Home from the Hill (25 page)

“I was awake,” she said in an unsteady voice. Yes, she had been awake, she thought, and the memory of what she had been considering while awake made her flesh crawl.

“And Papa?” he said. “Is Papa still up?”

“Your father's hours—” she began. But she gagged.

“Don't tell him, will you?”

Don't tell him!
The sarcasm of his wishing to conceal from his father that he had stayed out late made her mind reel. Her voice broke. “What were you doing all this time?” she demanded.

He avoided her eyes. “We went picnicking,” he said. “I told you.”

“Is that what you call it? Picnicking? At two o'clock in the morning?”

She knew. She had guessed. She must have seen it in his face. He had known he could not keep it from her. He was half glad she knew. “Oh, Mama,” he said, and was about to confess it all, when he realized that she did not know. It was a realization that brought him no relief. Instead it brought a new reproach, a new sense of unworthiness. What she suspected was not the truth. It was low-minded of him to have supposed that that could enter her thoughts. No; Mr. Halstead had suspected him of the worst. His mother had only suspected him of the worst she could: that he had been out until this hour petting with a girl. It was that thought which caused her jealousy, her pain, her bitterness. The irony of how inadequate her suspicion was brought a moan into his throat that would not be stifled.

His moan brought Mrs. Hannah understanding. It rekindled her jealousy, yet her heart went out to him. She could not stand to see him suffering even when she resented the cause of his pain. “She has hurt you,” she said. She sat down on the bedside and again laid her hand upon his arm—a motherly touch from which Theron felt his flesh shrink. “Oh, son, she has hurt you, hasn't she?”

He shook his head. He tried to speak. But no words of denial came anywhere near his need.

She smiled at him, smiled down upon him from heights of maternal understanding, a sad, hurt, tender, forgiving smile that gave away her next words and caused his mind to writhe in anticipation of them. “Don't you know,” she said softly, “that you can't keep anything from me?”

She knew now why he had wanted to avoid her on coming in. She had wronged him in thinking that because he came so close upon his father's heels and had the same furtive air, there had been any similarity in their motives for stealth. He had had his first disappointment in love, and he had wanted to spare his mother the sight of his pain, the knowledge that a girl had been able to hurt him. “They're all alike,” she said. “All girls. They're all alike. All heartless.”

“Oh, Mama!” he said. “Don't. Don't.”

His voice was husky; there was a kind of desperation in it. His eyes were wide, and his head shook. She was astonished. She drew her hand away. Her face hardened. “Well! You must be very much gone on her!” she said bitterly.

“Mama, you don't know what you're saying. You don't know,” he said.

“Don't I?” she said coldly. She turned from him. She sighed bitterly and made a move to rise.

Now it was his hand upon her arm. “Mama,” he said. “If I tell you something …” He stopped.

She turned. “Yes?” she said.

“Will you not tell Papa?”

It was like a slap in the face. She clenched her jaw. Her head trembled. He thought she had shaken it.

But at the last moment his courage failed him. What he said was, “Mr. Halstead turned me out of his house.”

“What? He what? Turned you out? What do you mean?”

“Not tonight,” he said. “The first time I went there. The night of our dance.”

“Why didn't you tell me? Turned you out? It's impossible. He wouldn't dare. And do you mean to say you've been seeing each other without—”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, turned you out? What did he do? What did he say?”

“I was waiting for her to get ready, and he came down and said she'd suddenly been taken sick. I handed him the orchid and told him to give it to her and to say I'd call the next day to see how she was feeling, and he said, ‘She'll be feeling just the same tomorrow,' and then he handed me back the orchid and shut the door in my face.”

“There must have been some misunderstanding,” she said. Then the image of it all formed in her mind, she felt the ignominy as he must have felt it. “Oh, my poor boy!” she said. “Didn't he know who you were?”

