“No. I am Teresa Kerr. This is Petra.”
The novelist’s daughter was sitting on the sill of an open window, her background wall-less—a sea of blue October air and light. She was a schoolgirl then, in a navy blue jersey schoolgirl dress. Her attentive, innocent eyes, set wide in a grave young brow, were the precise color of the gentians. That repetition of color and the eyes’ innocent attentiveness stabbed Lewis like some too pure, too perfect note in music. It was the most beautiful child’s face—or any face—of his memory. No wonder he remembered that so vividly! The short, straight nose, the upper lip—short to the exquisite point of breath-taking beauty—the Botticelli mouth, the strong, white, round chin!—The child was hardly human, she was so lovely!—Her head against the window’s blue background was a sculptor’s dream. Fine, very alive brown curls molded rather than obscured its classic contours. The gawky schoolgirl body, in its clinging jersey, was sculpture, too, with its wide shoulders and long thighs....
Lewis had supposed, since, that the mood which took possession of him when Teresa Kerr had opened the door to the Farwells’ Cambridge apartment, and which had increased like daylight upon dawn during the brief minutes he spent with those girls waiting for Mrs. Farwell to be ready to see him, was merely a state of rapport with their youth and happiness. Their relationship with life and with each other had by some miracle extended itself to him and created what at the time, and in memory ever since, had seemed a golden age circumferenced by a passing moment.
When the circumference contracted upon its enclosed eternity (these were Lewis’ similes, far-fetched, of course, but for himself alone), it was by way of a trivial voice calling out from the next room. Then he left timelessness, passed through a door into a ceilinged, four-walled space, and took a chair facing an emotional, pretty woman who lay relaxed among cushions on a chaise-longue; and at once, quite as if he had never passed through the sound of Teresa’s laugh and the sight of Petra’s attentive, innocent gaze to reach this meeting, he gave his complete attention to Mrs. Farwell and her woes.
She had these violent headaches. Weeks on end she could not sleep and then for other weeks she slept too much, could do nothing else but sleep. Her nerves needed either a stimulant or a sedative, constantly. But Doctor MacKay did not approve of drugs, not in the quantities her case demanded. Doctor MacKay said, “Exercise!” But she had this nervous heart. He admitted the nervous heart and yet insisted on the exercise. Imagine! Besides, how could she exercise? Riding was out of the question. Couldn’t afford it. And golf bored her. Terribly! And what other exercise is there, besides golf and riding? They hadn’t even a car. If they had, she might at least get some fresh air each day. But perhaps Doctor Pryne knew for himself—she was looking at his ready-made tweed suit—that fame did not pay in dollars and cents. Her husband’s novels were only for the discriminating few. The better the review, she noticed, the smaller the royalties always.... And noises—cooped up in a cheap little apartment like this—noises were a sort of crucifixion!
A laugh, muffled by the closed door, but audible enough for demonstration, coincidentally bore her out. Or so she imagined. She winced, becomingly, but genuinely enough.
“If only Petra could go away to school! She is my husband’s daughter, you know. But we can’t even afford a camp for her. And big girls like that are so noisy, so all over you! If she were a boy, she wouldn’t be always at home. It would be easier then. If Doctor MacKay ever thinks I am strong enough to have a baby I do hope it will be a boy!”
Lewis listened to all of this and much more with attention. And not until Mrs. Farwell had worn herself out with the emotion which accompanied her eager, fluent explanations of her nervous condition, did he venture a few tentative suggestions. But it appeared that Doctor MacKay had made the very same suggestions dozens of times already,—and none of them were any good.
“Well then—?” But it was only a mental question, a mental shrug. Lewis was grave and interested up till the very last. Doctor MacKay, however, had not had the slightest excuse for calling in a psychiatrist. It was an old story, but as disheartening and ridiculous as if it were the first occasion on which Lewis had wasted his time like this.
As it happened, the laugh which had penetrated Mrs. Farwell’s closed door, with its crucifying effect on one of its hearers, was Lewis’ last touch with Teresa and Petra. When he came out of Mrs. Farwell’s bedroom into the living room, they were gone. In their stead, a new individual—younger than Mrs. Farwell, older than the girls—was lying in wait for him. She had usurped Petra’s place in the open blue window, but she quickly left it and came forward.