Home from the Hill (24 page)

Tonight too the bells said
He's still not home
, but tonight for the first time it was of Theron, not Wade, that they sang to her, and it was of Theron too that the silence hummed
He's still not home
after the bells had ceased. He had been out this late before and on more dangerous pursuits. He had been out with this girl before, but never until so late.

At what must have been one-thirty (she had a sense for time at night, measured off in quarter hours) Mrs. Hannah said to herself that if she would stay out until this hour on a picnic in the country, just the two of them, Libby Halstead could not be a very nice girl. Her own father, she thought, would have been waiting up to have a word with any young man who brought her in this late. And then she thought: but no young man ever had. Wade never did, and at the time she had taken it as a mark of respect.

Libby Halstead had no doubt stayed out this late before with boys. That thought irritated Mrs. Hannah. For though she did not like Libby to be out at this hour with Theron, neither did she like to think that he was not the only boy with whom she had ever stayed out this late.

She was too pretty to be entirely nice, Mrs. Hannah thought, and in her mind she saw her as she had seen her on an afternoon shortly after Theron's first date with her—that date she had been unable to keep. On the way into town Theron had had to stop the car for a traffic tie-up in front of the high school. The graduating seniors were having their class picture taken on the school steps. Libby Halstead stood in the center of the front row. Mrs. Hannah had known her all her life, as one knew everybody in town, young and old, but she noticed her that day for the first time. Was it the central place in his composition which the photographer had given her that caused Libby Halstead, attired though she was in uniform ugly garb with all the other girls her age in town, to stand out? Or was it that jealousy already caused the girl to stand out in her mind? It was apparent that the photographer had placed her in the center of his picture because she stood out. With the practiced eye of a plain girl and a neglected wife, Mrs. Hannah scored her points: beginning, as she always did, with her hair (for her own hair was the feature on which Mrs. Hannah had been able to pride herself), which in the shadow of the mortar board was almost black, the dark and heavy brows, the eyes, paler than their lashes and brows (the kind you could not help noticing), the almost too large mouth.

Mrs. Hannah turned to look at Theron, and in so doing saw that the street was now clear of the traffic jam, and saw that Theron did not know it or care.

She turned back, and in that instant the photographer's flashbulb exploded, and in the flash something in that tableau brought back to Mrs. Hannah, skilled though she was in not thinking of her life as a girl, the time when she had stood on those same steps for her class picture. She had not been the girl in the center. Then too, however, there had been one. There was a Libby Halstead, a prettiest, most-popular girl, in every class, she thought, and then she knew what had, in her general view of the scene, so forcibly carried her back to her own time, and she thought, there was a Hannah Griffin in every class too. For, as she had seen before, had seen and censored, away out on the edge of the group, almost as if she was trying to sneak out of the picture, was a girl who reminded her so closely of herself that for Mrs. Hannah it was as if another flash had burst—which in that instant it did. Not that this girl bore any likeness to the girl she had been when she stood there; the similarity was in the feelings she so plainly revealed to those that Hannah Griffin had felt that day. She had the same awkward self-consciousness, the same insincere contempt for this ritual, the same awareness that she was not the girl in the center of the picture, and the same hopeless determination not to care. In Hannah Griffin's day the girl on whom the photographer focused had been Kitty Travis … Kitty Travis, who, too suddenly afterwards, to nobody's surprise, became Kitty Dillard … Kitty Dillard, who, some years subsequent (in that hot summer of 1920, when she was so sick, so heavy, so short of breath, and so happy) was the subject—or one half of it—of a short unsigned letter Hannah Hunnicutt received, which began, “You are living in a house of cards.”

Mrs. Hannah reached out and switched on the bedlamp, and in the vanity mirror across the room her face sprang up. She reached for a magazine, propped her pillow against the headboard, settled back, and opened the magazine and read, “He's still not home.”

She closed her eyes. Where is he? she wondered. She opened her eyes and read, “This time it was for keeps, thought Cassandra Storey as Marc Mainwaring crushed her to him with his muscular brown arms.”

She laid the magazine beside her on the bed and looked around the room. Why doesn't he come? she asked her reflection in the mirror. Has something gone wrong? What has happened? Where are they? And then—shrinking a little from her own gaze: what have they been doing?

She got up and went to the window. Her bedroom was above the den, and she saw that the lights were on down there; light fell out on the shrubbery and on the brick walk. Was Wade waiting up to meet Theron coming in? For once she would not mind his father's giving him a lecture.

She sat down at the vanity. Resting her face in her hands, she gazed at herself. She looked so old. She leaned forward, and the pressure of her palms drew the skin of her face taut, making the lines disappear. She withdrew her hands; the lines reappeared. She pressed her face again; the lines vanished.

Idly, she picked up a lipstick, idly uncapped it, ran it out. She touched it to her lips. Then seeing herself clearly once again, said aloud, “Fool!” After a moment, nonetheless, she painted her lips. But her inescapable self-irony and her sense of the hopelessness of trying to make herself attractive resulted in an awkward job, and her stiff, unyielding pride made her leave it like that. She asked herself, “Why am I doing this? For whom?” She thought of her two men; thinking of the one who was not in the house turned her mind to the one who was.

The time was not far distant when every night would be like this for her. What would be her life then, when the questions of Theron's whereabouts, his doings, his comforts, would be some other woman's concerns? And thinking of Theron's being out with a girl suddenly made her feel more neglected by Wade than ever. She might as well have been entirely alone in the house. And when Theron had left home for good, and every night was like this, just the two of them in the house together, why should he want her then? He never had; why then, when she would be even older, even plainer?

She examined the margin of gray at her hairline. She had once had pretty hair. It was Theron who had put those gray hairs there—and he showed his appreciation of them like this! A strange, fleeting thought, too strange to be dwelt on or endured, a sensation rather than a thought, shot across her mind: it would serve Theron right for this night if she took up with his father again.