It's Theron Hunnicutt
, he had said, and Mr. Halstead had replied
I see it is
. Mr. Halstead had taken just one look at him and had seen him as he really was, as no one else had ever seen him, as he had never seen himself.
She's going to have to teach me to dance
, he had said, and Mr. Halstead had said,
And what are you going to teach her
? He remembered his indignation, his determination to go back and defend himself. “Yes,” he said in almost a whisper, “he knew.”

Mrs. Hannah shook her head. “There must be some mistake,” she said. And then she knew what the mistake was. As clearly as if he were in the room, she heard Mr. Halstead's voice in her mind, saying,
Like father, like son
. She was amazed that she had not foreseen this inevitability. What father of a daughter would not be mistrustful of a son of Wade Hunnicutt's? Oh, was a man's son to have no life, no name part, no identity of his own?

He had not told. His courage had failed. He had only added to the burden upon his conscience. He had enlisted his mother's sympathies against the man whose suspicions of him he had proved justified. “As if,” he said aloud, “he could tell just by looking that I was no good. Nobody ever looked at me like that before. As if he didn't care what my name was, it was
me
he was looking at.”

When he looked at her, he saw that she was biting her lip. Around the teeth the flesh had gone white. She released it and the blood returned in a rush. She let out a deep breath. “Your name,” she said, “was all he saw!” Her voice was husky, hot. “Listen,” she said. “Listen to me. I'll tell you what Mr. Halstead saw in you. Your name—your father's name. It had nothing to do with you personally. He didn't trust his daughter with you because of your father.”

She stopped herself from telling him that his father had come into the house only a minute ahead of him tonight. Instead she said, “Your father is not what you think. I have kept the truth from you as best I could. There isn't a woman in town whose name hasn't been linked with his at one time or another. He's been notorious since he was your age. Like father, like son—that was what Mr. Halstead was thinking. It had nothing to do with you personally. Understand?”

He had raised himself in bed, stiffening as she spoke. Now what she had done caused her to stiffen too. They sat, both breathless, staring into each other's eyes. Of the two she was the more incredulous at her revelation. He could not doubt her disclosure: it was too perfectly what he deserved. She, though she had thought many times of doing this very thing, had known she never would. She had contemplated it for the sake of denying it to herself. Now, in a moment, with a few words, by her own act, she had swept away twenty years of her life, destroyed her ideal of herself, which out of necessity, as her only defence, she had fashioned in bitterness and clung to in desperation. She had had to make a merit of her suffering and her silence, and the strongest article in her creed had been that she would never, she the one most to have been justified in doing it, never disillusion his son about him. Now, the long vow broken, the precious penance terminated, it was as if her moral nature had collapsed. The very room, the color of the light, seemed altered, and for a moment she was a stranger to herself.

He said, “I don't believe it.”

“I didn't either,” she said. “I learned just six months after we were married. You've been able to believe in him longer than I was. You've seen more of his good sides than I ever saw. Think what it was like for me.”

“I don't believe it,” he murmured hoarsely—because hearing himself say it once convinced him that he did. There was no possibility of disbelieving it: she was his mother.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I wouldn't expect any less of you. You have always been a good and loving son. Do as I do: remember only his good points.”

He turned and stared at her, and his face drained whiter still. He seemed to have caught and held his breath. Still staring, he slumped down in the bed. She said, “Try not to take it hard. And no more of that kind of talk about Mr. Halstead. At least you know better than that now. It's time you were your own man.”

She stood, then bent to kiss his forehead, which was icy to her lips. She feared he was taking it worse than even she would have expected. “You must show people by your own life that you have inherited only his good qualities, none of his faults,” she said. A groan broke from him. He was loyal. It would take time, she told herself. Meanwhile she would be there for him to lean upon. Now even she could not comfort him until after this first shock had passed. She gave his head a final pat and sighed in commiseration for their common lot, straightened, and went to the door. Switching off the light, she heard him whisper, “Oh, Papa! I don't believe it!”

