear about you two driving into the city at this highly improbable hour. Dangerous. Tiring. Now! I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

  It is one in the morning before they know it, the hours having flown by as if they were minutes, seconds. They both have to work in the morning, so Francis takes her up to her room off the balcony, and at the door he looks steadily down into her eyes. “Allyson, you don’t know how much this evening—all of it—has meant to me. At that silly party I was so tense, so … But I won’t go on as if I really were one of the spoiled jeunesse doree my father would turn me into. Yet I am so grateful. You’ve been a spring breeze. Promising …” He stops, perhaps embarrassed. “Sleep well, Allyson … my dear!” He kisses her quickly on the forehead. “Sleep well!” And he is gone.

  It is later, hours later, when she wakes in the strange room. The moon is down and the tall windows are pitch-black. Has she heard a noise—a scraping noise? Her heart pounding, she reaches for the bedside lamp, finally finds it and turns it on. No one is in the room. But she did hear a noise. Quietly she dons the old-fashioned dressing gown Clifford laid out for her and goes to the door, opens it a crack and listens intently. Yes, there is a sound. Is it a deep breath from somewhere down the curving staircase, or a quickly stifled sob? Curious beyond fear, she goes out into the hall and down the thickly carpeted stairs, her hand on the railing of the cold marble banister. There is a light from a room on the left, a door that had been closed when she first came into the
hall, and she creeps softly to the open door. A man stands, his back to her, looking up at an oil portrait of a young woman with raven-black hair and blue eyes. Allyson has never seen such graceful, bewitching beauty, such a glowing face of wit and intelligence, yet with a hint of patrician superiority. Such glowing irrepressible life! The young woman seems to be looking straight at her, her half-smile knowing all, her ice-blue eyes staring into her very soul.

  Involuntarily she gasps, and the man quickly turns. It is Francis, and his eyes are cold, remote. “Well. And do you see the resemblance? Father did. Clifford did.”

  “Resemblance?” she manages to say. She is frightened by his coldness, his terse statement, his cruel voice.

  “Look into the mirror. Dark and light. Raven and gold. The other side of the coin.”

  And suddenly, with terror and anguish in her heart, she does see that but for the raven hair and blue eyes her own likeness stares icily down at her from the wall.

  Allard put down the manuscript and reached for his glass of sherry. “Hmmm,” he said. “Well, you’ve got some good details in there, Harold.” Now, was this the time for honesty, or not? No doubt, in spite of everything Harold had ever read, to him the purposes of this story were the very purposes of literature. And there was energy and emotion in this wishful fantasy. Work had gone into it. The pages were neatly typed, the paper crisp, expensive, rag-content watermarked bond; other drafts had been agonized over, words no doubt looked up in the dictionary and thesaurus. Was it the same faith in magic, the same mistaken sort of effort that had led Harold into the clutches of the hair people? Why not say so? How important was this creation to Harold? Why not tell him to take off the goddamn toupee, throw it in the garbage and take his medicine, because if he wanted Mary, or whatever it was he wanted, he must learn the difference between fantasy and reality. Suppose Allard were to tell him all this, to say right out, “Look, Harold, this is jerking off, buddy. This stuff is like being alone in your room at two in the afternoon with the door locked, beating your meat. Wouldn’t you rather be involved in what’s real? Why not write about Berlin, New Hampshire, about growing up above a poor grocery store as a French-Canadian kid in a New Hampshire slum with a drunken father and a retarded half sister and a mother who saw you as a priest? How about all that? And the army, and growing bald at twenty-three in a civilization that worships its follicles …”

  Harold sat there in his desk chair, turned toward Allard, silent and a little apprehensive because he wanted his friend to admire the sophistication of his story’s setting, the intelligent conversation, the mood, the tone. His sports jacket was just a little too thin in the nap to go with the striped regimental tie that was knotted too tightly and led down to his silver belt buckle, the kind that was solid and you fed the leather through it to the right place where it was held by some kind of inner roll-lock, and you bought it with an initial stamped on the outside of it, R for Russell, or Reade or Richardson or Ravendon or Roux, and your gabardine slacks were pleated at the waist and too much of a light blue and your socks were machine-knit cotton argyles and the soles of your too shiny, too pointed black shoes were too thin. Harold, Harold, of all the people in the world you should be the last to labor to deceive.

  And you, Allard Benson, having another glass of Harold’s Bristol Cream and feeling it in the back of your head, if you took on the job of changing Harold Roux into what he wanted to be, would you do it out of care? Would you really give a shit? Would you do it because you understand the sweetness and gentleness of this fellow creature who, compared to you, is practically a saint?

  About then it was probably time to go to Commons for supper, where they would meet Mary and her roommate, Naomi Goldman, who was a communist, and whom Allard called Yetta Samovar.

  But that is another story, and now Aaron Benham is lying in a strange bed in the cool vast gray light of predawn. A cock crows from a neighboring farm, a clear, mindlessly too early, machistic, bullying yodel.

  Aaron can just make out his cigarettes and matches on the chair beside his bed. As he lights a cigarette the inevitable sermon against this form of suicide runs its boring, desperate course through his head. He holds the match up to the match-book the better to read about La Salle Extension University of Chicago, which will change you into an accountant, artist, high school graduate, night club manager, diesel mechanic, and more—if you are smart enough not to mail the matches along with the cover.

