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Title: The debt
Author: Helen R. Hull
Illustrator: Nicholas Riley
Release date: November 5, 2026 [eBook #79923]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Hearst Magazines Inc., 1943
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79923
Credits: Jens Sadowski. This file was produced from images generously made available by Cornell University Digital Collections.
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEBT ***
[Illustration: Suddenly she looked up, and there was her father. Now he
would know, and now her mother, too, would know]
The Debt
A woman bears a child. What is then the debt of child to mother,
beyond affection? To whom then does the child’s first love
belong, and to whom her honor?
Helen R. Hull
Illustrations: Nicholas Riley
Good Housekeeping, vol. 116. Part 1: Feb. 1943, pp. 18-19, 137-151.
Part 2: Mar. 1943, pp. 44-45, 132-145.
“Remorse” is a harsh word, a “gnawing-back upon the heart.” It is a
harsh emotion, one that belongs primarily to middle age. Youth does not
know it, except in brief, wild moments caused by trivial, quickly
forgotten incidents. Regret that one has failed a friend, remorse that
one has lied, or stolen, or quarreled with a brother. Temporary, because
amends can be made, the quarrel patched up, the lie confessed. These
brief moments might be a warning of a deeper, inconsolable grief; they
are of the same nature, for all their brevity; but youth heeds no
warning. In a way, this is essential to growth. For remorse is black and
negative, it is gyves and fetters, ball and chain, it looks only
backward, it impedes all progress, and too early knowledge of its
dreadful gnawing would hold the youth incapable of motion. In youth
nothing seems irrevocable, everything moves ahead, tomorrow and tomorrow
are the days toward which one runs. And age, fortunately or it would
know no peace, is all passion spent, even the passion of remorse.
But at some time in the middle years each man comes upon a regret that
is inescapable, a remorse for which there is no alleviation. The friend
whom he has failed is dead, his grave is heaped, the wreaths wither,
amends are nothing but a crying in the night. The quarrel between the
generations—the old quarrel, in which the youth must contend with the
elders in order to be free—is ended with the mother’s death. There are
left the trunks in which—oh, sentimentally, if you like—she had kept the
baby shoes and little packets of baby hair, the diary in which she set
down modestly her aspirations for you before your birth. You had meant
someday to make her proud of you, to please her; it is too late now.
She has closed her eyes against the disappointing spectacle of your
humdrum middle age; she has closed her lips upon her protests at your
wilful, headlong mistakes; she has surrendered up her loneliness and her
grief. There was a debt you should have paid, and now it is too late.
Did you think you would escape payment, that there would be a moratorium
on this debt, that time and death would outlaw it? You will learn that
you will pay it in full, not to the past but to the future. An eye for
an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a grief for a grief.
When you have learned this, you bear your own grief, your own
disappointment, more proudly, knowing that thus you quiet the gnawing
upon your heart.
* * * * *
The high point of Winifred Page’s life was that fall of 1920 when she
moved her family—husband, two daughters, and son—from the isolated
village on one of the long fingers of land Maine thrusts out into the
ocean, to one of the inland cities, so far inland that the tide came up
the river only with a following wind. Winifred had worked for a long
time to effect this change. Generations of her own people, the Hills,
and of her husband’s people, the Pages, had lived and died on the narrow
peninsula and on the islands, raising sheep in rocky pastures, sailing
their own vessels, lumbering, raking blueberries with a bloom like that
worn by the distant hills, or seining herring as silver-flashing as the
sea. But as Winifred had begun to say soon after her marriage to John
Page, and as she had repeated persistently for more than twenty years,
those days were gone, there was no chance for a man to get ahead, there
were no opportunities for the children.
John Page was more easily satisfied than Winifred. He was a friendly,
easy-tempered man, who let Winifred talk without contradiction and went
his own leisurely way. He was agent for the steamship company, a post
that had been important in the early years of the century, with the boat
stopping twice a day, with freight moving in and away, with passengers
through the summer season. Early in his marriage he had found that if
Winifred was inclined to be censorious—“refined,” was the word he used
in his thoughts about her—other women were less exigent, other lips were
warm. He never had been sure how much Winnie knew about his
sidestepping. At times Winnie even embarrassed him by her boasts in
public about how kind and good a husband he was. The summer before the
move, however, she pulled everything down around his ears at once. For
one thing, his work, which had decreased so gradually that he had not
foreseen the end, his indolence increasing to match his idleness, was
terminated by a letter announcing that after Labor Day the steamship
line along the coast would be discontinued. He would have been content
even then to have stayed as they were, farming a little, selling wood to
the mill, staking some of the younger men to a weir.
Winifred said it was the hand of God, the way everything worked out. The
house in which they lived was hers, left her by her father: the old Hill
homestead—a square white house, the paint weatherbeaten now, with old
fireplaces, a beautiful doorway, a ship’s walk on the roof, and a double
row of tall, thick cedars in a double curve like a ship’s prow from the
corners of the yard to the front door. Summer people often stopped to
admire the trees and the house. Two of them, a man and his wife, who had
come for several seasons to the boardinghouse in the village, had been
more designing in their admiration than others. They were from Ohio; the
man had invented something—Winifred was a little vague—that had to do
with the automobiles appearing more often on the dusty roads; he had
money enough to buy a place of his own for the summer, and he wanted the
Hill house.
John Page was as shocked as if Winifred had suggested selling one of the
children. “It’s mine,” said Winifred. “They’ll pay enough to set you up
in business. We can get the children away from this backwoods-backwater
life. It isn’t too late, but in another year or two it would be. Elly
can take up music. If she has something like that to do, she’ll forget
this good-for-nothing Andrew. And Nan. She’s only sixteen, John! Chasing
out after supper every night with that Stillwell girl, and the boys
waiting down the road for them! I can’t keep her locked up, but I’m
frightened to death about her. There’d be nice boys and girls in a city
high school, the kind she ought to know. And Tom.” Winifred’s face
sharpened. Tom, the oldest, the only son. “You know yourself how he’s
run with Kitty all summer! I’ve warned him. Here he has only one more
year at the university, and then he can get a fine position somewhere
and find some nice girl who’ll help him. You know yourself Kitty is no
better than she should be!”