—For there was no hope of a doubt. The timing of it revealed the design of justice. He had already proved it himself. Like son, like father.

35

Mrs. Hannah felt oppressed and could not sleep. It was as if she was in her grave, lying under the blanket of darkness, listening to the night's eternal drone, staring wide-eyed into the solid blackness while time stood still and quietness settled around her heavy and still as earth. She wondered whether Theron was asleep, and felt sure he was not. There had always been, she believed, a kind of telepathy between them; she could feel now that he was awake. He had reason to be, she would admit. For she did not try to minimize the impact her disclosure must have had on him. Who better than she, who had nourished it in him, knew the respect he had had for his father? And even if it had not been altogether news to him, hearing it from her, whom he could not doubt, would still have been a blow. She wished she could have chosen her time, could have led up to it more gradually. But it had driven her wild to hear him talk against himself that way, to be so troubled by Mr. Halstead's look, to think he might have this same thing to go through with his next girl. Thus she was provided with a motive to substitute for her personal injury, her personal revenge for the outrage that still quivered in her spurned, almost-proffered flesh.

Mrs. Hannah was as little able as her son to take solace in the conviction of the injustice of an insult; that made it no less humiliating to have endured it. She resolved to summon Mr. Halstead for a talk the first thing in the morning. If he failed to heed her note, she would call on him. It was not an easy resolution for her to take, for Mrs. Hannah desired no good opinion of her son that she had to win by argument or even seek, and actually to have to defend him against low suspicions was inconceivable. Trying to picture a meeting with Mr. Halstead, she could imagine for herself not a single word—only speechless outrage. What decided her against going was the thought that Theron would be ashamed of her interference and think it might look as if he could not fight his own fight, but must hide behind his mother's skirts. She would have gone. She was up to calling on
Mrs
. Halstead, as her husband's representative, and closing with her in a nail-clawing and hair-pulling, had the quarrel only been on some other ground. For though Mrs. Hannah was a lady, conscious of her quality by right of her family name and by marriage, decorous and dignified, she was nonetheless capable of the violence of a slattern yelling from a back stoop, tigerish, when roused on the subject of her only son.

How, though, could she give herself quite wholeheartedly to the cause of advancing him with a girl?

She teased herself with the idea of telling Wade that his son had been turned out of a man's house, and why. She relished the thought of the awkward spot he would be in as he tried to decide whether or not to go and defend his son's good name. At the same time she admitted to herself that she enjoyed despising him for his ignorance of the affair.

The sound of the silence was like the hum of her own nerves stretched taut. Would she never fall asleep? She mused on the irony of
his
sleeping right through it all. While she and Theron tossed sleeplessly, the cause of their unrest dreamed peacefully on. Strange, the force of old convention, she thought; for upon thinking of him she had instinctively felt a twinge of guilt, conventional guilt, for having done what she did while he slept unsuspectingly.

She set her mind to think of other things. Reviewing her life, she thought of her courtship and marriage. This led to the memory of that first visit to her father afterwards. She had ceased to be a girl in that moment. She relived the scene: saw herself protesting that Wade had deceived her, that he had come to her tainted and impure, she saw again her father's amusement at her naïveté, heard again his crude and callous words, felt again her revulsion and dismay. Sometimes a strange thing happened: she saw her father standing before her smirking, and she saw again the fresh and ugly image of Wade that his words had created in her mind, and the two of them merged into the figure of a single mocking man.

Her thoughts were broken in upon by some vague but insistent sensation. She listened to the darkness. For a moment she had felt some sudden, inexplicable dread grip her heart. Some harbinger of knowledge, some messenger of dread, like a living presence watching her in the dark, seemed waiting, biding its time to pounce upon her. She felt lonely and afraid. It was one of those groundless and unreasonable night alarms, she knew; things were not themselves after you had lain sleepless, alone in the dark, thinking and thinking far into the night. She was not alone, and there was nothing to be afraid of.