Against the Season (13 page)

July 3, 1939:
Of course, Esther wouldn’t cry. She’s like Sister in that. And Rosemary is hardly more than a child. It’s hard for any of us to believe he’s dead. Because it was a sudden accident? Because we don’t understand it? Why do I feel frightened in a way I did when Father died? We’ve buried Mama and Aunt Setworth and now Bill Hopwood just in the last eight months. “We begin to bury ourselves,” Ida said. I believed so little in Bill’s life—no more than in my own. It’s a hard walk for Sister to the grave, but she always goes. “Accept it,” is all she will say. Aunt Setworth taught her that: “One of the hard poems, child.” For Ida and me it has to be a joke. I can’t accept it. Why won’t Rosemary cry?

July 4, 1939:
Sister and I sat in the turret tonight to watch the fireworks down at the docks. They are no comfort.

July 5, 1939:
Rosemary has gone. Esther won’t talk about it more than to say “She wanted to, and I thought it best to let her go.” At sixteen? And she’s moving into Rosemary’s room, as if she expected Rosemary would never come home again. When Ida asked her what she was going to do, she said, “Just what I’ve always done… nothing.” Are we simply born to bury each other? And help each other kill the time until the time.

Carl, driving back into town from the Veterans’ Hospital, had a sudden image of his wife, not as she was in those last sad months before she died but years younger, laughing at him. And somehow that laughter was related to Kathy this afternoon, sitting very solemnly in her bed, sucking one of the jawbreakers he had brought her. He wondered if on the next occasion of her having a baby, there would be an earnest young farmer to take his place who could sit in dumb adoration of that pregnant cheek. Then he heard his wife’s voice, still uneven with laughter: “There must be a great deal of silliness in the day of any good man, Carl. Isn’t that a lucky thing?” But it hadn’t to do with anything he had done or told her about, had it? Wasn’t it some foolishness between them? Some comic turn of love in the day? He couldn’t remember. Did Ida know how to laugh like that? It was probably something you couldn’t learn by yourself. It was certainly easy to forget by yourself. It was as if Kathy with her jawbreaker
was
his wife. To be reminded of someone by another’s gesture or tone or attitude wasn’t surprising, but to have his bright, articulate wife come to him in the face of Kathy was nearly perverse. Except that to have loved the silliness of one person was to make loving anyone’s silliness possible. The other faces of the day, with that gift, could be endured. If Carl felt a threatening connection between himself and the old men at the library, he was still healthy and independent enough to offer a detached sympathy for the men at the Veterans’ Hospital. Amelia was a different matter. He must speak to Harriet. Amelia was very fond of Harriet.

T
HERE WERE RESTAURANTS OTHER
than Nick’s: half a dozen dairies of varying dullness, a steak house, a seafood restaurant where the food was very good and the service very bad, a few motel and hotel coffee shops a step up from the greasy spoons and drive-ins, but Nick’s was the only place with a style that could make you forget you were going out to dinner simply because you did not want to eat at home. Nick’s could have been successful anywhere else as well, and that’s what happened to restaurants that did succeed: their owners left for the larger appetites and wallets of the real cities. But Nick Pyros would not leave. He had a house, a wife, a couple of children, and this was his sort of town. He’d chosen it.

It was really two halves of one place, a dining room and a café, mercifully separated by the kitchen so that the loud music of the café threatened the nervous systems of the diners only when both kitchen doors happened to open at the same time. Though that occurred on an average of once every five or six minutes, no one enjoying the intervening quiet ever complained. For those who talked, it provided a moment to eat. For those who were silent, it was company. For those of uncertain social habits, the jarring noise relieved them of any guilt of their own. But perhaps the acceptance was for the music as well. It was Greek. Like the menu, the jukebox offered only two or three North American choices, whatever was the musical hamburger of the moment. And a kid could eat a hamburger if he really wanted to, either in the dining room or the café, but it wasn’t the thing to do. Nick had trained his customers to tiropeta—a kind of cheese pie with many layers of thin pastry and a thick, savory filling—if they were snacking, to lamb dishes and eggplant if they were ordering a meal.