“Well, who is?” John had asked, and had added incautiously, “She’s a
kind of cute little gal.”
* * * * *
That had brought down around John the worst domestic storm he ever had
to weather. Winifred began by saying that she at least had nothing to be
ashamed of and that no doubt John knew more than she did about Kitty
Saunders, to say nothing of Kitty’s mother! From that she moved into a
comprehensive survey of John’s ladies. She gave him credit for several
with whom he never had disappeared down any wood road, and even as he
mopped his discomfited face, he had time for a quick, speculative
thought of one or two of those. “That’s why you want to stay here,”
Winnie cried, “and it’s why we’re going away! My poor mother didn’t want
me to marry you, and I wouldn’t listen to her. But I’m going to give my
children a chance! In spite of the example you set.”
John looked at her sheepishly; he felt too large for his clothes, too
uncomfortably warm. But with his guilt he had also a curious resentment
that she had known of his trifling infidelities, that she had saved them
up to use as a club, instead of flaring out in honest, open jealousy and
anger. She had been glad to be rid of him, he had thought, and suddenly
the tie between them seemed so baffling and meaningless that he was
indifferent to her plans. Sell the house if she liked, move them all
away, what difference did it make? He had for a moment the bewildered
despair that a man might feel, coming home from work, looking up at the
windows of his house, dreading to enter, thinking: “How have I been
trapped thus, what has happened to what I meant my life to be, why not
turn back and never come this way again? Run, escape, break the cobwebs
that bind me!” And then the neighbors would cluck, “How could he leave
such a wife?” But John was not given to reflection; he was too kind and
too indolent for rebellion.
“It’s a dreadful thing to sell the house,” Winifred was saying. “But you
can’t even keep it in repair. If it’s sold, we won’t have any place to
come back to, and you’ll have to make a living for us.”
* * * * *
By the end of September the move had been made. John had gone around the
land with surveyors, helping lay the chain, tracing the lines along
decaying split-rail fences and stone walls overgrown with weeds,
verifying corners with the neighbors on either side, and his feet,
stumbling through underbrush, were heavy with a feeling of betrayal.
Winifred drove them all briskly through the preparations for departure,
directing packing, the burning of rubbish discarded from attic and barn
loft, the auction sale of farm equipment they would no longer need and
household goods she meant to replace with nice new things. The odds and
ends left after the sale, and a few pieces Winifred had chosen to
keep—the bed in which she had been born, an apple-wood desk, a few
chairs—were stored in a wooden building on the shore. That building, in
which John’s father once had built small boats, and the small piece of
land around it were John’s, and they were all he owned. Winifred
complained that whenever she wanted Elly to do something, she couldn’t
find the girl. Nan was underfoot, enjoying the excitement of the
uprooting. Tom seemed glum as he helped pack china in a barrel. He, too,
had a way of vanishing.
Winifred put part of her proceeds into a down payment on the house she
had selected carefully: a yellow frame house with half an acre of land,
on a side street near enough the center of town so that John could come
home for a hot dinner at noon. With the rest of the money she bought a
share in a small hardware store; one of the partners had died, and his
widow wished to settle the business.
Tom went back to the university for his last year; Elly was registered
at the Conservatory of Music, voice and piano; Nan entered high school;
John shut himself for long hours among counters of kitchenware, racks of
guns, shelves of paint and varnish; and Winifred, having settled the
house (running water, plumbing in the bathroom, electric lights, and a
furnace) with overstuffed davenport and chairs in mulberry cut-velvet,
began to look around for the new friends who were to make the proper
life for her and her children.
At that time Winifred Page was as happy as she ever had been since her
childhood, happier than she was likely ever to be again. She had had her
own way; she had no doubt that she would continue to work it out. She
was one of those women who never recognize the essential quality of
life, its vast impersonality, its indifference to the individual, its
scope, its inevitable suffering. A spoiled, petted, pretty little girl,
she had grown into a woman who continued to expect everything in life to
treat her as her adoring parents had done, who met disaster with
slightly hysterical crying, suffering with intense and amazed resentment
that such things could happen to her. For all her soft and feminine
ways, her charm, her apparent helplessness, she was inflexible,
incapable of change. Her courtship by John Page had been thrilling; it
was flattering to see the way the big, handsome fellow actually changed
color, the way his heart pounded when she let him touch her hand or kiss
her. But to Winifred marriage was a troublesome necessity for a woman.
No one wanted to be an old maid, of course, but once you were
married.... She wanted children; but she had a bad time when Nan was
born, so that anyone, even John, could see she must run no more risks.
She was through with what she called “all that.” Marriage was pleasanter
without it. To Winifred sex was in the same category as diseases of
childhood, measles, chicken pox. You had them, you got over them, you
were thenceafter immune. The babyhood of each of her children had been a
delightful time. Winifred was a devoted mother, not too anxious; she
loved their dependence upon her, their helplessness. She liked to say,
“Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.” She had fought a war she did not
yet know she had lost against the change of each of them into a
separate, self-willed individual. Tom, she always said, was all Hill;
but she had not admitted that the girls might be part Page. Now that she
had transplanted them from the undesirable influences of Jed’s Point,
they would grow into charming young ladies.
* * * * *
When Winifred was a girl, there still had been some of the good families
on the Point. But the elders had died; the younger people, the boys and
girls she had known, had gone away—at least, those who amounted to
anything had gone; several of the best houses had burned, others had
fallen into the accelerated decay that besets houses in which no one
lives. Winifred herself might have gone away if she had heeded her
mother. That was one reason Winifred was determined her daughters should
meet “promising young men.” She didn’t want them repeating her mistake.
