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Felixity

By: Tanith Lee

* * * *

The name sounds a little like “felicity,” or happiness, and a little like “felix,” or luck.

Felixity, the quintessential poor little rich girl, seems to be neither happy nor lucky. In

any fairy story, such a girl would have compensations of brain or talent and marry a

handsome prince. Felixity can’t even do good watercolors. And when she chooses a

husband—don’t even ask.

Let Tanith Lee tell you in this ironic and elegantly decadent story. I could

compare “Felixity” to the works of Oscar Wilde or Angela Carter—but I think I’ll

say that this is Tanith Lee at the top of her form, and leave it at that.

* * * *

Felixity’s parents were so beautiful that everywhere they went they were attended by

a low murmuring, like that of a beehive. Even when pregnant with her child, Felixity’s

mother was lovely, an ormolu madonna. But when Felixity was born, her mother

died.

Among the riches of her father, then, in a succession of elaborate houses,

surrounded by gardens which sometimes led to a cobalt sea, Felixity grew up,

motherless. Her father watched her grow—he must have— although nannies tended

her, servants waited on her, and tutors gave her lessons. Sometimes in the evening,

when the heat of the day had settled and the stars had come out, Felixity’s father

would interview his daughter on the lamplit terrace above the philodendrons.

“Now tell me what you learned today.”

But Felixity, confronted by her beautiful and elegant father burnished on the

dark with pale electricity, was tongue-tied. She twisted her single plait around her

finger and hunched her knees. She was an ugly child, ungraceful and gauche, with

muddy skin and thin unshining hair. She had no energy, and even when put out to

play, wandered slowly about the garden walks, or tried tiredly to skip, giving up after

five or six heavy jumps. She was slow at her studies, worried over them, and

suffered headaches. She was meek. Her teeth were always needing fillings, and she

bore this unpleasantness with resignation.

“Surely there must have been something of note in your day?”

“I went to the dentist, Papa.”

“Your mother,” said Felixity’s father, “had only one tiny filling in her entire

head. It was the size of a pin’s point. It was gold.” He said this without cruelty, more

in wonder. “You must have some more dresses,” he added presently.

Felixity hated it when clothes were bought for her. She looked so awful in

anything attractive or pretty, but they had never given up. Glamorously dressed, she

resembled a chrysalis clad in the butterfly. When she could, she put on her drabbest,

most nondescript clothes.

After half an hour or so of his daughter’s unstimulating company, Felixity’s

father sent her away. He was tactful, but Felixity was under no illusions. Beneath the

dentist’s numbing cocaine, she was aware her teeth were being drilled to the nerve,

and that shortly, when the anesthetic wore off, they would hurt her.

Inevitably, as time passed, Felixity grew up and became a woman. Her body

changed, but it did not improve. If anyone had been hoping for some magical

transformation, they were disappointed. When she was sixteen, Felixity was,

nevertheless, launched into society. Not a ripple attended the event, although she

wore a red dress and a most lifelike wig fashioned by a famous coiffeur. Following

this beginning, Felixity was often on the edges of social activities, where she was

never noticed, gave neither offense nor inspiration, and before some of which she

was physically sick several times from neurasthenia. As the years went by, however,

her terror gradually left her. She no longer expected anything momentous with which

she would not be able to cope.

Felixity’s father aged marvelously. He remained slim and limber, was scarcely

lined and that only in a way to make him more interesting. His hair and teeth were like

a boy’s.

“How that color suited your mother,” he remarked to Felixity, as she crossed

the room in a gown of translucent lemon silk, which made her look like an uncooked

tuber. “I remember three such dresses, and a long fringed scarf. She was so partial

to it.” Again, he was not being cruel. Perhaps he was entitled to be perplexed. They

had anticipated an exquisite child, the best of both of them. But then, they had also

expected to live out their lives together.

