Home from the Hill (35 page)

Now that it was only hers, she thought of the baby as a thing distinct from her for the first time, and she felt a momentary, overpowering impulse of resentment, of hatred for it. This was followed instantly by a sense of almost criminal guilt.

Her sickness, and the already real necessity of defending it against the world, the very necessity of defending it against herself, made her unborn child more real to her and more precious. And she loved it more because of her instantaneous conviction that it, or rather
he
—for in assuming reality the baby at once became a boy in her mind—would hate her for his birth. And he would have the right.

“Feeling better now?”

“What? Oh. Yes, thank you, Fred.”

“Nothing,” he said.

There was silence for a moment or two, then he said, “Well, if you're all better …”

“Yes,” she said, and prepared to rise and go. Then she thought of what going meant, of what she was going to, of her father and his mute love, her mother's dazed pliability. If they had turned her out into the street she could have borne it better than the reproach of their silent endurance. These nine months would kill them, and they would die without complaint. Rather, seven, she corrected herself. “Oh, no,” she said. “Let's not. Not just yet.”

“Come back on you?” he said.

“No. No, just that it is so nice here,” she said. She thought his smile a bit unnatural, and then she realized why. “Oh, but I'm keeping you from your work,” she said.

“I make my own hours,” he boasted. “I can make those calls any time I feel like it.”

“It is nice here,” she said. “Don't you think?”

“I certainly do!” he said, with such a strangely timid enthusiasm that she turned to look at him. His smile was the same as before, only she misunderstood it. He meant he thought it was nice there with her, and wondered if he might hope she thought it was nice there with him.

Her first impulse was one of pity for him, for his callowness. She felt so old. And she felt for a moment a sense of distinction conferred, felt a melancholy pride in her troubles. It was an almost maternal smile she gave him in reply.

He, however, did not see himself as an infant. This was encouragement, a great deal compared to the little he had expected. “I'm awful glad you decided to come home, Libby,” he said.

He saw himself as a boy, saw the two of them as boy and girl out alone together on a fair day, making the first hesitant, exploratory little advances towards each other. To him, she thought, she was pretty Libby Halstead, not what she was already becoming to herself, “that poor Libby Halstead (and she so pretty, too) the girl who …” Who broke her old parents' hearts, whose fatherless child …

“I hope you don't mind my saying so,” he said. What he meant was, he hoped she didn't mind it's being he who said it.

He made her feel wickedly experienced. Her own next thought made her feel more wicked still. She thought, she could do whatever she wanted with him. She could give her child a name, save her parents from disgrace, heartbreak. She had known Fred Shumway all his life, knew his background, could guess the reach of his expectations, and she knew that she was beyond the hopes he had had for himself—or rather, that the girl he thought she was, was beyond them. It was plain that it dazed him to have got this far with her without check. Was not that other girl, the one he took her for, the one she had been, so much more than he had hoped for that the one she was now might still be a bargain for him? But this bribe with which she tempted her conscience was just the thing it held up to her shame. All this passed through her mind in an instant. The next instant she felt such a rush of guilt and pity towards him, and of fear of herself, that she reached out and clasped his hand in hers.

She saw two things at once—that he had not taken it for what it was (how could he do that?) and that neither had he taken it as he might have, as many another boy would have. He was pink with pleasure, but he did not presume further. He did not dare. He respected her too much.

It all brought back with sickening similarity that other time, that night by the lake shore—with sickening similarity and more sickening difference. One difference, she knew, was that should the same thing happen now between them, and she later told Fred of her condition, he would be aghast at himself, he would offer to marry her. Her conscience cried out against what she was considering doing to him, but her heart cried out against what had been done to her. She wanted revenge upon Theron and this was the best way: to let another boy behave with the honor he ought to have shown. Yet even while her resentment fed on the certainty that Fred would do the right thing, at the same time she despised him in her heart for doing what a better boy than he had not.

“I'm glad,” she said, “that you decided not to leave home.”

He just squeezed her hand. A hint, she saw, was not going to suffice. She was not to get off that easily. She saw that she was not to be allowed to save any of her self-respect. For him she was still pretty, popular, unapproachable Libby Halstead. She was to be spared no echo, except the few happy ones, of that other time. She felt her gorge rise again, and swallowed it down. It was something else than love this time that steadied her intention. Her heart hardened. It had better be now, she said to herself, if he was to be able to think himself responsible. She closed her eyes and languorously reclined upon her elbows. It was a humiliating minute before she felt his lips, before he dared. “To think,” she said to herself, responding to his timid kiss, “that I have had to seduce both the boys in my life,” adding with what seemed a pardonable last shred of vanity, “—and with my looks.”

Four days later (the urgency, to her chagrin, was his) she made him the happiest fellow alive, by adding to the self-satisfaction he felt for the handsome way he had treated her. Trailing tin cans and old shoes, they set off immediately for Niagara Falls in that car which wasn't yet paid for, but would be. At Little Rock that night they were given the Honeymoon Cottage at the tourist camp where they stopped. She felt it a duty to make herself as attractive as possible, and before bed seated herself in front of the powder-blue tinted vanity mirror. Under the doily she found a blond bobby pin, the souvenir of some sister bride. As she combed her hair something fell out of it onto the glass table top with a little hard click. It was a grain of rice.

48

A letter came notifying Opal that she was to appear at the courthouse for a hearing. She had been assured that Verne was not going to contest her suit; her father had washed his hands of her and refused to appear, and she was spared that unpleasant meeting, and so the case looked to be open and shut. But Opal had the country terror of law courts, and it was to have some company, not to save the walk, that she asked Theron to drive her down.

She was due at ten in the morning. The bells were just beginning to carol when they pulled up.

“Leave the baby here with me,” said Theron.