Not that Winifred ever had complained to her mother; but her mother had
eyes to see how different her daughter’s life was from the bright future
dreamed for her. Of course, after John got the position as steamship
agent, she did have a hired girl to help; but in the early years she
worked her fingers to the bone, washing, cooking, caring for the
children. At home her mother and her father, too, always had said,
“Winnie is too delicate for heavy work.” Winifred’s mother had been
ailing for a year before she died. It was the year Nan was born, and
Winifred had been too wretched to drag herself and two babies from the
little house on the Point, where she and John lived, over the long road
to the Hill homestead. She hadn’t known how ill her mother was; she
always remembered the way she heard the hoofbeats of the black mare the
morning Seth, her father’s hired man, came down the road, the sulky
rocking, in the terrible haste of a messenger of death. She always said
that the moment she heard the horse, she knew. When Seth told her,
stuttering, “Your m-m-mo-th—”, she had screamed, no, it wasn’t true, she
wouldn’t believe it, and they’d had to send for the doctor to quiet her,
and the milk curdled in her breasts, so that she never could nurse Nan
after that. Later, between fits of sobbing, she reproached her father.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t know—”
“She didn’t want to worry you,” her father said. “She was talking about
you that night—before she went to sleep. She said you and John could
move in here. The place is yours after I go.”
Winifred knew that her mother had died of a broken heart, and John
understood he was to blame for that.
“If Nan hadn’t been on the way, or if I’d had someone to help me with
the work and look out for the children, I could have gone to sit with
her afternoons. I didn’t want her to see me all dragged out and
wretched! Now it’s too late. Oh, my poor mother! And I was her only
child.”
“Don’t feel so bad,” said John awkwardly. “You saw her real often. She
couldn’t expect you to spend all your time with her.”
“I always meant to make it up to her someday.” Winifred mourned for her
mother, the clouds of bereavement in which she moved precipitating
frequent tears. Dreaming of her mother, Winifred was always a child,
standing against her mother’s knee while her mother’s fingers unwound
the rag curlers and brushed her long brown hair into shining spirals,
hearing her mother say, “My pretty, Mamma’s baby,” or turning slowly
before the mirror of the bureau in her mother’s bedroom, the glass
tipped back and wedged with a hairbrush to catch her reflection; her
mother on her knees pinning up the hem of the red velvet dress Winifred
would wear when she recited at the school Christmas program; Miss Betts,
the village seamstress, her hard black bosom like a porcupine with ready
pins, pursing her mouth admiringly, saying, “See how that throws the
color in her cheeks,” and slyly, “She’s filling out a little, isn’t
she?” Dream after dream, for Winifred had lost the person who would have
kept her forever young and sheltered and beloved, the person who agreed
most closely with Winifred about what she deserved.
* * * * *
She had a different feeling about her father. He had called her, “Our
ewe lamb”; he had liked to have people point her out as Tom Hill’s
pretty girl; he had given her everything she wanted. But somehow, after
her marriage, he had changed. He liked to talk with John; after Sunday
dinners the two men would stroll off together on some pretext like
looking at a new litter of pigs or estimating the pine in the upper wood
lot, the masculine rumble of their voices sounding bold, released, and
yet secretive. Winifred didn’t like it. Her father seemed, obscurely, to
have aligned himself with John against her. She knew their talk was not
of her; but she felt a threat in their companionship, a sex-solidarity
that lessened her power over each of them. “I should think Papa would
want to see me when I come home,” she said to her mother.
“Of course he does,” her mother replied comfortably. “You know how men
are—they like to get off together. I’m glad to have them out from
underfoot.”
After her mother’s death, Winifred wasn’t sure she wished to move into
the homestead with her father. Of course he was lonely, and the children
would be company for him; he said little Elly looked just like Winnie at
her age, and he liked to have Tom trotting busily at his heels. The
house was more comfortable than the mean little place where they were
living. She didn’t know that she was reluctant to expose her marriage to
close inspection, that she didn’t want John to have an ally. She said
she didn’t know that she was strong enough to take charge of a large
house, even if there would be a woman in the kitchen and a hired man.
There was an expression around her father’s eyes and mouth sometimes,
when she caught him looking at her, that had in it, if not disapproval,
at least a kind of speculative surprise. She certainly was doing
everything a wife could! Anyway, she couldn’t make any move until she
had recovered a little from the ordeal of Nan’s birth and from the shock
of her mother’s death.
Before she had to face a decision, her father, too, had died. John had
said: “You know, he sort of forgets what he started out to do. I told
him he ought to take things easy for a while.”
“There isn’t a lazy bone in his body,” said Winifred, implying that John
wouldn’t understand that.
* * * * *
The village said it was awful hard on Winnie, losing her father and
mother so close together. Winifred agreed; no one ever had a better
father and mother! She was disappointed when her father’s estate was
settled. He always had seemed so well fixed, and yet, except for the
property and a few hundred dollars in the bank—not much more than enough
to settle for the funeral and the granite tombstone—there was nothing.
The old deeds for the land were in a black tin box in the kitchen
cupboard, and for a long time Winifred was sure that somewhere, if she
only could lay her hands on it, there must be another box, with stocks
and bonds and gold pieces. Sometimes she woke up in the night and
thought of another place to look. John said: “He made a good living from
the place; he left it free and clear. What makes you think he had
anything more?”
“He always said, ‘Whatever happens, my girls won’t have a worry in the
world. I’ll see to that.’”
Winifred gave the place a good going-over after they moved in that fall.