She remembered the day of the barbecue and her encounter with Wade that afternoon. She remembered the touch of his big horny hand upon her shoulder and the involuntary throb of response it had awakened in her. She remembered dancing with him that night, he as smooth, she as awkward as ever, until, despite herself, under his gaze—slightly alcoholic, she knew—of unaccustomed tenderness, she had, not exactly bloomed, but for her at least had budded, had found herself close to him, dancing in step to his rhythmical lead.

“Fool!” she said aloud, though somewhat more softly than before.

She remembered that she had lain awake in bed for a different cause that night, and she acknowledged the cause. Something had happened that day, something had changed. She felt it, and she could tell that Wade felt it too. It was no revolution of feeling on the part of either; she would have despised him for that almost as much as she would have despised herself. But whatever it was, in his arms dancing that night, and after the dance undressing in her room for bed, she had felt it. She had lain awake, expectant, for what she did not know, telling herself she was not, but still wakeful, expectant. Now she could acknowledge it. She had not really expected him to come to her bedroom door, but it would have been pleasant not to have let him in, to have turned him away with such words and in such a tone of voice as to remind him of his years of neglect, yet not discourage him from trying again another night. He had not come, and then too, in a moment of half-admission, she had called herself a fool; but—though she had not admitted this, not even halfway—it had hurt, had hurt with that special numb pain as when a scar is cut. But now she could admit this: putting aside the question, whose fault it was, a long time had passed since he had had from her anything he could interpret as encouragement.

She put her hands to her temples and again drew back the skin of her face. A long time had passed, and yet, she thought, she was not old, not really old. He was old enough to have changed, perhaps. Was she too old to change?

Her proud resentment was momentarily panicked, and in that moment she found in the very range of his pasturage a hope. If so many, why not, at last, her, too? It had not always been so. One or two lasting attachments: if that has been his history—ah, what that would have done to her she did not know. Surely that would have hurt. Perhaps it would have hurt more; she thought so now. Formerly, however, she had thought that it would have hurt, but that it would have hurt less. In his very lack of attachment to any one, there had been this humiliation: if so many, why not, also, her? Why had she alone been of no interest to him? She was not attractive. That she knew. She had always known that. But how deep went those attractions of the women who were? He had tired of them quickly enough. Now the thought came to her that, having played the field, perhaps he felt the desire to come to her. She regarded herself as possessed of the qualities which, sooner or later, after a course of women of that kind, a man would know to appreciate. Perhaps now he did, and did not know how to proceed, sensed that the techniques for proceeding with those other women would never do, but was ashamed of himself and suddenly shy and did not know how to let her see that he had at last come to an awakening.

A long time had passed. Could she betray all those years, she asked herself, searching her face, now again lined and furrowed, for signs of relenting, of weakness? Could she now give him anything that she would have to interpret as encouragement? To think of doing so revolted her, and yet at the same time caused a mysterious emotion to rise up and challenge her pride. She felt a temptation beckoning her to be disloyal to herself, to lay down her burden of resentment. She looked at herself again, and again saw the gray in her hair, again thought of Theron, and a wave of self-pity, that emotion she had held off for so long, of bitter loneliness, broke over her, dimming her sight. When she saw herself again, she recognized in her face a wish to relent, and then she saw that without tugging at her wrinkles, suddenly she looked younger.

She rose, heart beating faster, and switched off the lamp, then went to the window and stood looking down at the light streaming from the den out on the shrubbery. In the darkness she did not have to see her own abjectness. In the darkness she could ask herself whether after all these years of estrangement, after all her remoteness, could he possibly be given to understand? Could she suggest willingness without suggesting … Without suggesting what? The truth? That she was dying of loneliness, that she was starved for love? She shook out her hair. She was ready now to risk the loss of a little gentility.

She was turning resolutely from the window when she saw a figure appear around the corner of the house. It was a man. He came into the light, apparently headed for the back door, and Mrs. Hannah saw that he was looking back over his shoulder. This, plus his stealthy walk, gave the figure a furtive look, and so completely had she forgotten Theron that for a moment Mrs. Hannah thought it was a prowler. Then she remembered, and though the sight of him sneaking in brought back her anger and jealousy, it brought them back as if from a distance. Her resolution was confirmed, her desire whetted. He came on into the light, now peering into the den, trying to escape detection by his father. Nothing had given her such a feeling of union with Wade as this sight of Theron trying to sneak in from his late date past both of them. She waited. Soon now he would steal a glance up at her window. And he would never know that she saw his guilty face, that she forgave him, never know that a look had passed between them in the dark in which she gave him her blessing to go his separate way.

He turned. He lifted his face, and she saw that it was Wade.

In the bitterness of her stultification, in the loud mockery of her body and soul, she forgot Theron again. And so it was with the force of a fresh blow that one minute later, she saw a second figure, a copy of the first, with the same stealth, the same furtive glance over his shoulder (apparently each of them had taken alarm from the noise of the other) complete the hideous farce by coming around the corner of the house, creeping into the light and casting a guilty look up at her room.

34

At the head of the stairs, in his stocking-feet, a shoe in each hand, he paused, listening in both directions down the hall. To the right was his father's bedroom, to the left his mother's, which he would have to pass on the way to his own. Listening first one way and then the other, he thought, what would he do to me if he knew, and, what would it do to her if she knew?

He crept down the hall, felt his way into his room, to his bed, and lay down with his clothes on. He thought he heard something and sat up. He lay back and again thought he heard something and lay still to listen. He felt a hand upon his arm, leapt up, gasped. The lights came on. It was his mother.

“You scared me!” he said.

“You're late,” she said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I'm sorry I woke you,” he said.