Copyright © 1947, 1982 by M.F.K. Fisher
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published by the Viking Press, Inc. in 1947
Published by North Point Press in 1982
Published by Counterpoint in 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Cover design by XXXXX
Interior design by Domini Dragoone
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ebook ISBN 9781619028678
For Donald Friede
Contents
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part II
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part III
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part IV
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Afterword
THE NEAREST JENNIE ever came to being untrue to Jennie was the night all four of them were staying with her. It was not just one of the people who adored her, not even two: they were all there, wary and jealous and demanding.
There was Paul, innocent at least in his assumption that he could ever have her for the simple reason that he wanted her. He made her bones yawn, which in itself was an affront to her inviolability: she hated the ignominy of being drawn to him just because he was young and teasing and clean to smell. It was like catching a head cold because somebody else had a head cold because somebody else had and somebody else. It paired sneezes and sexual pleasure as human indignities, which was a wrong mating indeed, as none knew better than Jennie.
Then sitting beside Paul in the oversized, oversoft chaise longue in the California patio was old Julia, less regal than usual tonight after a good share of the dinner bottles of Folle Blanche and Mountain Zinfandel, but still sounding like a spoiled character actress whenever she opened her handsome horsy face. She had come without quibble, as she always did when Jennie nodded. She was as much a worshiper as ever Paul or any other man could be, although it was reassuringly plain that she bowed down not to the small fine body of the woman but to her silky house, with its rooms always waxed, its windows sparkling out upon the still mountains, its kitchen fat. Julia took respite from her lonely, luxurious wait for senility in the warm homeliness of Jennie’s house, as surely as young Paul felt strong and sure to have Jennie lean over him and let her breasts send out a little puff, a delicate gas, of her private smell. Each drank at her fountain, sucked from her what she could give.
And Sir Harry drank, sucked; Barbara too. All four of them lay there in the dark patio, the night Jennie almost betrayed herself, like queen ants being fed. They were immobile with content, too full of what she had given them, willy-nilly, to move more than they must in order to keep breathing. And as Jennie lay a little apart from them, looking dispassionately at the darker shapes of their couches and then at the gentle glimmer of light from the low house behind them, she asked herself which got the most from her.
Perhaps it was Barbara, because she was even more innocent than Paul, and such a state demands most and gets it, the way the youngest child in a family is coddled in spite of its harelip or its foul temper or its stinks. Barbara was well formed, of course, and her nature was sweet, and she smelled like new-mown meadowflowers because of her youth and the way she had been raised to groom herself, but God! how dull she was to Jennie, how deadly dull, and how tired poor Jennie was of being kind to her!
“Jennie is wonderful,” the girl would say straight out in her breathless voice. “Ah, Jennie, I adore you, beautiful Jennie, so wise, so witty, so all that I’d one day be!”
And Jennie would smile and touch her lightly on her bare shimmering shoulder, and her bones would yawn, not as they did for Paul, but with an almost intolerable boredom for such love. Some time, she thought, she would like to whip Barbara with a little jeweled whip, in payment for the helpless kindness such adoration asked for. Meanwhile she smiled, touched, gave. . . .
It was easier with old Harry. He knew more than anyone in the world, except perhaps Jennie. He took what she had for him, like all the others, but it was resignedly, because he recognized at last that there could be no better. He had lived too long to grasp. Instead he came when Jennie asked him to; he let her brandy, her côtelettes Valmont, her perfume, flow without protest through his rugged, hoary frame. He felt her knowing fingers and the soft sheets of his bed with the same awareness, the same acceptance of their fleeting.
He was perhaps the best of them, Jennie thought as she listened to them all and knew in the summer night how they pulled at her, taking, asking so much, giving nothing. At least he was past any real assault, so that the two could meet unhampered on the battleground, knowing each other’s weapons to be those of mind and jaded hunger rather than such sharp ones of lust and fright as Paul and old Julia and the girl could sport.
The talk went on in the soft darkness, soft dark talk without end or beginning. Jennie felt that she had not been listening to it but floating in it, not swimming through it but floating, for years, ten or a hundred even. She stood up quickly, and her chair scratched