Not that house-cleaning was necessary. Her mother always had done it
spring and autumn; she’d always said that she had nothing of the
squirrel in her, she wasn’t going to hoard things for someone else to
paw over after she had gone. Winifred cried as she packed away the
contents of her mother’s bureau and closet, neatly folded cambric corset
covers and drawers with ruffles of eyelet embroidery and long-sleeved
nightgowns, scented with little cheesecloth bags in which lavender
flowers crumbled.
All that had been long ago. Now Nan was sixteen, the house, the farm,
the woodland all were sold. For if Winifred’s father had made a good
living from the place, John hadn’t. Times had changed, perhaps; no one
seemed very prosperous. John Page wasn’t the manager her father had
been. Lambs, born too early, chilled and died. Late spring rains washed
out the seeds and rotted the potatoes. No one bought hay—no one had
stock these days. As long as John had his steamship job, there was a
little money, and John had a reason for some of his failures. Seth had
grown too old for heavy work. He had been the Hill hired man for so long
that no one, not even Winifred, least of all Seth, thought of his
leaving the place until, as Seth said, he was carried off, feet first.
He never had had initiative; Tom Hill had called him as good as a crew
of ordinary men, but Tom had done all the planning.
John Page, working all day in the steamship office, didn’t have time for
seeing to things at the right time. It was a great joke in the village
how he walked the ten miles with the cow to the Poundridges to have her
served, only to walk her back again because he was a week or more too
late and Bossy’s humor had changed. John laughed as heartily as anyone.
Sunday was the only day he had, and that was the first Sunday it hadn’t
rained. He couldn’t get a man to do the plowing, and the garden was
planted so late the frost got the tomatoes and corn. He didn’t get to
haul the firewood before the spring thaws came. John would say he had to
be on hand when the boats came in, didn’t he? He’d do whatever else he
could in odd hours. But after the office shut down, John still seemed to
be a day or a week or perhaps a whole season too late. The inevitability
of the succession of tasks connected with the farm sometimes made him
feel nervous, but constitutionally he never accepted it. He slid away
from the time-compulsion that drove his farming neighbors; he was always
surprised when he found it too late. Perhaps he did not wish to admit to
himself how swiftly the earth swings in its orbit around the sun,
perhaps he dreaded the tramping feet of God’s black oxen. He was
unconsciously protecting himself against the bitter knowledge that it
was already too late for him to reshape his life.
* * * * *
Winifred said he was just too easygoing to work for himself, he had to
have a regular position, and now, in the hardware store, he had it. John
meant to do well, and that first winter in town Winifred’s move seemed
to prove its wisdom. Winifred, satisfied, was much easier to live with.
She plumped up a little; she looked quite pretty in the new winter coat,
brown with a beaver collar; she no longer complained of headaches. On
Sundays they all went to church. Elly hadn’t wanted to go, at first; but
Winifred managed to have the minister ask Elly to sing in the choir. So
twice a week Elly went to choir practice, coming home late with the dark
young man who played the organ. Winifred always sat up for her. She made
inquiries about the young man, Roger Smith: everyone liked him, he
clerked in the drugstore, he wanted to study music—that seemed a funny
thing for a man to care about, didn’t it? But he had a mother to
support. “I wouldn’t go around with him too much,” Winifred warned her
daughter.
“Oh, my goodness!” cried Elly. “I’m not going around with him! He just
drops me off on the way home to his mamma. We all go to his store after
practice, and he mixes ice-cream sodas for us, and then he’s the only
one who comes this way.”
“Why don’t you ask your brother to bring some of his friends home for
over Sunday?”
“Oh, Mamma! For heaven’s sake! First you don’t want me to go with
somebody, and then you do!”
“I just want you to have the right friends,” said Winifred.
John thought Elly seemed a little edgy, but Winifred said: “I’m sure
she’s not interested in this Roger Smith. He just says good-night out on
the sidewalk; he never even comes to the steps with her. But you can see
that all she needed was to get away from the Point. She hasn’t a thought
for Andrew.”
John, watching his daughter on Sunday in the choir loft behind the
pulpit, felt a helpless tenderness for her. Her piquant face, usually so
lively, so mood-mobile, was demure and sweet, a trifle pale under the
brilliance of the saints’ robes in the stained-glass window. She did
look a little as Winnie used to, although her features were less regular
than her mother’s, the eyes farther apart under the low, broad brow, the
small nose more impertinent, the short upper lip full and sweetly
curved. Not so pretty as Winnie had been, but more zip to her. Then the
members of the choir stood up, with rustles and experimental throat
clearings, and John listened for the clear, true notes of Elly’s voice.
He could hear them distinctly among the other tones. “Oh, come, all ye
faithful....”
* * * * *
When it was over, he could doze a little, until Winnie nudged him. He
couldn’t keep his mind on the sermon. He tried to keep awake by thinking
over the days at the store. One advantage about his present job was that
it took him away from the house all day and sometimes evenings, too, if
there was new stock to be unpacked. Winnie didn’t have to keep asking
where he’d been or what he’d been doing. He wondered whether Elly and
Nan felt the same way. They were gone from the house all day, too—at
least Elly was, and Nan had most of her day at school. On the other
hand, it was sort of monotonous, staying inside all day. Weighing out
eight- and ten-penny nails, wrapping up packages. He wasn’t very clever
at that. Of course, the hunting season was coming on, and that was
interesting, talking with the fellows when they came in to stock up on
cartridges or red plaid coats. Made him itch to try his luck. Maybe some
Sunday—Winifred poked him, and he stood up beside her in the pew,
holding one corner of the hymnal. He didn’t care much about the
shooting; he was a little slow on the trigger to be good. But those
mornings in the fall! The cold mist white over the marshy river at the
head of the lake, the silken sound of reeds and grass as the punt slid
through, a good nip of bootleg rum warming you, voices muted, faces
intent, mist-drenched, the subtle changes of light, almost in pulse
beats, as the dawn came on. Like the first morning of creation. And then
the tearing shock of excitement as the wild ducks rose, their wings
papery-loud. Winifred pulled impatiently at the hymnal; he had let his
corner drop. “The farthest away a man gets from women,” thought John,
and heard Winnie: “There is a fountain filled with blood, draw—en from—”
Winnie always flatted a little.
