Love and Lament (29 page)

Mary Bet shook her head. “No,” she said, “I haven’t done hardly a thing.”

“If there’s anything you need,” he went on, “you should let me know.” He patted her hand, then stood from the table to go up and check on his mother.

Cattie took a turn for the worse and Mary Bet summoned Dr. Slocum late on a Saturday night. The three of them took turns keeping vigil. Mary Bet went in as dawn was breaking and found her aunt awake and staring at the ceiling. “Come here, child,” Cattie breathed. “Sit with me.”

Mary Bet perched on the edge of the bed and held her aunt’s hand. “Do you feel any better this morning?” she asked. Cattie Jordan shook her head. “I’ll get Dr. Slocum to come check your pressure. It might be time for your medicine.”

“No, just sit a minute.” She said something Mary Bet could not understand, then coughed. “I haven’t always been easy on you,” she said.

Mary Bet felt tears sliding down her cheeks. “No, Aunt Cattie Jordan. I’ve been difficult sometimes. I know I’m headstrong.” Her aunt smiled a little, and Mary Bet smiled back encouragement.

“I haven’t always remembered how hard it was for you.” She closed her eyes and nodded briefly. “That’s all.”

“I’ll read some, if you like,” Mary Bet said. But her aunt made no response. Mary Bet went out for the doctor.

Cattie Jordan never woke up again. She died early in the afternoon, and that very day Hooper went back to Williamsboro, his mother’s body in a trailing carriage. Mary Bet came on Wednesday
for the funeral, and as she drove the buggy she was reminded, as she had been many times, of how a straight road that gave long views could have such deep dips that you never knew what was just over the rise.

SHE RETURNED TO
a house that was at last empty of every soul except her own. Clara begged her to come back and stay, telling her it was much jollier with her around. But Mary Bet didn’t like the idea of her father’s house sitting empty. Sometimes Clara would spend the night, but most nights Mary Bet was alone.

Robert Gray set up an account for her in the Bank of Hartsoe City and told her he’d help her manage her affairs, but what with paying for her father’s care and her own upkeep she’d need to find work of some sort. It seemed that everybody was suddenly aware of Mary Bet Hartsoe’s need for a job, and it was a little embarrassing in church when women she didn’t even know came up and told her they could give her some sewing work, or light housework, or told her about a teaching job their cousin had heard of in some town two days’ drive away, or simply invited her over for a meal. She was invited to join the D.O.C. and the Even Dozen Literary Club. One woman brought her an old pair of gloves and a hat her deceased mother had worn, saying she had no use for them anymore. Still, Mary Bet was grateful for the love and attention, thankful not to be forgotten.

When the weather turned cold in the middle of October, she wrote to her cousin, Sheriff Teague. Not long afterwards, she received a reply, telling her he could use a bright young woman as a clerk in his office. At supper one evening she told Clara and Mrs. Edwards she was thinking of moving to Williamsboro.

“You can stay with my sister,” Mrs. Edwards said. “She’d be happy to have a boarder. I’ll write to her directly. And if you should go up there and not like it—well, you can just come right back.”

It seemed to Mary Bet that too many things were changing too fast. She’d just taken her father off to the insane asylum and his business had been sold. She thought with excitement of moving to the county seat and working for the sheriff in the courthouse. She’d always liked Hooper—he was much more fun to be around than his mother, at least he seemed that way. But there was the question of her father and, of course, the house. Could she rent it out? Should she sell it? If only she could ask her father. Moving to Williamsboro would mean moving farther away—even though it was only thirteen miles, it was still three hours by carriage or an hour by train since you had to connect with a spur line up from Hogwaller Creek. “It’d be hard to leave you all,” she said. “And my house. I’ve never known any other home but right here in Hartsoe City.”

“I’d come visit every other weekend,” Clara said, “and you could come here as often as you liked.”

“Home is where your people are,” Mrs. Edwards said, “and you have people up in Williamsboro, and here too. We’re your people.”

Mary Bet smiled gratefully. “But my daddy’s house—what should I do about it?”

“What do think your father would want you to do?” Clara asked.

“I think he’d trust me to do whatever I thought was right, but I honestly don’t know what that is. What if he should recover and be able to come home, and there was no house for him to come home to?”

She decided, with the help of Robert Gray and his son, to put the house up for rent, and within a month they had found a quiet young couple who were looking for a place to stay while they built a little house in the new section south of town, where O’Nora and Mary Bet had lost their way on horseback. The family was from Wadesboro, the young man coming here to work as a manager in the new feed mill. His wife was pregnant, and the idea of them starting a family in her house filled Mary Bet with a poignant sense
of time and loss and change—it might’ve been she and Joe, or she and someone else, instead of strangers.

As she stood in the vestibule with her final bag packed and at her feet, she looked around a last time and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the credenza. She smiled at herself, smoothed away what appeared to be a wrinkle beside her eye, and thought, “There’s still time for me, still time to come back to this very house if I want to. But it’s only a shell, and now I have to cast it aside for a while and move on. The new people will like it here, and have lots of children, and they’ll live long and happy lives.”

She looked in all the rooms, and went to the little fireplace to see her guardian angels once more. She took off her mother’s sapphire that she had pinned on her blouse that morning and went into the parlor. The jewel glistened like ice, like a rare blue beetle, in her palm. She found the crevice in the bricks lining the fireplace and pushed the pin in with her pinkie. She straightened up, blew a kiss to each of the four walls, then went out and picked up her bag and left the house.

