Against the Season (23 page)

Harriet had said, when the month was up, he should ask Ida again, and tonight he intended to, not when he picked her up but when he took her home. He could be that patient. Then, if she agreed, they would go out of town directly, marry, and grow accustomed to each other’s company away from the amusement and curiosity of their friends. Ida was not going to refuse him. He somehow knew that.

The town, as he drove through it, was gentle with evening light. It was not really a chore ever to go to get Ida, but he would be very glad of a day when he did not have to travel farther than a room or two to find her.

The last stop light was red. He braked and looked at his watch. Six o’clock. He waited for the change. Green. A fist of pain, the weight of a falling planet, hit him in the chest. No instant of knowledge came with it He was dead.

Ida, who had cried so bitterly at the irony of being loved by Carl, did not weep when she finally located the fact of Carl’s death two hours later by phone. In his car, at a stop light, dead.

She had already told Amelia to go ahead with dinner. She did not like to phone again now, though she knew Amelia and Maud would be worrying. But probably they had finished what meal they felt inclined to eat. That hard thing, “Carl and I are going to be married,” did not have to be said now. She picked up the phone and dialed.

Cole answered.

“Could you put Amelia on?” Ida asked.

“Yes, Miss Setworth, right away.”

“Yes, Ida,” Amelia said into the phone, almost at once.

“Carl’s dead,” Ida said. “A heart attack, in his car, at the last stop light.”

“Cole’s coming out to get you,” Amelia said.

I don’t really think…” Ida began. Then she said simply, “All right.”

“He’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

“All right.”

Ida went out onto the terrace and sat down to wait. Dying was the only proper surprise any of them had to offer each other, one they were in some measure prepared for. She would not be the center of grief for this one. No one but Rosemary knew that Ida had been thinking of marrying Carl, and now she would not have to say so. Cole would take her to the Larson house to be one of the several mourning friends, as she had been for Beatrice. At the warm edge where she had always been. The only step for her to take, when the time came, was into the grave. Her brief holiday from that idea had not made her unfamiliar with it. But he had already taken it. Dead. Carl was dead.

“Miss Setworth?”

“Hello, Cole. I’ll be right there.”

But he got out of the car and came to her, offering her his arm. She took it, simply glad of the boy, to whose support she had no more right than she had to special grief. Gifts.

“You’re a good boy, Cole, to take care of so many old women.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Cole said.

“Is it?” she asked vaguely. “Yes, for you, young.”

“He was… such a nice man.”

“Yes… a good man. Did you have a chance to eat dinner?”

“Yes,” Cole said. “Agate’s kept some for you.”

“That’s kind of her.”

And Ida imagined that she could eat, there with Amelia and Maud, while they watched and said the ordinary things that people say.

“A younger man than Arthur,” Maud recalled, for no purpose.

“At least his loneliness is over,” Amelia said.

“I really thought he might marry again,” Maud said.

“At his age?” Amelia asked. “Dying is probably an easier solution.”

“You sound like your sister,” Ida said, cutting into a piece of ham.

“We blur,” Amelia said, “as we age. And die.”

“No,” Ida said.

“Don’t be perverse, Ida,” Maud said. “It’s not a time to disagree.”

“No,” Ida said, to agree. Safe. Safe next to the grave. Innocent. “Still it was unkind of him.”

Agate came in to clear away the others’ coffee cups. Cole got up quickly to help her, in the look they exchanged something irritable, needful, outside the circle of mourning.

If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,

Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime

Should hear my living feet…

Let new faces play what tricks they will

In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,

Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,

The living seem more shadowy than they.

Beatrice would quote, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death.” Nothing of that freezing comfort in Amelia’s honesty. Dull, direct, loving Amelia, who had hurt them more with her goodness, her contentment, than they could hurt her with their witty discontent. Carl, unkind, dead. He had sent roses to Beatrice’s funeral. Ida had forgotten that.

But never asked for love; should I ask that,

I shall be old indeed….

Ida wanted to go home, wanted to read her Yeats, play an ancient unreal Maud Gonne against her as unreal grief, who had never had a moment of beauty, had only taken comfort from the pointlessness of it in her best and beautiful friend, but she must sit and eat a while longer among the living ruins of Amelia and Maud, their faces bloated with customary sorrow, bored with death only a little less than with life.