When they sat down again, John had a glimpse of Nan, beyond Winnie, as
she leaned forward to replace the hymnbook in the rack. Still sulky. She
hadn’t wanted to go to church this morning. Just overnight, it seemed,
she’d changed from a tomboy riding the farm horses bareback, falling out
of apple trees, always in hot water with her mother and with Elly, too,
because, as Elly said, she was simply disgraceful! She was in hot water
often enough now, but for different reasons. She wanted to do everything
Elly did, like staying out at night and having beaux; she wanted to
dress like Elly. You’d never know she was three years younger. She was
fairer than Elly, and her blue eyes, for all their wide, innocent gaze,
were quick to measure her effect. She had what John Page would have
recognized with pleasure in anyone except his own daughter—a provocative
figure and a charming flaunt to her walk. But in his thoughts about his
girls he kept a strict reticence, pooh-poohing Winnie’s worry about them
and going no farther than to feel at times that they weren’t much like
their mother.
After church, John waited in the vestibule while Winifred shook hands
with the minister and talked with the minister’s wife about the supper
the Ladies’ Aid Society was planning. It was queer to see so many folks
he didn’t know, and to have the few whom he had met call him “Mr. Page”
instead of “John.” Like wearing store clothes and a collar and tie all
the time. No use in admitting homesickness; there was no going back.
Winifred liked it. She was smiling, her cheeks flushed, as the minister,
having sped his flock, turned to John with, “Your good wife is a great
addition to our parish, a great addition.” When he added that he hoped
to see John at the midweek prayer meeting, John muttered hastily that he
was pretty busy through the week, learning a new business took a lot of
time. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” asked the
minister, and John ran one finger along the edge of his collar, not
seeing any answer to that.
* * * * *
After church they walked home along the pleasant street with old elms
arching overhead, and Winifred said: “That’s where the president of the
bank lives, in that brick house. I didn’t see him in church today, but
his wife is one of the officers in the Ladies’ Aid. She told me she was
going to call on me. Someday I’d like to live on this street. We could
rent our house and buy out here. Everyone says the town is booming. You
can’t help but do well.”
“Let’s not move right off,” said John. “We just got settled.”
“Someone has to look ahead,” said Winifred. “If I hadn’t, we never would
have had anything.” She walked faster, her head well up, her neat, small
feet clicking along in quick, short steps toward her bright future.
John always stopped at the corner drugstore, open for an hour on Sunday,
to pick up the Boston paper. Roger Smith was there, buttoning his white
jacket over his Sunday suit, having hurried out the back door of the
church the minute his hands had released the final chord of the
processional. He would thrust his dark head forward, peering past John
to the street, where sometimes Elly lingered, elaborately ignoring
Roger’s searching eyes, picture of pretty daughter waiting for her
father. Sometimes Elly wasn’t there; she and Nan would have disappeared
by the time Winifred was ready to start home, although Winifred thought
it looked nicer if they all walked home together. “Nice anthem today,”
John would say, as Roger tried to make change without looking away from
the door.
“I think they ought to give Elly the solo part,” said Roger. “Just
because Mrs. Parker’s sung in the choir twenty-five years! She’s
jealous.”
“He’s smitten with Elly, all right,” thought John. “He’s not half the
man she needs.” But even when Elly waited, pretending to be absorbed in
the window display of shaving lotion and soap, John said nothing to her.
After dinner had been cleared away, John sat in the dining room with his
paper. Winifred didn’t like it littering the living room, in case
someone dropped in. He drowsed between paragraphs, thinking he heard the
tide lapping at the old piles of the docks, the soft, sighing lift and
fall of golden seaweed on the rocks. If the rest of them liked it here,
he’d have to make the best of it.
* * * * *
He was, however, increasingly doubtful that his best was going to be
good enough. John didn’t dislike men, as a rule, and he’d tried to get
over his feeling about Race Bronson, his partner in the store, since he
was tied up with him for the rest of his life, as far as he could see.
Race was a sandy, tall man, so thin he had to keep hitching up his
pants, with freckles on his bald forehead and in the sandy fuzz on the
backs of his scrawny hands—homely enough, certainly, to be honest. When
he talked, which was a great deal, he blinked his sandy lashes and
twisted his long mouth around his words. He had been cordial in his
reception of John. He had explained the stock in detail. They’d have to
cull out some of it: Henry Scott, the dead partner, had been set in his
ideas, they hadn’t always seen eye to eye, all those gadgets were a
total loss. He, Race, knew what the people in this town would and
wouldn’t buy; he hoped John would trust his judgment. He’d had a hard
time, Scott had been ailing for a year before he died, all the work had
fallen on Race, by rights a good share of the money John had paid
Scott’s widow should have come to him. If he had a fault, it was that
he’d work himself to the bone for a friend and never say a word.
By the end of the first month John decided that Scott had died from
worry, overwork, and being talked to death. Race explained that he’d
been tied down so close he had a good many matters to see to, and now
that John knew where to lay his hands on most of the stock, he wouldn’t
mind if Race stepped out for an hour or so, would he? And the quickest
way to learn was to do it alone. They were supposed, each of them, to
have a small drawing account, and at the end of the month to reckon
profits, settle bills, and split the difference. Race had a way of
borrowing from the till. He always left a memorandum, usually on a bit
of wrapping paper, his initials in large loops, “R. B.,” and the amount.
The odd thing was that he seemed to regard the memoranda as equivalent
to money in the drawer. “We’ll even that off next month,” he would say.