But more than the music or the food, it was the dancing that drew people of all ages to Nick’s. Even on a weeknight there was always a nucleus of half a dozen men, either immigrants like Nick or first-generation Greeks, who kept a sense of that rhythm of manhood which would call them to their feet at any time. Singly at first, later often together, some simply assertively and some with real authority, they danced. Local boys, used to showing off to anything but music, watched during the early evening, but, as the hours passed, they too would get up, their first solos drunken and sheepishly imitative, even mocking, but the music allowed for that. Within it a number of them had learned to dance so that the crowd’s response would change from cheerful jeering to stamping and table-beating approval. Weekends the place was always jammed, and after eight the dining room was opened to music and dancing as well. Any night there were Greek sailors in town, it was hard to find a place to stand. Women were not forbidden to dance either by rule or custom, but not many did except when the sailors were there, teaching them what would not have been allowed in Greece.

The sailors had been in town for a week because of a delay in loading lumber, caused by a series of the usual errors in planning. Deadlines here were rarely met, not because there were strikes but because owners of timber clipped trees like coupons, when they needed the cash, without regard to mill needs or foreign orders. The uncertain supply of logs made work at the mills uncertain, and whether there were logs or not, most mills shut down for the opening of the hunting and fishing seasons. Another thirty years and there would be nothing left of the already vastly depleted forests; so why not spin out the process a little longer? If a ship waited in the harbor, sailors danced in the town, and whoever was paying the bill probably knew nothing about it and did not care.

For Nick, it was good business: free meals and drinks for a dozen sailors who, by their presence, tripled his take. At five-thirty the first had arrived, and by six o’clock locals who usually didn’t drop in until after eight were already coming to have dinner and claim their space for later in the evening.

Cole Westaway was already settled at a table by himself when Carl and Harriet came in.

“Hi, Cole,” Harriet said. “Isn’t the new girl a good cook?”

Cole tried to stand up and nearly tipped over the small table in front of him. “I just thought while Cousin A was in bed it would be easier for Agate not to have to bother with me.”

“How is she?” Harriet asked.

“Better, I think.”

“Is it a good idea for her to have company?”

“She’d love to see you,” Cole said. “She always does. And I think she gets a little depressed, just staying in bed and reading Cousin B’s diaries.”

Carl wondered if he should ask Cole to join them, but the boy was obviously embarrassed to be found eating out in the first place. Better let him alone. Carl and Harriet had just settled at a table of their own when Dina Pyros came in. She stopped at Cole’s table, and for a moment it looked as if she might join him. Then she went to sit by herself at a table for four, where almost at once she was joined by the two women who ran the corset shop.

“Do you know what Dina said to me the other day?” Harriet asked, her voice pitched so carefully low that Carl had to strain to hear her. “She said that a woman should marry, any woman.”

“Do you think she’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. It just surprised me, when
she
said it.”

“Knowing what should be isn’t hard,” Carl said with some dryness. “Accepting what can be seems to me the problem.”

“I owe you an apology about this morning. It’s hard to explain. …”

“There’s no need to…”

It’s just that Peter was so angry the other night, and I was upset by it. I’ve thought of phoning him, but somehow I can’t. I don’t phone Peter. That’s one of the things I think he wouldn’t like. So I sent him a note. He must have had it this morning. He often does call me at the library or at home right after work. He didn’t call. There’s not much else I can do, is there?”

“Are you in love with Peter, Harriet?” Carl asked.

“I didn’t think so,” Harriet said, bleakly honest. “Months ago, we had a talk, and we agreed we weren’t really interested in each other, but, as Peter put it, we could be convenient for each other—friends.”

“Maybe that wasn’t a very good agreement.”

“I couldn’t really think of any reason to refuse,” Harriet said.

“But maybe now there is one.”

“For Peter, you mean?”

The kitchen door swung open, and six fast bars of Greek song canceled Carl’s reply.

“I beg your pardon?” Harriet said.

“For either of you,” Carl repeated.

“I guess, when I forgot, I stopped being a convenience,” Harriet said. “Once when I was just a girl, my mother asked me to take my little brother and sister shopping with me. I did it, cheerfully enough, but then I forgot them. I mean, I simply left them in the store and got all the way home before I remembered. They were tiny—about three and five at the time.”

