Authors: William March
Later that summer, when Mrs. Penmark looked back and remembered, when she was caught up in despair so deep that she knew there was no way out, no solution whatever for the circumstances that encompassed her, it seemed to her that June seventh, the day of the Fern Grammar School picnic, was the day of her last happiness, for never since then had she known contentment or felt peace.
The picnic was an annual, traditional affair held on the beach and among the oaks of Benedict, the old Fern summer place at Pelican Bay. It was here that the impeccable Fern sisters had been born and had lived through their languid, eventless summers. They had refused to sell the old place, and had kept it up faithfully as a gesture of love even when necessity made them turn their town house into a school for the children of their friends. The picnic was always held on the first Saturday of June since the eldest of the three sisters, Miss Octavia, was convinced, despite the occasions on which it had rained that particular day, and the picnic had to be held inside after all, that the first Saturday of June was invariably a fine one.
“When I was a little girl, as young as many of you are today,” she would say each season to her pupils, “we always planned a picnic
at Benedict for the first Saturday of June. All our relatives and friends came—some of whom we’d not seen for months. It was a sort of reunion, really, with laughter and surprises and gentle, excited voices everywhere. Everyone had a happy, beautiful day. There was no dissension in those days; a quarrel was unknown in the society of the well-bred, a cross word never exchanged between ladies and gentlemen. My sisters and I remember those days with love and great longing.”
At this point Miss Burgess Fern, the middle sister, the practical one who handled the business affairs of the school, said, “It was so much easier in those days, with a houseful of servants and everybody helpful and anxious to please. Mother and some of the servants would drive down to Benedict a few days in advance of the picnic, sometimes as early as the first of June, when the season was officially open, although the established residents of the coast didn’t consider the season really in swing until the day of our picnic.”
“Benedict is such a beautiful spot,” said Miss Claudia Fern. “Little Lost River bounds our property on the Gulf side, and flows into the bay there.” Miss Claudia taught art in the school, and automatically she added, “The landscape at that point reminds one so much of those charming river scenes by Bombois.” Then, feeling that some of her pupils might not know who Bombois was, she went on. “For the sake of some of the younger groups, Bombois is a modern French primitive. Oh, he is so
cunning
in his artlessness! So right in his composition, and in the handling of green! You’ll learn much about Bombois later on.”
It was from the Fern town house, the school itself, that the picnickers were to begin their long day of pleasure; and the parents of each pupil had been asked to have their particular child on the school lawn not later than eight o’clock, when the chartered busses were scheduled to leave. Thus it was that Mrs. Christine Penmark, who disliked being late or keeping others
waiting, set her clock for six, which, she felt, would allow time for her ordinary tasks of the morning and for the remembrance of those last-minute, hurried things which are so easily overlooked.
She had impressed the hour on her mind, saying to herself as she fell asleep, “You will awake precisely at six o’clock, even if something happens to the alarm”; but the alarm went off promptly, and, yawning a little, she sat up in bed. It was, she saw instantly, to be a beautiful day—the day Miss Octavia had promised. She pushed back her blond, almost flaxen, hair and went at once to the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror for a long moment, her toothbrush held languidly in her hand, as though she were not quite decided what to do with it. Her eyes were gray, wide-set, and serene; her skin tanned and firm. She drew back her lips in that first tentative, trial smile of the day; and standing thus in front of her mirror, she listened absently to the sounds outside her window: an automobile starting in the distance, the twittering of sparrows in the live oaks that lined the quiet street, the sound of a child’s voice raised suddenly and then hushed. Then, coming awake quickly, in possession once more of her usual energy, she bathed and dressed and went to her kitchen to begin breakfast.
Later she went to her daughter’s room to waken her. The room was empty, and it was so tidy that it gave the impression of not having been used for a long time. The bed was neatly remade, the dressing-table immaculate, with each object in its accustomed place, turned at its usual angle. On a table near the window was one of the jigsaw puzzles that her daughter delighted in, a puzzle only half completed. Mrs. Penmark smiled to herself and went into the child’s bathroom. The bathroom was as orderly as the bedroom had been, with the bath towel spread out precisely to dry; and Christine, seeing these things, laughed softly, thinking:
I never deserved such a capable child. When I was eight years old, I doubt if I could do anything.