The drummers who appeared on their fall trips were taken hastily into
the office, on a landing halfway up the stairs to the attic storeroom,
after Race had said: “Meet Mr. Page, John Page, now in business with me.
You tend the store, John, and I’ll tend to the ordering, since I’ve had
the experience.” That seemed reasonable to John. How could he tell how
many double boilers or garbage cans or mousetraps they ought to have?
But even to John, Race seemed in a devil of a rush to get the salesmen
shut behind the office door, and he knew Winnie would think that since
her money was in the store, her husband ought to know what went on. He
found out, the day they rehung the sign above the door, with “Page” in
brighter letters than “Bronson,” painted over Scott’s name. It was nine
in the morning, Race hadn’t come in yet, and John stood on the sidewalk
watching the sign pulled into place.
“I thought you just worked here,” said a voice, and there was a drummer
who had been closeted with Race the day before, on his way to the train,
briefcase and suitcase in his hands. “Do you own here?” He walked into
the store with John, and after five minutes John knew that his
suspicions were well founded. The amount had dragged along for years,
with Race paying just enough so the drummer’s firm extended him a little
more credit. For two years now Bronson hadn’t paid a cent; he’d tried to
shift his buying to another firm; if he didn’t come across now, he’d be
sued. Then the drummer, an energetic young fellow, had to run to catch
his train.
When John asked Race about it, Race was voluble and almost patronizing.
That was the way you did business. John didn’t understand. That company
was on its last legs and so was trying to squeeze every penny out of old
accounts. Race would send them a check, enough to silence them. He’d had
a bit of luck yesterday, a private deal.
John’s mind moved cumbersomely among these revelations. They were as
confusing to him as the litter of old stock, uncrated pumps, broken
cartons of paint, the cans rusty, dusty and cobweb-draped coils of rope
that filled the attic and basement. He knew he ought to take some stand;
but he felt as helpless when he tried to think things out as he did when
he stood at the foot of the cellar stairs, one unshaded light bulb on a
beam dazzling his eyes and throwing queer shadows over the disorder. He
should have said something to Winifred, of course; but he didn’t like to
upset her good humor. She’d cry and take on. She’d say, “Why don’t you
_do_ something?” Until he made up his mind what he could do, he didn’t
see much good in telling her.
* * * * *
Tom didn’t get home from the university for Sunday as often as Winifred
had planned. She had fixed up one of the three bedrooms for him, putting
the two girls together in the east room, although Elly had begged for a
room of her own. “Tom won’t be home much,” Elly had said, “and Nan just
drives me crazy! She’s into all my things, and she’s so untidy! Tom
could sleep on the divan.”
“Why should you want to shut yourself up alone?” asked Winifred sharply.
“You girls have always roomed together. You might help train Nan.
Anyway, my boy must know there’s a place here that belongs to him.”
“This awful house! It’s a sardine tin!”
“I could have bought a better house, Miss, if I hadn’t saved out money
to send you to the Conservatory!”
“That was your idea,” said Elly mutinously, “not mine.”
John knew how Elly felt about the house. At the farm there had been room
to spread out, plenty of places where a man could get out from
underfoot, places where he could have his own things to tinker with,
outbuildings and acres of land, livestock and woods and the shore. But
this little box, sitting on a few square rods of shaved grass, with
other little boxes up and down the street—where was there any getting
away? Except to work. He didn’t blame Elly for her outburst, but he
could see how Winnie felt. She didn’t want her son pushed out of the
nest; she wanted to make herself believe he still belonged to her.
After Winifred had his room ready, the boy didn’t get home until
Thanksgiving. He said they worked ’em too hard senior year; if he was
going to make the grade, he had to stay at school and bone. He rattled
off the names of his courses, and John thought those would be fine
things for a man to know. He’d left school pretty young himself. Tom was
a good-looking young fellow, as tall as his father but not so heavy,
quick-moving and impatient. Nan adored him, Elly and he didn’t get on so
well, they were too near of an age, and Elly didn’t like the
older-brother-patronizing air Tom put on. But they didn’t do much
sparring. Tom was too busy tucking away the good dinner Winifred served.
“Oh, boy, if ever I find a girl that can roast a turkey like this, I’ll
grab her right away!”
Elly sniffed, and Nan said, “Have you got a girl, Tom?”
“Dozens of ’em.” Tom winked at his mother and accepted another helping
of turkey. “Fellow has to watch his step around college,” he said
between bites. “Two kinds of dame there, the homely ones with buck teeth
and spectacles—they’re going to be schoolma’ams—and the ones who are out
to catch a man.”
“I should think girls could think about something else if they’re in the
university,” said Winifred.
“Now, Ma, you ought to know what girls think about—till they give up
hope.”
“Oh, my goodness, did you ever hear such conceit!” This from Elly.
“You ought to try a year there. Better picking than out at Jed’s Point.”
“You ought to know!” Elly and Tom were like a pair of chickens, feathers
all abristle, eyes clashing.
“They’ve got something on each other,” thought John, and spoke up
quickly: “How about filling that empty gravy boat, Elly? Got any more
hot gravy?”
Elly flounced out to the kitchen, and by the time she came back, Tom was
telling Winifred about the dormitory meals and Winifred was clucking a
sympathetic accompaniment.
* * * * *
Tom could stay only a day even that time. He had some laboratory work he
had to do before Monday. He’d be home for Christmas, unless he got a
job. Some of the fellows were talking about going into the woods to chop
for two weeks. Winifred thought that was too hard work for him, he was
too thin as it was, he might hurt himself. If he needed extra money,
they could spare some. John didn’t see how much she gave him.