“Oh, ain't you coming in with me, Theron?”

“You can't take the baby in there with you, Opal. What if he starts to cry? I'll stay in the car and take care of him. Go on now, or you'll be late. Don't be scared. Nobody's going to hurt you.”

The courthouse was two blocks up from the square. A railing of pipes enclosed the grounds, and outside the railings, facing the walks, were benches where in spring and summer Confederate veterans, widowers, old men escaping for the day from daughters and daughters-in-law with whom they were living out their last days sat to whittle and to feed the pigeons that roosted in the clock tower. The pigeons were there now, but the benches were empty. The court calendar was on, and the bench-sitters, all curbstone attorneys, were no doubt inside in the gallery. The courthouse was busy. Cars of lawyers and litigants lined the side streets, and while Opal was in getting her annulment, someone else was getting married. For up the block a surprise party of half a dozen young men and girls, all of them familiar to Theron, were busy decorating the car parked at the curb in front of the main entrance. Already out of their carton they had brought a collection of old shoes on strings and tied them to the bumper. Now came tin cans, and two of them unrolled and held up for the delectation of the rest a length of butcher's paper on which was splashed in butcher's red tempera
Just Married
. They taped the sign to the car trunk and finished tying on the cans, and then from the carton each took a small paper bag.

They entered the grounds and with exaggerated nonchalance strode down to the steps. At the door they split into two groups and posted themselves on either side to wait.

Soon one of them began signalling with his hand, pushing his own group back and motioning the group on the other side back. They all dipped into their paper bags and stood poised, twitching, full of themselves.

They burst out with a whoop and filled the air with rice, and Opal jumped backwards into the doorway.

The whoops died. There was consternation in the wedding party. One of them ducked inside and came out with Opal, trying to brush her shoulders.

Theron had to laugh. Of all things to greet Opal at that moment! To make it even funnier, she obviously saw nothing funny in it, and was giving them a piece of her mind.

However, her humor was soon restored. She came down the steps and down the walk waving a piece of paper. “I've got it,” she said. “I've got it, Theron.”

He opened the door for her and she picked up the baby and got in. “Congratulations,” he said. “For a moment there I thought you were getting married.”

“Wasn't that something! I didn't know what on earth!”

She looked back at the courthouse and as she did the bride and groom emerged. At once they were showered with rice. They ran down the steps, the party whooping in pursuit. Pigeons fluttered up in alarm. Bride and groom raced down the walk, ducking under the hail of rice, and to the car, and Opal saw the sign, the old shoes and tin cans, and she laughed. They got in, started the motor, and there was an explosion. Smoke poured out of the hood. The pranksters had rigged a bomb to the ignition. With a clatter of tin cans the car lurched into the street and bucked away. By this time Opal was enjoying herself as much as if she had been a member of the party.

The wedding party broke up, the car disappeared, and Opal remembered her own cause for rejoicing. “I got it!” she said. “I'm free!” She turned to Theron. His face was white as a sheet. “What's the matter?” she cried. “What's wrong?”

“What?” he said.

“You,” she said. “You look like you seen a ghost!”

Then her attention was suddenly diverted. The baby had grabbed hold of her decree. “No,” she said. “No. Let go. Stop that, you hear me.”

While engaged with the baby she suddenly felt Theron's hand upon her collar. She looked up. He had picked something off her collar—a bug, or something—and he held it between his finger and thumb looking at it. Now he dropped it into his palm. It was a grain of rice. She started to say something, to giggle, but he looked at her just then, and there was something in his look that silenced her. Together, slowly, they looked back at the grain in the palm of his hand, and the baby happily chewed the piece of paper which was her annulment decree.

49

Mrs. Hannah's plan was for the presence of Opal and the baby in the house to be a constant embarrassment to her husband and a living proof to Theron of his father's guilt. Instead it became a living torment to her. With Theron's gift to Brucie of his toys that she had treasured, she understood at last that he did believe her charges against his father—believed and hated her. Then every time she saw Opal she saw living proof that she had gone too far, that she had driven Theron from her. She was right and she had proved it, and she had lost. Now all day long she had before her in her own house the evidence on which she had won and lost.

To win her way back into Theron's affection she would have been glad to do anything. Anything but the one thing which would, it was beginning to dawn on her, do it. All her practiced resistance could not now stave off this realization: that her fate was identical with Wade's, that only by thinking well of both could Theron think well of either of his parents, and that it devolved on her, who had disillusioned him, to win him back to his father. Only thus could she win him back to her. It was incredible, but it was so. It was an irony which even she could not have conceived. The days were past when she could take a kind of pleasure in sacrificing herself to Wade, and now she would have to be his advocate. Incredible, but the time soon came when she would have been glad to do it, if she only could have.

She could not get near Opal's child. She tried. To do so became, in fact, an obsession. Still hardly confessing to herself that she wished to compare his features more closely with Wade's, certainly not that she wished now to find them unlike, she burned to be alone with the child for just two minutes. But Opal was watchful as a mother cat and moved her baby as soon as Mrs. Hannah came near.

Meanwhile, neither could she get near her own son. He too moved away as soon as she drew near.

She did not know when she could expect to be free of Opal, for she was out of contact with everyone in the house. She was afraid to ask Wade, too proud to ask Opal, unable to ask Theron, and ashamed to ask Melba to ask.

One evening, prowling about the house with nothing to do, no one to talk to, she overheard Opal saying to Theron that it had come. Would he drive her down in the morning? She had to be there at ten. Yes, he said, he would.

Bells awoke her, the chimes of the courthouse clock. It was half past nine. A little panic seized her. It was an important day and she feared that she had missed it. She was slow in the mornings, even when driven by a sense of imminence and expectation, and so it was 9:40 by the time she was ready to go downstairs.