She went into the
wide, elaborate hall with its elegant, old-fashioned parquetry floors of contrasting woods, and called gaily, “Rhoda! Rhoda!… Where are you, darling? Are you up and dressed so soon?”
The child answered in her slow, cautious voice, as though the speaking of words were a perilous thing to be debated. “Here I am,” she said. “Here, in the living-room.”
When speaking of her daughter, the adjectives that others most often used were “quaint,” or “modest,” or “old-fashioned”; and Mrs. Penmark, standing in the doorway, smiled in agreement and wondered from what source the child had inherited her repose, her neatness, her cool self-sufficiency. She said, coming into the room, “Were you really able to comb and plait your hair without my helping you?”
The child half turned, so that her mother could inspect her hair, which was straight, finespun, and of a dark, dull brown: her hair was plaited precisely in two narrow braids which were looped back into two thin hangman-nooses, and were secured, in turn, with two small bows of ribbon. Mrs. Penmark examined the bows, but seeing they were compact and firmly tied, she brushed her lips over the child’s brown bangs, and said, “Breakfast will be ready in a moment. I think you’d better eat a good breakfast today as there’s nothing more uncertain about a picnic than the arrival of lunch.”
Rhoda sat down at the table, her face fixed in an expression of solemn innocence; then she smiled at some secret thought of her own, and at once there was a shallow dimple in her left cheek. She lowered her chin and raised it thoughtfully; she smiled again, but very softly, an odd, hesitant smile that parted her lips this time and showed the small, natural gap between her front teeth.
“I adore that little gap between dear Rhoda’s teeth,” Mrs. Monica Breedlove, who lived on the floor above, had said only the day before. “You know, Rhoda’s such an
outmoded
little girl with her bangs and pigtails and that single dimple. She reminds
me of the way children looked when my grandmother was young. Now, there was a colored print in my grandmother’s house that I’ve always remembered; it was a little girl skating—oh, such an immaculate, self-possessed little girl with flowing hair, striped stockings, laced boots, and a fur toque that matched a little fur muff. She was smiling as she skated, and there was a darling gap between her teeth, too. The more I think of it, the more that child reminds me of Rhoda.”
She had stopped talking suddenly, wondering if her affection for the little Penmark girl had somehow been determined by her reaction so many years ago to her grandmother’s skating print, for Mrs. Breedlove denied the existence of the meaningless thought; everything said, she maintained, no matter how casually, was related, was tied together, was part of a logical and quite comprehensible pattern if others could find the clues or glimpse the design. She came to the conclusion that her admiration of the colored print was the genesis of her admiration for the child. There was no doubt about it!… None at all!… Then she remembered that her brother Emory, with whom she lived, loved the little girl quite as much as she did. Now, Emory’s affection was
certainly
not the associative end result of an old lithograph, for he was nine years younger than herself, and there was no reason whatever to assume that he’d even
seen
the old skating print. In fact, her grandmother had died, and her effects had been scattered, two years before Emory was born.… So it was very doubtful that— In other words, there was no reason to suppose— She waited, wondering if her system of associative wisdom were as effective as she had believed, her brows puckered in perturbation.
She had said these things, and had thought these thoughts the morning before, while returning leisurely with Mrs. Penmark and her daughter from the closing exercises of the Fern School. There had been the customary recitations with the customary
lapses of memory and the usual flow of tears; the fumbling application of parental handkerchiefs; the traditional caresses and words of comfort. Miss Burgess Fern (the middle one) had made her expected speech on honor and the need for fair play; there was the harp solo by Miss Fern herself, who had once studied in Rome.
When these preliminaries were done with and the chorus of children had sung the school song, the prizes for the different excellencies displayed were awarded. At the very end, the most important prize of all, in the minds of the pupils, was given: the gold medal awarded annually to the child who showed the greatest improvement in penmanship during the school year. (“The hallmark of the lady or gentleman is the quality of his penmanship,” Miss Octavia Fern so often said. “The clarity, elegance, and refinement of one’s penmanship establishes the true character and background of the individual when all other tests are inconclusive.”)