Early in December, on a gray day that John had been thinking smelled
like snow, Jathro Steele showed up at the hardware store, corduroy
trousers buttoned into high leather boots, plaid mackinaw flapping as he
pumped John’s hand. He had worked with John as deckhand; he was the
first Jed’s Pointer John had seen since they’d moved. Jathro had come to
town with his woman to have some teeth pulled—hers, not his. So he’d
dropped in. John showed him around the store, hoping Race Bronson
wouldn’t come in—Jathro was smart enough to size him up in a smack.
Jathro thought things looked real good. He hung over the case of hunting
knives, admiring their blades, their neat cases, and when John wanted to
give him one, a present on the store, he demurred. Wouldn’t be lucky.
John, genially warmed by the visit, insisted, and finally Jathro fished
a quarter out of a pocket, blew tobacco crumbs off it, and laid it on
the counter. “That’d make it all right.” He stood in the doorway,
looking back at the store. “Kinda cooped up, ain’t it? Well, come out
and see the old place someday. I told Tom when I see him, I said, ‘Tom,
you tell John he oughta come out before we forget him.’”
“Did you see Tom?” asked John slowly.
“Not this last time, I didn’t. Two-three weeks back.” Jathro grinned.
“He ain’t caught Kitty two-timing him yet. Still and all, there’s quite
a gap between visits, the best Tom can do. You take a girl like Kitty,
isn’t much else for her to do.”
John nodded. Jathro was giving him a warning; he knew damned well the
boy wasn’t supposed to be chasing out to Jed’s Point every week or so.
And Jathro, after a moment of friendly silence, said: “Well, I got to be
going. My woman said come back in about an hour. You take a day off and
come out. Ed Willy’s made him some of the keenest applejack ever you
tasted. Got a wallop like a dogfish.”
* * * * *
John turned back heavily into the store. He had Jathro’s quarter in his
hand; he looked at it before he slipped it into a vest pocket. Jathro
was a good friend, not a mean streak in him. John missed him. Winnie
would be wild if she found out about Tom. Lying about how he had to go
back on account of school, and all the time.... “I’ll have to have it
out with him, next time he’s home,” thought John. “I’ll tell him a thing
or two,” and he blew out his lips, blustering to himself against his own
knowledge of the futility of words against the fever in a man’s blood a
girl like Kitty could set burning. Winnie was wrong about her. She
wasn’t a bad girl—not yet, anyway. If she got married soon enough, she
might settle down into a fine wife. Winnie was wrong about Kitty’s
mother, too; all the women were. Maybe she was loud-spoken, sort of
rough in her ways, with a deep, hearty laugh, going around in overalls.
But she did a man’s work on her small farm, had ever since she came home
to take care of her father when he slipped and hurt his spine so he
never walked again. She’d run away from home because he worked her so
hard after her mother died; but she saw the piece in the paper about him
and came right back, baby and all. Nobody ever found out who was Kitty’s
father, and Lib Saunders never pretended she’d got married or anything.
Just pitched in, ran the farm, waited on that bedridden old
son-of-a-gun, and saw to it Kitty was clean and had plenty to eat. Maybe
she was sort of free and easy in those days. John didn’t know; it was
too soon after his own marriage. When her father died, she got the farm,
mortgage and all, and stayed on. She was a wonderful hand with animals,
and a good many of the farmers got so they’d send for her instead of
into town for the regular vet. John grinned, remembering some of the
stories told of Lib and the remarks she got off. Didn’t care what she
said. Of course, that proved to the women that she was as bad as they
thought—coarse, tchk, tchk! Lib was a fine, warm-blooded, deep-bosomed
woman, and her laugh made you feel good all over. Kitty was something
like Lib, on a smaller, more delicate scale, smaller framed, pretty
where Lib had been handsome, gay where Lib was hearty, feminine where
Lib was human. Lib never let her help around the place. She didn’t worry
over her or spoil her; she treated her a good deal as she treated the
other young animals she had around. One of the best things about Kitty
was the loyalty she felt toward Lib, even after she grew old enough to
know that women like—well, like Winnie, for instance—wouldn’t let their
girls play with her.
* * * * *
John was relieved when the door of the store opened and the chill wind
blew in with a customer. He decided he would say nothing to Winnie.
Kitty would take up with some boy who was handier; Tom would have a
dozen other girls before he was fixed to get married. Winnie thought she
had them all transplanted, dug up and moved away from Jed’s Point; he
wouldn’t worry her. But he’d give Tom a talking to.
Jathro’s visit had set him thinking too much about the old place; it had
quickened his loneliness and his uneasiness. He’d made a vague kind of
resolution to watch his step after Winnie had blown him up about what
she called his women. But as he cleared a place on the counter to spread
out a sheet of wrapping paper and as he folded the paper over the
purchase, he suddenly thought that it might be different in a town as
large as this, where so few people knew who he was, where he could walk
up one street and down another without some neighbor speculating as to
why John Page went thither at that time. His eyelids crinkled softly,
and he looked from his customer’s work-distorted hands, with which she
counted out the coins, up to her face, heavy, age-raddled, and felt an
impatient pity for her. She didn’t so much as see him; she was imbedded
in years and anxieties and toil and clumsy flesh, sensitive now to heat
or cold or hunger or pain, but no longer—He dropped the money in the
cash drawer and banged it shut, the clatter of the bell like a warning
signal. What ailed him? He said, “Good-day,” and: “If you aren’t
pleased, just come back. We want our customers to come back.” Then he
watched her move toward the door, shaped like a bell under the
greenish-black coat. Funny how he liked to notice hands. You could tell
a lot about a woman by her hands. Take Winnie. No matter how plump she
got, her hands stayed thin; you could see the bones and the cords, and
the bump of the wristbone stuck up, and she always kept her short thumbs
curled under the fingers. He checked himself again, halfway into a fancy
that someday a woman might stand here at the counter, her hands right
there under his eyes, and when he looked up, he’d see—“Oh, God, you
fool!” The door blew open again, and this time it was Race, who burst in
with his usual spurt of energy.
