Against the Season (6 page)

“To Harriet? What for?” Maud asked.

“She liked it,” Amelia said.

“Oh.”

“Is she going to marry Peter Fallidon?” Ida asked.

“I don’t know,” Amelia said.

“I don’t think he’s the marrying kind,” Carl said.

“How do you judge that?” Maud wanted to know. “He’s already a widower.”

“You know, he’s nearly convinced me that this town may still turn into a city,” Amelia said.

“So he doesn’t want you to sell the F Street property?” Maud asked.

“
Yes
,
that,” Amelia said.

Kathy was at the door with the chicken sandwiches.

“Is it that time already?” Amelia asked.

“Ten-thirty, Miss A.”

On a Saturday night they often played whatever they were playing until midnight. On Sunday, though none of them had any reason to consider Monday the beginning of anything, they were careful to stop early. And they could stop in the middle of a rubber or round, in the middle of a hand, since there was never anything at stake, not even their interest. So now they pushed away from the table, variously adapting to their frailties, except for Ida who seemed to have none aside from being frail. Kathy left the sandwiches and came back with thin, hot, nearly bitter chocolate, the only thing Amelia insistently taught all her girls to make, for it was a specialty of the Larson house. Her guests could trust it, no matter who had made it. They were not so confident about the sandwiches, but they ate briefly against the alarms of both butter and mayonnaise, knowing remedies.

“A week from Friday?” Amelia suggested, as she stood with her guests at the door.

They agreed, soft, old lips against the soft, old cheek, careful of dentures. There was only one car in the drive, Carl’s. He helped both his passengers in.

Maud needed to be driven simply round the block.

“Love to Arthur,” Ida said. “I’ll call in during the week.”

“Do that,” Maud said. “He’s always better for a visit. Don’t bother, Carl.”

But Carl had already opened his door. He would see Maud to her house, as he always did, courtesy relieving his small guilt at being glad to be rid of her once again.

“What will she do when Arthur dies?” Ida asked, as Carl got back into the car.

“Perhaps he won’t be that unkind,” Carl said.

Ida sat with that, interested in the unkind dead, who had always been as much her companions as the living. There were so many more of them, and they were her neighbors, which was Ida’s most important comic fact. She lived on the top of a hill in a little white house, overlooking the graveyard. She had lived there since she was seven, orphaned by a fire and taken by her aunt, the “first” or “original” Miss Setworth, who said, “The dead are friendly, peaceful companions, and I would sooner recommend a man to their company than to a good many of the livelier worlds I’ve known.” But her aunt was neither sinister nor cynical. She had been a loving guardian and a loving friend, teaching Ida truths that did not seem hard at the time: fearlessness, horticulture, poetry, and self-discipline. It was one of the marks of a stagnant town that no one had ever thought to suggest that, once old Miss Setworth was dead, Ida should move into town. No one would ever suggest to Amelia that she should move out of the house she had grown up in, either. When anyone had to move, there was sympathy. But before that, there were ways of adapting large houses to reduced numbers and circumstances, ways of limiting isolation and loneliness. It would never have occurred to Ida to apologize to Carl or Cole or Rosemary Hopwood or any of the others who so often drove the five miles out of town to pick her up or take her home. She was too old to drive herself and too careful to spend much on taxis, even though the flat rate to Ida’s had been fixed at $1 years ago and had never gone up. It was a pleasant trip on a back road, past a dairy farm, then along the rising slope of graves, through an old prune orchard to her own dirt drive.

“Are you going to ask me in for a brandy?” Carl asked.

“Do you need one?”

“Yes,” Carl said.

The flowered summer slipcovers were already on the old couch and the armchairs by the fire, and only the African violets and Christmas cactus remained on the plant stand in the window. The others had been put out in the gentle weather. It was not a cluttered room, perhaps because the two Misses Setworth had been domestically related to no one but each other and had shared a taste for serene space. The quiet seascape over the fireplace mirrored in miniature the view from the front windows and the terrace, over the town to the sea.

“How many years have you lived alone now?” Carl asked, standing while Ida got the brandy and, he was interested to see, two glasses from the cupboard.