And then she was outside and breathing fresh air again and thinking of next week, and the next. Yet she found herself looking over to the horseless pasture and, beyond, to the woods that had been the proscenium to so much of her childhood. Somewhere out there—and she knew she could find it—was the grave of George the horse, and somewhere else were the decayed bones of a small rabbit, unburied. She hurried away from the house and from the thoughts trying to pull her back.

CHAPTER 18

1906–1907

M
ARY BET SAT
in a ladder-back chair by the window, mending a pair of drawers; a pile of other clothes in need of attention lay in a basket by her feet. It was nearly time for supper, and the smell of boiled greens and frying onions arose from downstairs, along with occasional kitchen sounds. They were not yet so familiar to her to be a comfort, nor anything but an association with nourishment for a hungry stomach. She had been homesick for weeks. Mrs. Edwards’s sister, a widow named Henrietta Gooch, liked little conversation at mealtimes. She would ring a small bell that indicated it was time for the boarders to come to the dining room. After the meal, which she provided three times daily, everyone was free to sit in the parlor for as long as they liked, though no one ever stayed very long because there was an unannounced time beyond which Mrs. Gooch would begin fidgeting and looking at the clock and making suggestive glottal noises to move people along.

Mary Bet heard the tinkling bell and laid her mending carefully in the basket and went to the wash basin on her table. There was no mirror in her room, nor anything but a high, iron-framed bed, her trunk, a table and chair, and a battered old armoire that seemed to take up a quarter of the room. If she wished to write, she sat in the chair, with a book in her lap for a desk.

She squeezed between the bed and the armoire and went out to the stairs. She was greeted there by Mr. Hennesey, a white-haired widower of about sixty years, who was no taller than she; he had a dapper way of dressing that was at odds with his sad face, his cheeks and eyes in a permanent sag that made Mary Bet want to say something cheerful every time she saw him. “Hello, Mr. Hennesey,” she said, “it’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?”

He nodded and indicated that she should precede him on the stairs. “It’s fair enough out,” he said, a hint of Irish in his voice. He worked in the post office as an assistant to the postmaster, and Mary Bet pictured him drinking a drop or two in his room at night, as she sometimes heard him singing softly to himself. At meals, the only time she saw him regularly, he maintained a decorum verging on the ridiculous. She wondered if with his exaggerated politeness he was not holding something back, some great sorrow—perhaps having to do with his wife—that had become an almost physical deformity.

They went to the dining room, where Mrs. Gooch and Amanda Tomkins were already seated, the latter having anticipated the bell by several minutes so that she could unobtrusively get herself to the table and stow her braces beneath her chair. Besides having legs shriveled by polio, she had a wine-stain birthmark across one cheek and crossed eyes, her thick glasses only exaggerating the defect. She was in her middle thirties, Mary Bet judged, and she worked for the recorder of deeds in the courthouse, so Mary Bet saw her at work every day. Her father had been a railroad clerk, and there had
been some scandal about him, though Mary Bet did not yet know the full story. Both her parents were dead, but she had a brother in Raleigh. She was so shy that she almost never spoke unless spoken to. Once or twice when she turned her head in a certain way, Mary Bet thought she was quite pretty, or would be if she didn’t keep her hair so short and hanging loose about her face.

After Mr. Hennesey said the blessing—at Mrs. Gooch’s prompting—Mrs. Gooch remarked that she was expecting another boarder soon, and then she thought it would be just about a full house. “I never expected to take in boarders atall, but after Horace died I didn’t see how I could manage. The Lord didn’t bless me with children, so I’ve had to make do.”

Mary Bet looked around the table. Mrs. Gooch sat at the head, so that she could lean back and peer into the kitchen; if she needed something, she would ring for Mehitabel the cook and maid. She talked without looking at anyone, just staring past the empty place at the other end and out the window to the hedges between her house and the next. Amanda and Mr. Hennesey hardly bothered to look up. “What did your husband do, Mrs. Gooch?” Mary Bet ventured.

The table went suddenly quiet, and both the other boarders glanced up, as though wondering who in the world dared breach the suppertime etiquette. They just as quickly went back to their eating, and Mary Bet felt herself blushing in shame, though she could not fathom why. “Well,” Mrs. Gooch said, flustered, “well, he was a barber, owned his own shop. And did quite well with it.” She ran her tongue around her teeth to clean them, and she let her fingertips rest lightly on her cheek as though recalling something. She had pasty skin and almost no chin, and Mary Bet was certain she had never been anything but plain. Her few smiles were all gums, her hips much too large for her bust and narrow shoulders, like a bowling pin.

“But back to the situation at hand,” Mrs. Gooch went on. “I’d always said three boarders was enough. Now I could turn one of your rooms into a double, but it would be a bother.” Mr. Hennesey glanced sharply up at this, his gaze instinctively avoiding Mrs. Gooch and settling instead on Mary Bet, as though she were responsible. “And I’ve thought of turning the back porch into two or three little rooms, but we’ll just have to see … what would you think of that, Miss Tomkins?”

Amanda looked up, startled. “Ma’am? Oh, I don’t know what to think of that.” Mary Bet had to lean in to hear, and she thought Amanda’s birthmark darkened just a little and an almost imperceptible scowl flickered over her face.