Authors: William March
“Hortense! Hortense!” said Mr. Daigle. Then, turning to Mrs. Penmark, he added, “Hortense isn’t herself. She’s under a doctor’s care.”
“You’re so attractive, Christine. But, of course, blondes do fade quickly. You have such exquisite taste in clothes, but I’m sure you have a great deal of money to buy them with. When I was a young girl, I always hoped I’d look like you, but, of course, I never did.” She giggled at some obscure memory of her own, and went on. “I went to see Miss Octavia Fern about little Claude’s death, but she told me nothing I hadn’t read in the papers, or heard over the radio. Oh, but she’s a sly one—that Miss Octavia Fern! She’d made up her mind she wasn’t going to tell me anything, and you can be sure she didn’t. She knows more than she tells, I think. There’s something funny about the whole thing, and I’ve said so over and over to Mr. Daigle. He married quite late you know, in his forties. But I wasn’t exactly what the fellow calls a ‘spring chicken,’ either.”
“Please, Hortense! Please! Let me take you back to bed where you can rest.”
“There’s something funny about the whole thing, Christine!” she said knowingly. Then, impulsively, she turned to Mrs. Penmark and said, “I heard that your little girl was the last one who saw him alive. Will you ask her about him and tell me what she says? Maybe she remembers some little thing. I don’t care how small it is. Miss Octavia isn’t going to tell me anything, and I’ve resigned myself to that.”
“Miss Fern told you all she knows, Hortense. You must get that idea that she’s your enemy out of your mind.”
“Miss Fern despises me. She knows my father used to run a little fruit stand down on St. Cecelia Street, near the wharves.”
Then, seeing that Christine was about to interrupt her, she put her damp palm against her visitor’s lips and said amiably, “Oh, yes, she does. Don’t try to apologize for her. I’m no fool. But if that isn’t the reason, she despises me because I was a beauty-parlor operator before I married. She and her sisters used to come in the shop where I worked. You know something, Mrs. Penmark? Miss Burgess dyes her hair. She’d faint if she thought I told anybody that, but it’s true. She dyes her hair, all right.”
Christine put her arms about the suffering woman, closed her eyes, and thought:
Don’t let me show my emotions now! Let me wait till I’m home where nobody can see me!
Mr. Daigle lit a cigarette and walked aimlessly up and down in the room, straightening a vase, aligning a picture, brushing with his fingers the beadwork that hung like cobwebs from the dreadful lamps. “Hortense isn’t herself, Mrs. Penmark,” he said. “You must pardon her.” Turning to his wife, he said pleadingly, “If you’ll go back to bed, Mrs. Penmark will sit by you and hold your hand for a while.”
Mrs. Daigle, moving toward her bedroom, said, “Will you, really? Will you really, Christine?” Then humbly she said, “You can wear such simple things, and they look so well on you. I could never wear simple things. I never knew why.… I know all mothers say these things, and most people laugh at them, but he was such a sweet child. He was such a lovely, dear little boy. He said I was his sweetheart. He said he was going to marry me when he grew up. I used to laugh and say, ‘You’ll forget me long before then. You’ll find a prettier girl when you grow up and you’ll marry her.’ ” Her voice was mounting again, and as she went into her bedroom, with her husband and Mrs. Penmark supporting her, it got steadily louder.
“And you know what he said then, Christine? He said, ‘No, I won’t, because there’s not another girl in the whole world as
pretty and sweet as you are!’ If you don’t believe me, ask our cook. She was present at the time, and heard it all, and laughed with me when I laughed. There were those bruises on his hands, and that peculiar crescent-shaped place on his forehead that the undertaker covered up. He must have bled before he died. That’s what my doctor, who saw him, said. He said he must have bled some, but the water had washed it all away.” Then, turning and pressing her face into her pillow, she cried out wildly, “What became of the penmanship medal? Where is it now? I have a right to know, so please don’t try to stop me! I’m the little boy’s mother, and if I knew what happened to the penmanship medal he won, I’d have a good idea what happened to him! Why doesn’t somebody find the medal and bring it to me? Then I’d know for sure.”
She sat up on the side of her bed and said, “I don’t know why you took it on yourself to come here unasked, Mrs. Penmark. But if you want to please me, you’ll be gracious enough to leave.”