“Nearly thirty,” Ida said.

“A long time.”

“Not as long, I imagine, as the last two years have been for you.”

“It’s obvious I do it badly, isn’t it?”

“Not badly,” Ida said, offering him the job of pouring the drinks. “You keep yourself clean and cheerful and busy. You just don’t enjoy it. Why don’t you marry again?”

“I’d like to.”

“Then you should go about it,” Ida said. “Stop hiding with A and Maud and me. You never will learn to play Mah-Jongg, you know, and you’d like a serious bridge partner.”

“I’d like to marry you, Ida,” Carl said.

She did not reply except with the unguarded surprise in her finely set, light eyes.

“Does that seem ridiculous to you?” he asked, smiling an apology.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“I suppose it is ridiculous then,” he said, taking his brandy like medicine but immediately pouring himself another—“for you.”

“Why would such a thing occur to you?”

“Well,” Carl said, “I think we’re companionable. I think it might make financial sense. I don’t like living alone. And—if it doesn’t sound foolish—I love you.”

“You
love
me?”

“Yes, Ida, I do,” Carl said, and again he smiled.

“I’m seventy-eight years old,” Ida announced. “I have not been domestically intimate with anyone for thirty years. In my life I have never been affectionately intimate with anyone.”

“You’ve never loved anyone?”

“No,” Ida said, sharply.

“A word both too sacred and too profane for your critical use,” Carl said.

“Is that a reprimand?”

“I suppose it is. Forgive me. The natural bad habit of a minister. ‘Love’ is an easy word for me. I mean by it all lands of very ordinary needs and pleasures. I mean by it admiration and affection.”

“I don’t know anything about ordinary needs and pleasures,” Ida said, finishing her own brandy.

“Another?”

“Thank you.”

“I think you know more about them than most people. How else could you have lived alone so contentedly?”

“I’m not always content,” Ida said. “My aunt once said to me, ‘The only way I could ever be sure of having my own way was to live alone.’ She said she was of too amiable a nature to get along with people in a way that would suit her for very long.”

“She got along with you to suit her well enough.”

“I was a child,” Ida said. “A well-behaved child.”

“But not
too
amiable,” Carl said.

“No, I suppose not. Carl, if you want a wife, you must find someone who knows something about the job and someone young enough to…” She gestured to end that sentence. “Not a virgin, eight years your ancient. That is simply absurd.”

“Put that way, probably. But I don’t really want ‘a wife.’ I’d like for whatever years we have left to share as much with you as we can. And, for heaven’s sake, Ida, I’m not talking about sex.”

“How should I know what you’re talking about?” Ida demanded in embarrassed irritation.

“By listening to me. By considering what might be a perfectly practical, sensible proposal.” Carl was also feeling irritable.

Quite suddenly Ida burst into tears.

“My dear,” he said gently and went to her where she sat on the couch, her face in her hands.

“I shouldn’t have taken that second brandy,” she said, as she recovered.

They sat side by side, Carl’s arm around her, stiff and awkward in their bodies but somehow easier with each other. Then Carl reached for the bottle.

“How are you going to drive home?” Ida demanded.

“Maybe I’m not going to,” Carl said. “Will you have another?”

“I have also never been drunk in my life,” Ida said. “And this is no time to begin. You must go home, Carl.”

“Must I? Why?”

“I don’t know,” Ida said.

“Will you marry me?”

“I don’t know.”

He put the bottle down without having poured another drink. Then he kissed her on the cheek and got up.

“I’ll phone you in the morning,” he said.

“I won’t know in the morning.”

“I know,” he said. “But one of these mornings you may.”

When he had gone, Ida did pour herself another drink, and, as she drank it, she cried again, a frankly drunken crying, though it was true that she had never been drunk in her life. When she had finished those tears, she went into her bedroom and carefully took off all her clothes. Then she stared at her hairless nakedness, the soft folds and puckers of skin that had been her breasts so long ago she had forgotten their shapes, and at her ancient face, bluish and stained now with confusion as well as age.

