Against the Season (12 page)

C
ARL HOLLINGER WAS SUFFERING
from nervous embarrassment. In the week since he had proposed to Ida, he had experienced an intensity of emotions he was too old to cope with. At times he deeply regretted having spoken to Ida at all and determined to tell her he now realized what a ridiculous suggestion it had been, but he knew perfectly well that he could say no such thing to her. Aside from its being both dishonorable and unkind, it was for most of each day untrue. What he really regretted was the hope he had made real, for now the discomfort of his loneliness seemed to him intolerable. He hated the pleasant house he and his wife had retired to five years ago. He couldn’t work in the garden or in his study. He could not comfortably read the newspaper in his own living room. He went out for as many meals as he remembered, even for breakfast, and spent a great deal of his time at the public library with random rather than systematic reading so that he often could not remember what he had read or why he was reading what was in front of him. Once a week he visited the General Hospital. Twice a week he called on patients at the Veterans’ Hospital, where he had been the chaplain before his retirement. But none of these tastes and duties which, until two years ago, had made his old age an interesting contentment gave him any satisfaction now. The sorrow he had known during the first year after his wife died gradually gave way to irritable self-criticism which he had known was destructive and had tried to control. But he could not live happily alone. It was not his nature. Why should he endure it when Ida might provide a return to the domestic center of life? His impatient need of her brought him as close to lust as he had been for years. His shame at his inability to deal with loneliness humbled him. Ida had no such need and no such weakness. Why should he hope that answering his would have any appeal for her? But he did hope, and to distract himself from that was even more difficult than finding an escape from grief.

On Monday morning, he was on the library steps before it opened, a declaration of impatience he had never allowed himself before so that he had never seen before the number of people who were willing to suffer the humiliation of their loneliness so publicly. Old people, more than a dozen of them, who were regulars like himself, stood about or sat on the steps in the sun. Several had learned to talk at each other, but most were silent, occupying small, isolated spaces of their own, staked out the months or years ago when they had resigned themselves to this way of passing the time between important deaths and their own. Probably the talkers went elsewhere, to the benches outside the courthouse, to the train and bus station waiting rooms if the weather was bad.

“Good morning, Mr. Hollinger,” Harriet said as she came up the steps with her key. “You’re early this morning.”

“My watch was wrong,” Carl said.

“It’s a lovely day to be in the sun,” she said. “I should think you’d be tempted into your garden.”

“We missed you Friday night at the concert,” Carl said, and was immediately sorry that he had when he saw the expression change on Harriet’s face. “I hope nothing was the matter.”

“I went to the hospital to see if I could do anything to help Miss A. Kathy was having her baby.”

“Ah,” Carl said. “I didn’t know. I should stop in and see her.”

“I simply forgot the concert,” Harriet confessed.

“It was pleasant enough but nothing to be really sorry you missed.”

Harriet unlocked the large front door, and Carl held it open for her. None of the others seemed in any hurry to come in out of the summer morning.

“I didn’t mind missing the concert,” Harriet said quickly. “But it was very rude to forget Peter.”

“He’d understand,” Carl said.

“I’m afraid he didn’t,” Harriet said, and to the confusion of both of them she began to cry. “I am sorry,” she said, recovering. “It’s not important at all. I think I just don’t like being in the wrong like that and upsetting someone else. It’s silly, really.”

“Silly to be concerned about someone else’s feelings?” Carl asked, gently teasing her, wanting to comfort her.

“Oh, Peter doesn’t matter to me at all, Mr. Hollinger,” Harriet said. “What I mean is…” and she hesitated, obviously near tears again.

“That you wouldn’t want to worry anyone,” Carl finished for her.

“May I tell you the truth?” Harriet asked with a sudden, angry earnestness.

“If you want to, of course.”

“I would like to worry someone. I really would. But it would have to be someone who cared about me.”

“I feel exactly the same way.”

“You do?”

“It’s something some people never outgrow,” Carl said. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing. And, Harriet, people don’t worry about people who don’t matter to them, not much anyway.”

The others had begun to come into the building now, and the telephone on Harriet’s desk was ringing.

“Excuse me,” she said.