“Dessert, Miss Setworth?” Agate asked.

“Yes, thank you,” It would pass the time.

“He never could learn to count,” Maud said.

“Did you speak about arrangements?” Amelia asked Ida.

“He has a brother who’ll come to bury him.”

“It should be a nice funeral,” Maud said.

“I hope so,” Amelia said. “He always did such a nice one.”

Like Aunt Setworth’s wine cake or old Mrs. Larson’s quilts. And Amelia would walk to the grave, even at the risk of toppling into it, not with any sense of drama, simply of what was fitting. Ida, too, only making whatever gesture was required with some moment of sharp whimsy. For Maud, every funeral since she had been a young woman was a rehearsal of Arthur’s. Perhaps Carl was wrong. It might be unkind to rob her of that.

Rosemary, without stopping to telephone, drove directly from her office to Ida Setworth’s, and she found Ida, as she expected to, sitting on her terrace reading Yeats.

“I didn’t hear until this afternoon,” Rosemary said.

“Rosemary!” Ida said, looking up surprised.

“It’s horrible for you. It’s…”

“Don’t ever say anything to anyone, will you?” Ida asked with some urgency.

“I…” Rosemary, seeing the distress in Ida’s face, could not admit that she had blurted out to Amelia, “But Ida was thinking of marrying him.”

“It was never anything serious,” Ida said. “A silly notion… silly, old fools…”

“That’s not the truth,” Rosemary said, surprised at her own rudeness.

“It will do,” Ida said sharply. “Anything else is an embarrassment to people… to me.”

“Oh, Ida, Ida…” Rosemary said, putting a tight arm around this old lady, her friend.

It was criminal, this denying of Carl Hollinger, this leaving of him now as a lonely old man instead of the lively, loving person he had been. To save face. Rosemary felt the stiff, brittle shoulders, the unbending head, and knew Ida was looking out through the orchard to the graves of almost everyone she had known and loved, where day after tomorrow Carl would be buried beside his wife. Criminal, this living need of dignity against the defenseless dead. Her father, a possible suicide for some perversity of her mother’s pride. But Rosemary, in an angry pride of her own, had not buried her mother. Did it, after all, make any difference? Rosemary had thought so, but she had not loved her mother. In angry concern, she held to Ida, her sense of all these things blurred in protesting tears.

“It’s nothing to cry about,” Ida said, taking Rosemary’s free hand. “We’re all too old to cry about. Don’t. Don’t, Rosemary.”

“I’m sorry,” Rosemary said.

“You can’t have had supper.”

“I came right out.”

“There must be something in the kitchen,” Ida said. “Come along. We’ll look and see.”

As Rosemary took lettuce and celery from the refrigerator, opened a can for Ida, and then went to set the table, Ida didn’t really seem distressed. She might even be in some way relieved of the burden of choice. No investment. Not like Rosemary’s mother, whose had been a passionately bad investment, but important, all-important after Jimmy died. If it had been her father instead, who had had no investments either except perhaps in her, would he have been, like Ida, relieved? Or forced to suffer no more than embarrassment? Something ugly in it all, perhaps in everyone. No. Carl had grieved. Amelia, too. Why hadn’t Rosemary the decency to? She had even refused to weep for her father. If Dina cracked herself up tomorrow in that new Volvo of hers, would Rosemary be glad that no one knew about their relationship? Would she? Probably. She hadn’t even risked lively confessions. What was independence after all but a denial?

Rosemary sat at the dinner table with Ida, appalled at them both, unable to think of the most ordinary things to say.

“You have to learn not to bury all the dead again,” Ida said, “each time.”

That firmness startled Rosemary. “What do you mean?”

“Just that,” Ida said. “Just that.”

“You mean, Aunt Setworth…”

“And your brother and your father and your mother, my mother, my father…”

“Beatrice,” Rosemary said.

Ida nodded, “Her, too.”

Rosemary wanted to shout at Ida, wanted to make her confess, for surely she had loved Beatrice, been in love with her but had never said, never done anything…

“Ida, I’m in love with Dina Pyros.”