“Oh, Beatrice, where is your sharp tongue now?” she demanded theatrically. “We are such old fools because the ones who laugh best die first. I can’t love Carl Hollinger. I don’t even know what it means.”

Then she took from the hook on her closet door a pink flannel nightgown and a robe. In the bathroom, she did not look into the mirror after her teeth were out. She never had. And this was certainly no time to begin.

May 20, 1936:
Ida called today to say they wouldn’t be able to come for the evening because Aunt Setworth is ill again—the same digestive complaint. Mama is more irritable about other people’s ailments than she is about her own. She is disappointed, of course. Sister offers double solitaire, a game which might have been invented for Ida and Aunt S. How can we all be so resigned?

May 21, 1936:
Met Ida for lunch today. She doesn’t look well herself but was as full of whimsy as ever. She never gossips the way I do. She imagines people just as they are not. The way she turned Maud into a scheming nurse after a rich man’s money still makes me laugh. What I said was simply that she does
make
Arthur sick, which is an exaggeration. At least Ida’s interested. Sister has odd gaps of humor or some lack of malice. It isn’t loyalty in her. It’s a lack.

May 22, 1936:
When Maud told us today that Arthur was suffering from slow deterioration, Mama had a real lapse of tact and said, “It’s really everyone’s disease.” Sister does get that from Mama, though Sister’s really much worse. Maud was quite put out though she tried not to show it.

May 23, 1936
: Doing nothing but trying to love friends and relatives makes a bitter, frivolous life. Not for Sister. Will I never outgrow envying her deformity? Being in some dark way in love with it, wanting it for myself. But for me, it would be simply another excuse, a way to rest in self-pity. She is so placidly grotesque. With my body, she would have escaped without effort and without guilt.

A
T THE SEA END
of F Street, on the corner of Main, among a waste of used-car lots and low warehouses was an old, twenty-five-room hotel which had been bought and was maintained by the Protestant churches in town as an unwed mothers’ home. In an informal, reciprocal arrangement with churches in other towns and cities, most local girls were sent away and out-of-town girls accepted. The isolation of the hotel from stores, coffee shops, and movie theaters as well as from the residential areas of the town was a natural and welcome barrier for those who wanted to practice charity without moral confusion. Since the F Street bus hadn’t gone all the way out to Main for twenty years, and since the girls usually knew no one in town to come to pick them up, chaperoned excursions were their only means of seeing what there was to see. Aside from the embarrassment of being chaperoned there was the humiliation of being herded into a movie or shop along with a half a dozen others as huge with guilt. Therefore, except for those who had very recently arrived, most of the girls did not take advantage of what the town did offer but occupied the hotel as if they were under house arrest or siege, playing cards, watching television, writing letters they usually didn’t mail, telling each other comforting or terrifying lies. They were given some few chores to do, encouraged to sew and read, and everyone who was feeling up to it took a daily walk along the seawall, a sight funny and forlorn and also beautiful, as so many animal groupings are against the largeness of ocean and sky.

“Awful,” Rosemary Hopwood said aloud, the first time she saw them like that, a straggling single line of swelling females, awkward over the awkward terrain. Thank heaven there was not a collie. “Awful,” but she went on watching until she began to smile.

Homes of this sort were, of course, not sane solutions to the problem. They were a dangerous breeding ground for things more difficult and less lovable than babies. Any hope that the Pill or more liberal abortion laws would finally phase out these places as TB sanatoriums had been phased out twenty years before had collapsed. No scientific or legal advance could move beyond community morality, which still required a life sentence for children conceived on beaches and in back seats. Ten years ago there were often empty beds at the hotel. Now there was always a waiting list, even though Rosemary worked hard to find jobs for the girls and to persuade them to move out into the community. The two sorts of girl she wanted to get out as soon as possible were the simple country girls like Kathy and the potential troublemakers like Agate. The Kathys were easy enough since they were shy and ashamed and used to work. The troublemakers were just that.

Agate had been at the home only a week, and already the staff was complaining of a new market in pills and pot and pornography, late-night parties, hysterical episodes. Rosemary had to get Agate out before she was thrown out.