Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke

Author:Henry Van Dyke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

3

Belle Thompson had a catharsis about every other month, or so she use to tell me when I read to her the Shakespeare sonnets. I wondered, as I passed her house on the way to town, when she’d had her last one; I had not read in the papers of a funeral or wedding in Allegan for quite some time. In times of draught, presumably, she improvised.

As I walked down the dirt road that came at one point near her vined and ivy-smothered cottage I noticed that all her shades were drawn, but the radio was on, which meant that somebody was around. She, or perhaps her roué brothers. But I’d passed Belle Thompson’s place a dozen times since my sonnet-reading days and would have gone on today had it not been for the sound of familiar male laughter. Nobody else in the world was cursed with laughter like that (a kind of Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here intrusion on the senses) except Jerome. My watch said ten to three, so I supposed he’d decided to kill time with Belle. That was his business. Yet the thought of the long hike to town under the blue-hot sky wasn’t a pleasant thought—especially when Jerome’s big fat black air-conditioned limousine was standing idle by Belle’s shrubs.

Belle herself saved me the trouble of deciding how I could most gracefully intrude upon the afternoon tryst. She came skittering, on high plastic heels, into view as she crossed the patio with two tall frosted glasses decked with cherries. She stopped dead in her plastic-heeled tracks and pushed her sunglasses gently down her nose with a crook of her wrist. She blinked a bit, to believe her eyes, and said, “Hi, honeybunch!”

Belle was known as a Plump Widow; she’d been a widow forever and she’d been plump forever, and she had little inclination to change either status. She was a Renoir woman. Her limbs were full-fleshed; however, they were called luscious by her friends (male) and elephantine by her enemies (female). Quite often she was motivated to take odalisque attitudes, i.e., she usually was in a position of recline on one or the other of her hips. During those weeks of reading sonnets (until Mrs. Klein and Aunt Harry put a stop to it) I rarely saw her walk or sit upright. Her world was the divan, the settee, the hammock, the couch. In fact, there was not a single upright chair in her entire cottage. Yet there was not a sickly aura about her reclining positions; there were always bits of frenzy surrounding her chaise longue, her bed, for her hands did a thousand things (fanning, picking chocolates); her hands were as gay as bees always. It was only her face I objected to—an attractive face, more or less, but the contours in it were unsteady. Her hair, though, was thrilling: it was frizzled Colette hair, wild and uncertain, and its color range included apricot, russet, kumquat, strawberry, ocher, peach, or, alas, just plain

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