  One drag on the cigarette tells his capillaries what death’s soothing syrup feels like, and he puts it out. But deep in his body he feels a sea change. Certain glands have closed, and his heart is running well, almost without effort. His muscles and joints are full now of sweet fatigue, and he believes that he can sleep. He must sleep, but he never desires that nothingness and never really wants it to happen. That suicide in small—he has never understood it, never remembered how it came to him when it came. He has watched others fall asleep and it was almost as if they willfully died before his eyes. And yet he loves to dream; he loves that emotion so encompassing it destroys all the concerns of the other world and makes something so great out of nothing. But to die in order to hope for a dream?

  No dream; there is that small single room in Parker Hall again, and Harold Roux, having by his writing revealed something of himself to Allard Benson, sat smoking a Parliament cigarette and carefully tapping the ash into a shining glass tray. His legs neatly crossed at the knee, his pale face calm, he vibrated on a frequency the eye could not quite discern.

  Allard glanced quickly, guiltily, at the line across Harold’s forehead where the dark neat cloud of hair had settled upon the flesh. “Well,” he said. “It’s really a fantasy, isn’t it? I mean, you’d like to be Francis Ravendon, and have Allyson look at you like that.”

  Harold nodded, smiling. “Yes, I guess so.”

  “But, Harold …” How was he to say to Harold what was so obvious? “It’s not really the truth.”

  “The truth?” Harold said. “Isn’t it the truth if you believe it? Fiction isn’t the truth, is it?” Though terribly disappointed by Allard’s reactions so far, Harold would consent to discuss theory, which hadn’t such a personal claim on him. Allard didn’t want to destroy him, and he didn’t want to mention Mary, either—to say, for instance, that Allyson Turnbridge was obviously, from more evidence than the shard of jade in her brown iris, Mary Tolliver. Though he had, almost as a matter of predestined right, taken over Mary as soon as Harold introduced her to him, he still wondered why Harold wasn’t angry with him. Here was a real, live, warm girl, after all, not a fantasy.

  “Wouldn’t you rather …” he began tentatively, but then felt himself change; irritation, exasperation, and possibly a feeling of his essential benevolence toward Harold made him reckless and a little brutal. For one thing, he believed that if it weren’t for him and his two roommates, who were known to be Harold’s friends, Boom Maloumian and Short Round would by now have beaten Harold naked through the halls, painted his balls and bare skull blue and crucified him. So maybe he did have a right to speak straight. “Wouldn’t you rather have Mary than dream all this moonlight and roses? Damn it, Harold. I mean, wouldn’t you rather even write about what it’s really like?”

  “I don’t particularly like what it’s really like,” Harold said. “Why should I write about that? I know what Mary is like. Perfection, that’s what she’s like.”

  “Oh Christ, I don’t know. You’re a strange case, Harold.”

  “You mean because I … All right, I’m not ashamed of it. I love Mary. I think she’s the most beautiful, sensitive, kind, wonderful girl in the world. I do love her.”

  “Okay, I agree that she’s damn near all those things, Harold, but wouldn’t you want to take what you love? Wouldn’t you want to have all of her, not just the ideal? Wouldn’t you rather … I mean, well, fuck her, Harold?”

  “I wouldn’t use that or any other dirty word in connection with Mary.”

  “If you were in connection with
Mary, what would you be doing to her then?”

  “I don’t think that’s funny!” Harold’s voice was rather shrill; usually he tolerated Allard’s lapses into vulgarity with a shake of his head, but now his disapproval was nearly outrage. “Mary is a virgin and will remain a virgin until marriage. She’s a good Catholic, too, or hadn’t you noticed that? No, I’m not worried at all about Mary in that way. I think she’s fascinated at the moment by you. You’re very sophisticated and all that, but she’s not going to let anything bad happen. She’s too moral and too honest with herself. I know her very well because we see each other and talk for hours when you’re not around—when you’re giving Naomi Goldman rides on your motorcycle or something.”

  “What do you mean by ‘or something’?” Allard said, wanting to laugh, although outright laughter would do more violence than he wanted to do to Harold’s seriousness.

  “You take her out to the reservoir or to College Woods and neck with her. I’ve seen you come in with pine needles all over you.”

  “She also likes to be bitten high up on the insides of her thighs,” Allard said.

  “Cut it out! I don’t believe that or anything else you say!” Harold was near tears; he was also horrified to be talking to his best friend this way, Allard could tell. Harold thought he had put himself in grave danger of losing Allard’s friendship by this show of real anger. Allard stood up. My God, he thought, I’ve not removed my friendship from people who’ve smashed me in the mouth. What a delicate world Harold inhabits. He slapped Harold lightly on the shoulder of his padded jacket. Because of some fear that he might dislodge the toupee, the slap was gentle indeed.

  “Come on, Harold, old chap. I do believe Commons is open, and shall we dine?”

  Partly pacified, at least, and certainly relieved, Harold smiled as he tidied up his room. Of course he still held to his arguments. A certain grimness of jaw indicated that. They walked down the stairs and across the green campus to Commons.