When she was thirty-three, Felixity stopped moving in society, and attended

only those functions she could not, from politeness, avoid. Her father did not

remonstrate with her, indeed he only saw her now once a week, at a rite he referred

to as “Dining with my Daughter.” Although his first vision of her was always a slight

shock, he did not disenjoy these dinners, which lasted two hours exactly, and at

which he was able to reminisce at great length about his beautiful wife. If anyone had

asked him, he would have said he did this for Felixity’s sake. Otherwise, he assumed

she was quite happy. She read books, and occasionally painted rather poor

watercolors. Her teeth, which had of necessity been overfilled, had begun to break at

regular intervals, but aside from this her life was tranquil, and passed in luxury. There

was nothing more that could be done for her.

One evening, as Felixity was being driven home to one of her father’s city

houses, a young man ran from a side street out across the boulevard, in front of the

car. The chauffeur put on his brakes at once. But the large silver vehicle lightly

touched the young man’s side, and he fell in front of it. A crowd gathered instantly,

at the periphery of which three dark-clad men might be seen looking on. But these

soon after went away.

The chauffeur came to Felixity’s door to tell her that the young man was

apparently unhurt, but shaken. The crowd began to adopt factions, some saying that

the young man was to blame for the accident, others that the car had been driven too

fast. In the midst of this, the young man himself appeared at Felixity’s door. In years

he was about twenty-six, smartly if showily dressed in an ice-cream white suit now

somewhat dusty from the road. His blue-black hair curled thickly on his neck; he

was extremely handsome. He stared at the woman in the car with amontillado eyes.

He said, “No, no, it was not your fault.” And then he collapsed on the ground.

The crowd ascended into uproar. The young man must be taken immediately

to the hospital.

Felixity was flustered, and it may have been this which caused her to open her

door, and to instruct the chauffeur and a bystander to assist the young man into the

car. As it was done, the young man revived a little.

“Put him here, beside me,” said Felixity, although her voice trembled with

alarm.

The car door was closed again, and the chauffeur told to proceed to a

hospital. The crowd made loud sounds as they drove off.

To Felixity’s relief, and faint fright, the young man now completely revived.

He assured her that it was not essential to go to the hospital, but that if she were kind

enough to allow him to rest a moment in her house, and maybe swallow a glass of

water, he would be well enough to continue on his way. He had been hurrying, he

explained, because he had arranged to see his aunt, and was late. Felixity was afraid

that the drive to her house would prolong this lateness, but the young man, who said

his name was Roland, admitted that he was often tardy on visits to his aunt, and she

would forgive him.

Felixity, knowing no better, therefore permitted Roland to be driven with her

to the house. Its electric gates and ectomorphic pillars did not seem to antagonize

him, and ten minutes later, he was seated in the blond, eighteenth-century drawing

room, drinking bottled carbonated water with slices of lime. Felixity asked him

whether she should call her father’s doctor, who was in residence. But Roland said

again that he had no need of medical attention. Felixity believed him. He had all the

hallmarks of strength, elasticity, and vitality she had noted in others. She was both

glad and strangely sorry when he rose springingly up again, thanked her, and said

that now he would be leaving.

When he had left, she found that she shook all over, sweat beaded her

forehead, and she felt quite sick. That night she could not sleep, and the next

morning, at breakfast, she broke another tooth on a roll.

Two days after, a bouquet of pink roses, from a fashionable florist, arrived

for Felixity. That very afternoon Roland came to the gates and inquired if he might

see her. The servants, the guards at the gate, were so unused to anyone seeking

Felixity—indeed, it was unique—that they conveyed the message to her without

question. And, of course, Felixity, wan with nauseous amazement and a hammering

heart, invited Roland in.

“I’ve been unable to stop thinking about you,” said Roland. “I’ve never

before met with a woman so gracious and so kind.”

Roland said many things, more or less in this vein, as they walked about the

garden among the imported catalpas and the orchids. He confessed to Felixity that

his aunt was dead; it was her grave he had been going to visit; he had no one in the

world.