At that moment, the street door opened, and Peter Fallidon walked in.

“Oh dear,” Harriet said.

Peter caught sight of Cole just before he noticed, with acute embarrassment, Harriet and Carl. He spoke to Cole, and then he deliberately moved to greet the others.

“Won’t you join us?” Carl suggested.

“I’d like to,” Peter said. “But I’ve just told Cole I’d keep him company. I got your note, Harriet. Thank you.”

“I just wanted you to know how sorry I was…”

“Have you heard about Miss Larson?”

“Yes,” Harriet said.

“The new girl called to tell me there won’t be dinner on Wednesday.”

“No, I thought there wouldn’t.”

“Doesn’t even seem to be dinner for Cole,” Peter said, glancing back at the boy. Then he caught sight of Dina, nodded and smiled. “Everybody seems to be here tonight Well … enjoy your dinner.”

“That’s good advice, you know,” Carl said gently to Harriet “Why not enjoy it?”

“I don’t know why I involve you in all this nonsense,” Harriet said. “I don’t see how you can enjoy yours.”

“The older you get, Harriet, the gladder you are of lively problems, and you’re very charming not to realize how flattering it is for me to be confided in.”

Peter had stopped at Dina’s table, his smile a little strained at the bad jokes Dolly and Sal were sharing with him. He waited for a pause and then said, “If you’re in the bank any time this week, Dina, I wish you’d stop in to see me.”

“All right,” Dina said, her clear gray eyes alert with questions she would not ask.

“Just some business that might interest you.”

Then Peter returned to Cole, who had nearly finished his meal.

“Are you planning to stay awhile?” Peter asked. “I don’t want to hold you up.”

“I was planning to stay.”

“You look tired.”

“First day at the mill, I guess,” Cole said. “Takes a while to get used to it.”

“Hard not to be able to go home for dinner.”

“Oh, I could have gone home. It’s just that… I didn’t really know where I should eat.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, with Cousin A having her dinner in bed, I didn’t know whether I should sit in the dining room or suggest that I eat in the kitchen.”

Peter grinned at him. “You’d better solve that problem or you may have to eat out every night for a week.”

“I know, and I wouldn’t mind that, but I guess Cousin A would think it was funny.”

“What’s Agate like?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cole said.

“Bad cook?”

“Oh no. She cooks all right.” Cole waited for Peter to order. “She’s different from Kathy. Kathy would have just gone ahead and set my place. But I don’t think Agate’s used to being a… a servant. She doesn’t act like it anyway.”

“How does she act?”

“Sort of like a… well, just like a girl. She jokes a lot. Tonight when I got in, she was sitting in Cousin A’s chair in the study reading the paper. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t. Cousin A’s in bed, after all. She said something like, “The master’s home from touring the cotton, is he?” in a cornball southern accent. So I told her I’d be going out for supper, and she just shrugged, but maybe I hurt her feelings.”

“Well, she was bugging you. Just tell her what you want.”

“Sure,” Cole said, with a wry grin. “All I have to do is figure out what that is. There have to be more choices than master or slave.”

“She’s paid.”

“So am I. I still don’t like taking orders, but I’d rather take them than give them. Ever meet a sadder combination? An army mentality in a conscientious objector.”

“Are you going to take that route?”

“Can’t,” Cole said, “not legally anyway; so it’s jail or Canada.”

“I was in the navy. It wasn’t all that bad.”

“So was my dad. Maybe he was a bastard before, just a one-armed bastard after. But I still think maybe he wouldn’t have slugged so hard with two arms.”

“What happened to him?”

“Don’t know. He took off.”

What should Peter say: that he was sorry? that he hadn’t even had the benefit of a bad father himself? That letting women run you and the world was no solution? Nobody had shown Peter that alternative of domestic kindness and unworldly idealism which Cole was trying to struggle into. Could Peter say it wouldn’t work?

“You don’t approve,” Cole said.

“Of what?”

“Me.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you think the army would make a man of me.”

“Don’t hang that cliché on me, Cole. I don’t know what I’d do now in your shoes. It was a different scene for me, for all of us.”