Carl hesitated a moment and then went into the reading room. If Peter Fallidon had no intention of marrying Harriet Jameson, he should stop seeing her. Carl could not say why he felt Peter would not marry. He was not a cold man, but there was something rigidly self-sufficient about him, not at the social edges but at the center. Peter Fallidon would not find it difficult to go home at night to the task of preparing his own meal and eating it alone. He would never be driven out to escape solitude. Like Ida, he would have made for himself a cheerful discipline, even a pleasure, out of singleness. Still, for Ida it was a necessity which she found the courage to serve. For Peter it was a choice. And he should be free to make it only if he really could live without worrying much about other people or mattering much to them. It was quite wrong of him to teach Harriet the peripheral pleasures of companionship without taking responsibility for them.

The stern tone in Carl’s head warned him. Wasn’t he really lecturing at Ida? And certainly, if she decided she wouldn’t marry him, he would not want her to decide, as well, that she should not see him any more. Would that occur to her? She had said that night, if he wanted a wife, he should stop “hiding” with her. But, at their age, that was ridiculous. Was it less ridiculous at Peter’s and Harriet’s? There certainly didn’t seem to be anyone else who was being discouraged from courting Harriet because of Peter. At least, with Peter, she had the peripheral pleasures, and that was better than nothing. If that was all Peter could offer her, if that was all Ida could offer him, why judge them for it? Carl knew why. He couldn’t stand the idea. He wanted to walk into Peter Fallidon’s office and say not “If you don’t intend to marry Harriet, leave her alone” but “Marry the girl!” Peter should come down here to the library. Maybe now, while he was occupied with business and energetic in his health, being alone had its virtues, but did he want to grow old like one of these rheumy, rheumatic old men who shuffled in out of the sun every day to the files of old newspapers? Carl sighed. He doubted that there was a bachelor among them. Peter, in his old age, would be no more baffled by loneliness than Ida was now. Harriet? Well, she would have lived her whole life in the library, anyway. But what a waste! Even now for him, at his age, it was a waste. Couldn’t Ida see that? If they had no more than five years, no more than six months, why should they live even a moment not worrying much, not mattering much to each other, when from that center flowed the love one had for everyone? A profane view for a minister, but for years Carl had suspected that his love of God was supported by his love for his wife rather than the other way round. And he could not feel guilty about it; it was too good a thing to mistrust. Even now in his loneliness, when to love God was a requirement without comfort, he did not mistrust human love.

“Daily bread,” he said and realized that he spoke aloud, but it was not an unusual thing here among books and old people used to talking to themselves.

Carl closed the book he had not been reading and went back out to Harriet’s desk.

“Are you busy tonight?” he asked. “I’m going to be fairly late at the Veterans’ Hospital, and I won’t want to cook myself supper. Would you have some with me?”

“Why, thank you, Mr. Hollinger,” Harriet said. “That would be very nice.”

“I’ll pick you up around six,” he said.

If he and Harriet had to suffer, there was no real reason why they should suffer alone. He thought of Kathy. Given her shyness, it would be better to call on her with Amelia, Perhaps he would stop at the Larson house now. It was about time for Amelia’s midmorning coffee, and she liked company.

“Cole’s at work,” a tawny-eyed, ample-bodied girl informed him at the door. “And Miss Larson’s in bed, doctor’s orders.”

“I’m sorry,” Carl said. “Is it serious?”

“She needs rest, the doctor said.”

“How about callers?”

“I don’t know,” Agate said. “Do you want to see her?”

“Could you just tell her that Carl Hollinger is here?”

“All right.”

“Thank you.”

Carl was surprised at the alarm he felt, for at their age it was surely more surprising to find a friend well than sick, but Amelia, much more than Maud Montgomery, who bragged about her strength, or Ida, who simply did not inform people of her ailments, had a strong constitution which seemed hardly affected by emotional or physical strain.

“She says you’re to come up,” Agate announced as she came back down the stairs. “I’ll bring you some coffee.”

“Oh, don’t bother. Ill stay only a few minutes.”

“Miss Larson says you
expect
coffee,” Agate answered with mock firmness.

The girl’s tone, tilting toward rude familiarity so different from Kathy’s shy politeness, reassured Carl, for she did make Amelia sound like herself.

“What’s this all about?” he asked, standing in the door of her bedroom.

“Nothing but four months of biscuits and too long a night,” Amelia said cheerfully, but her color wasn’t good. “I’m to be starved and bored for a week. So much for modern medicine. Come in, Carl.”