Rhoda had wanted the penmanship medal from the first, and from the first she had thought she would win it. She had practiced faithfully, the tip of her tongue protruding between her teeth, the pen clutched in her determined hand; but as it happened, the beautiful medal had gone not to herself but to a thin, timid little boy named Claude Daigle, who was in her class and who was her age.
When the exercises were over, and the pupils and their parents were strolling under the live oaks of the Fern lawn, Miss Claudia came up, rested her hand on Rhoda’s shoulder, and said, “You mustn’t feel badly about not winning the medal, although I know how important these things are at your age. It was a very close race this year.” Then, turning to Mrs. Breedlove, she added, “Rhoda worked so hard; she labored so diligently to improve her penmanship. We all knew how badly she wanted the medal, and I, for one, was sure she’d win it. But our judges, who are
entirely impartial, who don’t even know the identity of the children whose work they inspect, decided that the little Daigle boy, while not writing the clear neat hand that Rhoda used, did show the greatest
improvement
for the term, and improvement is what the medal is given for, after all.”
Remembering these things of the day before, knowing how disappointed the child was, the reason for her quietness now, Christine said gaily, “You must have a perfectly wonderful day! When you’re as old as I am, and perhaps have a little girl of your own who goes on school picnics, you can look back on today and remember it with pleasure.”
Rhoda sipped her orange juice, turning her mother’s words over in her mind; then, with no emotion in her voice, as though repeating a thing which did not really concern her, she said, “I don’t see why Claude Daigle got the medal. It was mine. Everybody knew it was mine.”
Christine touched the child’s cheek with her finger. “These things happen to us all the time,” she said; “and when they do, we simply accept them. If I were you, I’d forget the whole thing.” She drew the child’s head toward her, and Rhoda submitted to the caress with that tolerant but withdrawn patience of the pet that can never be quite domesticated; then, smoothing down her bangs, she impatiently pulled away from her mother. But feeling, perhaps, that she had been inconsiderate or unwise, she smiled her quick, placating smile, her pink, pointed tongue darting toward her glass.
Christine laughed softly and said, “I know you don’t like to have people paw at you. I’m sorry.”
“It was mine,” said Rhoda stubbornly. “The medal was mine.” Her round, light-brown eyes were stretched and unyielding. “It was mine,” she said. “The medal was mine.”
Christine sighed and went into the living-room; and kneeling on the window seat, she hooked back the heavy, old-fashioned
shutters, allowing the soft morning sunlight to flood the room. It was almost seven o’clock, and the street was rapidly waking up. Old Mr. Middleton came onto his front porch, yawned, scratched his stomach, and, stooping cautiously, picked up the morning paper; the cooks for the Truby and the Kunkel families, approaching from opposite directions, nodded, raised their hands in greeting, and disappeared, almost at the same instant, around the corners of their respective houses; a half-grown girl, with legs as shapeless and almost as thin as the lines in a child’s drawing of a girl, pulled her scarf more tightly about her head and ran for her bus with a clumsy, loping motion, her ankles turning inward a little like the ankles of an inexperienced skater.…
Mrs. Penmark, seeing these familiar things, turned back to her living-room and began to straighten it up. When her husband’s work had brought them to this particular town, they had looked forward to a house of their own, having spent their entire married life in apartments; but not having at once found what they wanted, they had taken another apartment after all, deciding vaguely to build later on.
The apartment house itself consisted of three floors of ponderous Victorian elegance. It was of red brick, and its turrets, oriel windows, spires, and ornamental spouts balanced and matched one another in a sort of impressive architectural madness. It was set on a little natural hillock, well back from the street, and it was banked with shrubs and flanked by a well-tended lawn. When the house was planned, the lot at the back had been bought as a playground for the children who might some day live in the apartment itself, and it had been turned into a sort of private park enclosed by a high brick wall. It was the playground rather than the big, inefficient apartment which had attracted the Penmarks to the place.