“Hortense is not herself,” said Mr. Daigle.
Mrs. Daigle, brushing her limp stringy hair out of her face, said, “I’m impossible! I’m completely impossible!”
“Hortense is under a doctor’s care,” said Mr. Daigle.
When Christine returned home, the medal still in her bag, Rhoda was sitting quietly in the lamplight reading her book. She saw the disturbed, unhappy expression on her mother’s face, she felt her unexpressed censure, her hurt disapprobation. She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, wondering what her mother had said to Mrs. Daigle, and what Mrs. Daigle, in turn, had said to her mother. She stood up, smiled, tilted her head back, and clapped her hands in a lovely little gesture she’d picked up somewhere. “If I give you a basket of kisses, what will you give me?” she asked.
But Christine did not answer, and Rhoda, in sudden panic,
danced eagerly to her mother; she put her arms about her mother’s waist and said, “What will you give me, Mother? What will you give me?”
Christine sat down suddenly, as though too weak to stand longer, and took her child in her arms. She pressed her cheek against her daughter’s cheek, and said, “Oh, my darling! Oh, my darling!” but she did not answer the child’s question.
Mrs. Penmark again found it difficult to sleep; she kept hearing, in memory, Mrs. Daigle’s affirmation of her son’s devotion, in tones alternately too shrill and too hoarse; hearing her ponder, in a kind of compulsive despair, the baffling factors of the boy’s death. She slept at last, drifting into a dream too frightening to be remembered; but when she woke the next day, with the sun lying in a gentle pattern on the carpet, with the familiar noises of morning everywhere about her, she felt calmer. Then, as though something in the forgotten dream had revealed some forgotten wish of her own, she knew she wanted now, and had wanted all along, to visit Benedict, to see for herself the woods, the house, the bay, and the old wharf there.
At nine, she telephoned Miss Octavia Fern, and Miss Fern said she understood completely. She’d be glad to accompany her, to act as a guide for the occasion. She suggested they go the next day, and they agreed that Mrs. Penmark would pick up the older woman at ten, at the school gate. Christine turned from the telephone,
thinking:
Rhoda was never disobedient or lazy or insolent, like so many children. She’s got so many good qualities. There’s only this one thing about her, this quirk in her character.
Later she sat beside her window waiting for the postman, hoping there’d be a letter for her from Kenneth. She saw the postman turn the corner on schedule; and her neighbor, Mrs. Forsythe, who plainly had been waiting for him, too, met him on the flagstones. “Have you heard anything more about your son who’s missing in Korea?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. We haven’t heard anything more. We can only hope.”
“Waiting for news is such a sad thing, Mr. Creekmoss. You have all my sympathy. I’ve been praying for him since he was reported missing.”
“I appreciate that. You’re a real nice friend to have.”
“It’s hard to understand sometimes why there must be so much pain and cruelty in the world. But it’s something we’ve all got to face.”
The postman said there were two ways of meeting experience—you could expect pain or you could expect happiness. “Now, I’m going to look on the bright side until I know to the contrary,” he said. “I’m going to look on the bright side, and keep saying everything’s going to come out the way I want it to.”
“That’s certainly better than looking on the dark side.”
“I remember the last world war, when I had to deliver those sad messages to people I knew real well. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I kept saying to myself, ‘Somebody’s got to do it, and I guess it’s me.’ But I don’t think I could do it now.”
He walked away, and when Mrs. Forsythe was in her apartment again, Christine took from her mailbox the letter she had awaited. She read it eagerly. It recounted her husband’s activities, the things he had done thus far, the things that still remained to be done. He missed Christine and Rhoda more than he could say.
His one desire was to wind up his work as quickly as he could and return to them.
When she’d read the letter, when she’d extracted from it the last subtlety of meaning, she went to her bedroom and examined the photograph of her husband on her dressing-table, a photograph which showed him in naval uniform, the way he had been when she first knew him. His hair was dark and cropped close to his skull; his brown eyes looked out at the world with a sort of innocent eagerness—a quality she’d always found so moving, so entirely charming in him; and at that moment she had a desire to see him again, to hear his soft laughter, to feel his arms about her, that was almost unendurable. She reached out and touched his smooth, tanned cheek with her finger, her heart filling again with all the richness of the love they shared, her mind remembering once more those tender, absurd, secret joys they’d known together; and then, since she could not bring him back to her, she turned regretfully and began work on Rhoda’s school dresses.