“I was just stopping by to see if I could arrange to take you down to Kathy,” Carl said, taking a chair that had been moved near the bed.

“I was going to call you,” Amelia said. “Rosemary’s going down, and Harriet will, but, since I can’t, I’d be awfully glad if you did as well.”

“Ill go from here. Now what else can I do for you? If Cole’s gone to work, you must need some errands run.”

“That’s no problem. I can send Agate by cab.”

“Quite a change from Kathy,” Carl said, smiling.

“Isn’t she? She doesn’t even know
how
to bake bread.”

“Is she managing for you all right?”

“Perfectly,” Amelia said. “She’s simply taken over. I think she’s going to be a bit bossy, and she hasn’t a manner to her name, except as a way of being funny, but she is funny. I haven’t laughed so much since Sister died. I’m sure Maud won’t approve.”

“She wouldn’t in any case,” Carl said.

They heard Agate coming up the stairs.

“Here’s your coffee,” Amelia said.

“I hear you’re taking good care of Miss Larson,” Carl said, taking a cup from the tray Agate offered. “Thank you.”

“She just doesn’t want me to tell people what a terrible patient she is; so we made an agreement not to complain about each other. You don’t get coffee.”

“I know. You needn’t remind me,” Amelia said.

“I found the Teflon frying pan in the bottom drawer of the stove. It was full of pork fat, but Kathy didn’t use it before she’d scrubbed it clean. The only Teflon left is around the handle bolts where she couldn’t get at it.”

“So it won’t do?”

“Not without butter, and you’re not having butter.”

“Order a new one then,” Amelia said.

“Yes’m, Miss A,” Agate said and did an Aunt Jemima strut out of the bedroom.

“Are they always critical of their predecessors?” Carl asked.

“Not always,” Amelia said. “But it’s not unusual. Kathy was too busy with her own mistakes to notice, or at least she never said.”

“What are all these boxes?” Carl asked.

“Sister’s diaries. I’m reading them before I burn them.”

“Are they witty?”

“I suppose they are,” Amelia said. “Is it always the unhappiest people who are?”

“Beatrice wasn’t really unhappy, was she? Critical, yes, but not unhappy.”

“She was never content with herself. I know that, but I find it peculiar to read her saying so. I was so content with her.”

“Why do you read them?” Carl asked.

“I don’t know. A way of passing through grief, is it?”

“I used to have answers for questions like that,” Carl said, and he took Amelia’s hand.

“We’re bad at missing people, you and I,” Amelia said.

“Is there anything I should take to Kathy?”

“Jawbreakers,” Amelia confessed.

“Out of the penny machine?”

“That’s right. And thank you, Carl.”

“I’ll come by again in a day or two.”

July 1, 1939:
How can Sister really mean that it doesn’t matter how Bill Hopwood died? Of course, if he committed suicide, it shouldn’t be in the paper, but we should know. If he had a heart attack at the wheel, an autopsy would show it. Esther won’t agree to an autopsy. Is she so afraid? Is she so sure? He wasn’t ever stable, not even as a boy. Still, to live to nearly fifty makes suicide unreasonable without troubles over money or something of the sort. He would have been a happier man with troubles. Was it just two months ago he said, “When we die, it will be of boredom”? He never could make a decision, not even to marry. But he wasn’t really unhappy with Esther. Except for losing the boy. But that must be ten years ago now. And Rosemary, even before that, was his favorite. A vain thing people do, loving the children who take after them. Rosemary would be better off with more of Esther’s toughness and less of his temperament, particularly now. An odd thing to see beauty change sexes from father to daughter, mother to son. If I’m going to believe that Bill Hopwood is dead, I must know how and why. Was he having an affair? Was he ill? He could not have been too bored to go on living—that isn’t possible.

July 2, 1939:
Ida, come from the Hopwoods, said Rosemary wasn’t speaking to her mother—at a time like this! But Ida knows no more about it than the rest of us. Esther says the funeral has to be tomorrow, whether all the family can get here or not. It can’t be on the Fourth of July. Amelia is arranging to have casseroles sent over. That’s what Esther did for us when Mama died. Should I speak to Rosemary? Sister won’t discuss the idea. Who is close to the child? She can’t behave this way now. If people think Rosemary blames Esther, they’ll also think Bill killed himself. I don’t know what to think.