Felixity did not know what she felt, but never before had she felt anything like

it. In the dim past of her childhood, when some vague attempts had been made to

prepare or alter her, she had been given to understand that she might, when she

gained them, entertain her friends in her father’s houses, and that her suitors would

be formally welcomed. Neither friend nor suitor had ever crossed the thresholds of

the houses, but now Felixity fell into a kind of delayed response, and in a while she

had offered Roland wine on the terrace.

As they sat sipping it, her sick elation faded and a mute sweetness possessed

her.

It was not that she thought herself lovable; she thought herself nothing. It was

that one had come to her who had made her the center of the day. The monumental

trees and exotic flowers had become a backdrop, the heat, the house, the servants

who brought them things. She had met before people like Roland, the gorgeous

magicians, who never saw her. But Roland did see her. He had fixed on her. He

spoke to her of his sad beleaguered life, how his father had gambled away a fortune,

how he had been sadistically misled on his chances of film stardom. He wanted her

to know him. He gazed into her eyes, and saw in her, it was plain, vast continents of

possibility.

He stayed with her until the dinner hour, and begged that he might be able to

return. He had not told her she was beautiful, or any lie of that nature. He had said

she was good, and luminously kind, and that never before had he met these qualities

in a young woman, and that she must not shut him out as he could not bear it.

On his second visit, under a palm tree, Felixity was taken by compunction.

“Six of my teeth are crowned,” she said. “And this—is a wig!” And she snatched it

off to reveal her thin cropped hair.

Roland gave a gentle smile. “How you honor me,” he said. “I’m so happy that

you trust me. But what does any of this matter? Throw the silly wig away. You are

yourself. There has never been anyone like you. Not in the whole world.”

When Felixity and Roland had been meeting for a month, Felixity received a

summons from her incredible father.

Felixity went to see him with a new type of courage. Some of her awe had

lessened, although she would not have put this into words. She had been with a

creature of fires. It seemed she knew her father a little better.

“I’m afraid,” said Felixity’s father, “that it is my grim task to disillusion you.

The young man you’ve made your companion is a deceiver.”

“Oh,” said Felixity. She looked blank.

“Yes, my child. I don’t know what he has told you, but I’ve had him

investigated. He is the bastard son of a prostitute, and has lived so far by dealings

with thieves and shady organizations. He was in flight from one of these when he ran

in front of your car. Obviously now he is in pursuit of your money, both your own

finances and those which you’ll inherit on my death.”

Felixity did not say she would not hear ill of Roland. She thought about what

her father had told her, and slowly she nodded. Then, from the patois of her

curtailed emotions, she translated her heart into normal human emotional terms. “But

I love him.”

Felixity’s father looked down at her with crucial pity. It was a fact, he did not

truly think of her as his daughter, for his daughter would have been lovely. He

accepted her as a pathetic dependent, until now always needing him, a jest of God

upon a flawless delight which had been rent away.

“If you love him, Felixity,” he said, “you must send him to me.”

Felixity nodded again. Beings of fire communicated with each other. She had

no fears.

The next day she waited on the terrace, and eventually Roland came out of the

house into the sunlight. He seemed a little pale, but he spoke to her brightly. “What a

man he is. We are to marry, my beloved. That is, if you’ll have me. I’m to care for

you. What a golden future lies before us!” Roland did not detail his conversation

with Felixity’s father. He did not relate, for example, that Felixity’s father had

courteously touched on Roland’s career as crook and gigolo. Or that Felixity’s

father had informed Roland that he grasped perfectly his aims, but that those aims

were to be gratified, for Felixity’s sake. “She has had little enough,” said Felixity’s

father. “Providing you are kind to her, a model husband, and don’t enlighten her in

the matter of your real feelings, I am prepared to let you live at her expense.” Roland

had protested feebly that he adored Felixity, her tenderness had won his heart.

Roland did not recount to Felixity either that her father had greeted this effusion with

the words: “You will not, please, try your formula on me.”

In the days which succeeded Roland’s dialogue with Felixity’s father, the

Tanith Lee - Felixity.pdf

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