But she quickly found they no longer interested her, for her thoughts kept turning another way, and putting her typewriter on her desk, she wrote another long letter to her husband. She recounted the depth of her fears, which, as yet, had such ambiguous facts to sustain them, but which, nonetheless, persisted to trouble her. She spoke of finding the medal, and of Rhoda’s evasive response to her questions. She described her second visit to the Daigles. She spoke of the postman whose son was missing in Korea. In future, she would resolutely heed his words—she would react as he did to circumstances that could not be altered; she would put doubt behind her; she would anticipate happiness, not sorrow. She wrote:
I’m saving these letters that I cannot send, my darling. When you are back with me, and my fears have all proved foolish, perhaps we can read them over together. Then you can hold me in your arms and laugh at my weak, unreasonable fears, can ridicule in your dear, gentle voice my overheated imagination.…
She wrote on and on, saying that, in her distress, she felt herself turning for comfort to some force stronger than herself. She had never been religious in the accepted sense of the word, but she’d always believed in the power that had once shaped the universe, and guided it now. She chose to think of that power as benign. She saw so clearly now that the thing which had repelled her in the past, and had kept her from the expected orthodoxy, had been the efforts of institutions to visualize God in human images, to define him with man’s definition of himself, to catch his power in obsessive rituals, to confuse the laws with laws that man devised for his own safety.…
She wrote:
Do I sound too much like Monica now? Are you surprised to know these thoughts are in my mind, and have been there for a long time? I’m not really the conventional, passive person I’ve schooled myself to be all these years. I learned the things others see in me from my mother. You see, my father, in spite of his charm, his brilliance and kindness, could be most unpredictable at times. He had periods of doubt and nervous depression, and it was then he turned to my mother, and later to me, for serenity and faith in himself once more. Giving him what he lacked, what he must have to be what he became, was my mother’s greatest joy, her true reason for existence, she once told me. I learned something of her serenity, perhaps because I, too, loved her so greatly. Do not be mistaken in me, my darling. Do not be misled. My emotions deep down are disturbed and powerful. They are stirred up now, and I must struggle to get them under control once more.
I miss you so badly. I long for you so deeply at this moment. When you get this letter, drop everything, no matter how important it seems now, and come back to me. Laugh at me. Tell me my doubts have no basis in fact. Take me in your arms again. But come back to me! My darling, come back to me! Please come back to me quickly!
When she’d finished the letter, she put it in the locked drawer of her desk. She went and stood by her window for a time, her
hands pressed against her cheek; and then, her heart lighter, she went about her ordinary affairs. Later, she sat down to read the morning paper. On the front page was a long account of a murder case which was being tried at the time, a case which the paper had featured, since some of the principals in it were locally known. Usually, she did not read these things, having no interest in them, but now she read the story in all its detail. It concerned a man named Hobart L. Ponder who was accused of killing his wife for her insurance.
She had hardly finished the long account when Mrs. Breedlove stopped by for a chat. She came into the room, put a book down on the table, and said, “You’re looking a little pale and tired, my dear. You seem distrait. What is it that troubles you?”
Mrs. Penmark said she’d been reading the Ponder case—perhaps that was it; and Mrs. Breedlove, as though the name were one to put her tongue in rapid motion, said she’d known Hobart Ponder’s mother at one time. She’d had two sons—Hobart, the elder, now on trial for murder, and his brother, Charles. Bad luck seemed to have trailed Hobart from the beginning. When he was about seven or eight years old, he’d accidentally locked Charles in an old icebox and had forgotten him.
Christine said, “What is the book you brought? Is it for Rhoda?”
“It’s an illustrated copy of
Robinson Crusoe.
Emory had it as a boy. He thought Rhoda might be interested in it.”
But she was not to be diverted from her history of the Ponders, and she went on to say that Hobart’s maternal grandmother, who’d lived with her daughter after she married Mr. Ponder, had been mysteriously murdered with one of young Hobart’s golf clubs when the boy was about fourteen.