Ida sighed. “Yes, I supposed you were.”

“Is it ridiculous? Is it so ridiculous?”

“Yes,” Ida said. “It can’t ever be anything else.”

“I don’t really care.”

“No, neither did Carl. Even, in some way, he found it a comfort, like his religion, I suppose. I didn’t, don’t, but I did think I just might manage it… with him.”

“But you really loved…”

“Nobody,” Ida said. “Or I wouldn’t have minded so much… even now.”

“Did Beatrice ever…?”

“Leave our graves alone,” Ida said, but gently. “Ride by.”

P
ETER FALLIDON WENT TO
Harriet Jameson, aware that she would need comfort and shaken in his own sense of mortality, for, since he had known that Carl Hollinger was courting Ida Setworth, Peter no longer thought of him as one of those marked and waiting, his life already accomplished or not. He had become for Peter a man with a lively problem, in some comic measure similar to Peter’s own, full of silly, hopeful needs that might be answered. A couple of embarrassed bachelors, out of the habit of amorous persuasion, focused upon women whose graces had nothing to do with being courted. That Carl could be so intent upon a future and then simply not have one put Peter’s own in jeopardy. Allotted time: thirty years? five minutes? Any stop light.

It’s hard to think about it,” Harriet said. “Not like the others. They let you see them dying… even Miss A now. I’ll hate it when she dies, but she begins to behave in a way to make it clear, like someone gathering up gloves and saying ‘thank you’ with a mind already in some other place. With Mr. Hollinger, it’s as shocking as if one … of us …”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“And Miss Setworth there where she’s always been, all her life, among the dead. Why didn’t she just go ahead and marry him? But maybe that would have been worse.”

“How could it have been worse?” Peter asked, almost irritably.

To be a widow, to have someone else’s name. Oh, I don’t know. Embarrassing?”

Peter rubbed his face.

“Would you like something? Coffee?”

“Do you really think Miss Larson is dying?”

“Really? Yes, I do. It may take a long time, like Miss B, but she’s begun.”

“There’s so much she might still do,” Peter said.

“I think she’s tired of that idea.”

“Tired?”

“People do just get tired.”

“I suppose,” Peter said.

“But not Mr. Hollinger. It seems like an accident. I hate that. To suffer some lower form of fate.”

“It wasn’t an accident. It was a heart attack.”

“I know that.”

“Harriet?”

She turned to him from her sense of insult at this death.

“Let’s not wait,” Peter said.

“For what?”

“Let’s marry. There couldn’t be more harm in it than not.”

Harriet looked at him and shook her head. “Harm.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I meant that, whatever happens, I’d rather have married… you.”

“In retrospect,” Harriet said quietly, trying out the idea.

“Now, too,” Peter said earnestly. “I’d rather. I’d so much rather…”

“Than what?”

“Than not.”

Harriet sat without answering, her thin arms prim against her body, her eyes focusing through glasses onto her own hands.

“Wouldn’t you?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know. I think we should … do other things first.”

“Other things?”

“What other people do… go to bed.”

“You’re not serious!”

“What if you couldn’t bear me? What if I turned out to be one of those people who…”

“Don’t be silly,” Peter said. “We aren’t adolescent. That sort of thing doesn’t matter. It…”

“Doesn’t matter?”

“Harriet, one of the reasons I love you is that you’re not the sort of woman who makes something cheap of…”

“Nobody is a sort of anything,” Harriet said, flushing. “I don’t think you want to make love to me. I don’t think I’m attractive to you.”

“That’s not true.”

“You never touch me. In books men touch women.” Harriet’s tone was not accusing. She was earnestly trying to explain.

“Harriet,” Peter said, taking both her hands, “we’re both of us shy people. It doesn’t do any good to behave as if we’re not. Or to behave as if we didn’t care about the things we do care about. I couldn’t try anything out. Not like that. There are lots of things that people do, in books and out of them, that aren’t for people like us.”

“People like us?”

“Born decent like you, or trying to be decent like me.”

“I don’t think I’m that old-fashioned.”

“Of course you are,” Peter said.

“Maybe what I’m afraid of is that you’re a prude,” Harriet said, an uncertain amusement in her eyes.