As I appeared, my grandmother, looking fragile in a blue print dress, opened her eyes sleepily without focussing them, and then closed them again. Miss Fox gave me a friendly smile.
“Would it disturb her if I spoke to you?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. She’s pretty much like a three-year-old child, you know. She smiles at everyone, and everyone’s her friend.”
“She must demand a good deal of care.”
“She requires it, yes, but she doesn’t demand it. That makes it easier.”
I sat down beside Miss Fox and looked at the old lady’s hand lying relaxed on the arm of the wheelchair. It was remarkably unwrinkled for one so old, delicately tapered, with almond-shaped nails. There were dark, possibly medicinal, stains upon her fingertips.
I felt a sudden sadness, for her hands were exactly like Aunt Kate’s. On impulse, I took her hand in one of mine, while with the other I took the note out of my pocket and held it out to the nurse.
“Did you write this, Miss Fox?”
She read the note and I could see a deep flush spread over her features.
“No, I didn’t write it. Why should I? Where did you get it?”
“It was slipped under my door last night. Yours was the only really friendly face I’ve seen here, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else going to such trouble.”
For a moment Miss Fox seemed to be in conflict. Then her face cleared and she laid her hand on my arm.
“I may have no right to say this, Mr. Gentry, but I think you should follow its advice. You don’t belong here.”
“Why?”
“You mustn’t ask me that. I’m not acting very — professional.”
She made a movement as if to rise, but I restrained her.
“Miss Fox, I need your help.”
Grandmother Owen stirred in her chair and I released her hand.
“My father died when I was five,” I continued. “Shortly afterwards, my mother married Mr. Gentry, who was a widower with two children of his own, Linda and Fred. I remember I didn’t get along very well with them. When I was seven, I developed asthma and had to leave the city and go live with my mother’s sister Kate. I guess mother made the thing legal, because when Edwin tried to get me back later, after my mother’s death, he couldn’t do it. He used to write to me for years, but Kate would never let me answer. She said he was a man it was better to have nothing to do with. Those were her words. But she never let me know anything about him. I came here because I was homeless and penniless and jobless. Mr. Gentry is my stepfather, for what it’s worth. I must say he’s been kind to me. But, well, I’ve felt uneasy here from the first, and after I got this note—”
“I see.” Miss Fox’s voice was sympathetic. “I’ve only been here a month myself, Mr. Gentry, and all I can say is that I feel there is something wrong here. I can’t say what it is. Everybody’s very nice, but there’s something in the air, in every seemingly conventional remark. When I saw you last night, I knew you weren’t part of it. And somehow, I know you mustn’t let yourself become part of it!”
“Thanks. It’s nice to know you’ve thought that much about me, Miss — I can’t go on calling you Miss Fox when I feel so grateful and friendly towards you!”
“Felicia,” she said smiling.
“And please call me Dan. I’m going to keep an eye out for you while I’m here, anyway.”
“Oh, I’m in no danger!” Felicia said with a laugh.
I had to admit Edwin was a fine host that night as we hit the high spots. Linda came along, too, breathtaking in a low-cut lame dress, and apparently she had had a change of heart about me. She took my arm and snuggled up possessively, and halfway through the evening, when I had enough to drink to make me sociable, and we were pressed in a close embrace on the dance floor, I told her how glad I was that, although she was my stepsister, we weren’t really blood relations at all.
That seemed to amuse her, and she threw back her handsome head and laughed until other partners on the floor looked at us. I shook her a little and she subsided and pressed me secretly, and the look in her deep blue eyes thrilled me right down to the soles of the new Florsheims that I’d bought that afternoon with the money Edwin had given me.
We rolled home around three in the morning, all of us hilarious, and as I walked up the stairs to my room, I was glad I had developed a good head for liquor at college, and hadn’t disgraced myself in front of my relatives.
Inside my room there was another note on the floor that sobered me.
You are being tested. Do not succumb, or you are lost!
I took a shower and then went to bed. A little while later, while I lay still awake, there came a scratching at my door. I opened it, and Linda slipped in a thin nightdress and put her arms around my neck.
“I’m glad we’re not brother and sister, too, Dan,” she whispered in my ear.
And when she kissed me, I couldn’t help giving her what she’d come for.
At the breakfast table the next morning Edwin told me, “Fred will take charge of you today. He even got up early to do it!”
Fred, too, seemed to have had a turn of heart, for he smiled at me cheerfully now, his teeth looking large beneath his Hitler-like mustache.
“You interested in photography?” Fred asked.
“One year I was head photographer for the campus yearbook,” I said.
“Then we’ve got something in common. There’s a fine collection at the Legion of Honor — French and German schools. How about breezing out to the gallery with me?”
“Suits me.”
So around the middle of the morning, we jumped in Fred’s Volkswagen and sped over to the Legion of Honor and parked on the esplanade overlooking the Golden Gate. Then we sat in the car until the gallery opened, while Fred talked about the relative merits of foreign cars and I got thoroughly bored and thought Fred pretty much of a fool.
But once we got inside the gallery and I heard him discourse on photographic techniques and effects, I revised my opinion. He really knew his stuff. The pictures were the usual street scenes, still lifes, landscapes, portraits, nudes, but Fred made me see them in a new way, from the standpoint of composition, subject matter, and design. He was a natural teacher, and his explanations made photographic technique seem vital and easy. I noticed, however, he lingered mostly over the nudes.
“You ought to do some pretty stunning photo work yourself,” I said at last.
“I do. Would you like to see some?”
I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. Fortunately he suggested we go to lunch first, which gave me the advantage of viewing his collection on a full stomach. That gave me stamina, because on an empty stomach I get nervous and lose my self-control easily.
After lunch we returned to the big house and he led me to his studio at the back, on the main floor, a thickly-carpeted, heavily draped atelier two stories high, with a huge northern skylight. There were a lot of sofas and tables standing about, and Fred went to the east wall which was curtained like a proscenium, and took hold of a stout cord.
“Of course, you must judge these specimens purely from an artistic point of view,” he said, with a trace of a smirk. “If one loses himself in the subject matter, then he becomes blind to the subtler values, the raison d’etre of the medium, as it were.”
And with that he pulled the cord and revealed a gallery of sumptious pornographic art that was out of this world. But it was a super-pornographic art, with the devilish quality of genius in the lighting and arrangements of subjects, so that beyond the immediate significance of conjugating bodies and entwining limbs, there was often, in the subtle light and shadow, a total image which impressed me as a veritable archetype of evil. Looking at some of the latter, I felt a sense of disgust, as if I were recoiling from an invitation to participate in the lust and license pictured before me.