All the rest of the day John felt a mild elation, a lightness he had not
known for months, not since Winnie had told him off and he had accepted
as inevitable the move to town. Maybe he’d get the hang of things and
make a go of the store after all. Maybe Race wasn’t so much of a
fourflusher as he’d thought. Maybe he’d get so he liked living in town.
When he woke the next morning, he wondered why he felt so good. Nothing
had happened. But something might happen! If he kept his eyes open—He’d
been like a man imprisoned, and imagination had slipped him a file to
saw through the bars. He stretched himself awake, with a sense of
well-being that was far more natural to him than the uneasy, caged
depression of the past months. Fully awake, he jeered at himself for a
fool. But he whistled as he shaved. He didn’t have to do anything, just
wait. He knew.
* * * * *
He set off for the store at a lively clip. The streets were wet, where
the light snow falling through the night had melted; flakes drifted
uncertainly through the gray air, too light to fall. “May turn to rain,”
he thought. The clock at the bank corner showed him early by quarter of
an hour, and that, of course, was how he came to see Elly. She always
left before he did, crying back at Winnie that she didn’t want any more
cereal, she didn’t need her rubbers, she’d be late for her practice
hours. There Elly was, on the steps of the red brick post office, her
portfolio under her arm, head bent over something, a letter, which she
read and turned to read the other side, and then turned to read again.
Even so, John might have thought nothing except how pretty she was, how
slender and neat the waist, clipped in snugly with the belt of the polo
coat she’d been so pleased with. But she lifted her head and saw her
father and gave such a terrible start, trembling an instant and then
freezing erect, trying to slip the letter out of sight into a pocket her
hand could not find. Then she gave a nervous little giggle, and the
color rushed into her face.
“My goodness!” she said. “You scared me! I just stopped to buy a stamp.”
Her long lashes did not hide the anxious inquiry under them: _What did
you see, what do you think?_ “’Bye, I have to run!” She dashed down the
steps and past John before he spoke. But before she had gone halfway
along the block, she stopped abruptly and waited for her father.
“Listen,” she said, and her face was white again. “Did Mamma tell you to
follow me? Did she—” She swung slightly, her desire for flight and need
for knowing at war in her muscles.
“Why, no,” said John. “No, Winnie didn’t tell me anything.”
“You’re early,” Elly accused him.
“What of it?” John wanted to touch her, to tell her not to be so
frightened; and at the same time he felt Winnie behind him. There was
something up; he had some responsibility, hadn’t he?
“Oh, nothing.” Elly tossed her head; she caught her breath quickly.
“Don’t say anything, will you? I mean—”
“Isn’t much of anything _to_ say, that I can see,” said John. It was a
kind of promise, and he saw Elly seize upon it.
“No, of course not! That’s what I mean!” Her quick smile before she
hurried away was her puckish child smile, accepting complicity, like the
time she’d fallen off the dock and John had fished her out, stripped off
her wet clothes, wrapped her in an old gray sweater, and hidden her
behind his desk until her dress and panties were dry. He could see her
tousled dark head bobbing up when he came in, and that same smile. But
if Winnie had ever found out, she wouldn’t have let Elly play around the
dock. And other times.
This was different. This might not be a child’s prank. Because John had
some practice in duplicity himself, he knew that Elly’s confusion had a
direct ratio to the importance of whatever she was up to. As he went
about the morning task of opening the store, his mind moved reluctantly
to conclusions. Here in town postmen made the rounds, dropping letters
into boxes beside front doors. Elly’s letter hadn’t come that way. She’d
got it herself at the post office. If they let a child like Elly have a
private box, they ought to be strung up! But if he rushed over to ask
about it, he might get Elly into trouble. Just some foolish little thing
she didn’t want her folks to know about; like the time he’d sent a
quarter to have his fortune read, he’d waited for the stage down the
road out of sight of the house for a week, to get the mail before Winnie
looked it over. “A dark woman is coming into your life.” John chuckled
to himself. That had come true, all right. Then he thought: “Winnie sort
of drives you into acting that way. She won’t leave you any leeway.
Elly’s growing up.” He swept down the aisle with slow, indifferent
strokes and came finally to what he had known the minute he had laid
eyes on Elly. Andrew, of course. When a girl curved her head over a
letter that way, held it thus in her two hands, what else was it but a
love letter? First Tom, and now Elly. John liked Andrew better than that
organ player; but he could see why Winnie was against him.
* * * * *
Andrew Blake didn’t own a thing in the world except his old lobster
boat; he didn’t have the kind of ambition Winnie admired, to go away and
make something of himself. Andrew liked Jed’s Point; he liked working
around the water, tarring the heads for his lobster traps in the spring,
setting off the traps in deep water, hauling them, waiting down the bay
for the lobster smack to collect his catch. What they said in the
village was that no Blake ever could work for another man, he was too
independent and too cussed. It would be a hard life for a woman, with no
more at the end than at the beginning. As Winnie said, you just had to
look at Andrew’s folks to see. Andrew was just like his father, except
that the old man built a fish weir every spring and seined herring.
Eliza Blake, his mother, said the only real restful times she ever had
were when her children were being born. But Elly, just before they left
the Point, hadn’t been able to look beyond Andrew himself, bronzed,
wiry, quick tongued, quick tempered, demanding. Well, thought John,
Andrew wouldn’t be much of a letter writer; maybe Elly would shake him
off. She seemed real interested in her music. Maybe he ought to say
something to Winnie; but he’d as much as promised Elly he wouldn’t.
Winnie had done about all she could; she’d said plenty, and she’d got
Elly settled at the Conservatory. John’s sanguine mood had reasserted
itself. He ended by deciding that a girl as pretty as Elly was bound to
have a lot of fellows chasing after her; he guessed her mother’d keep a
close enough eye on her to see she picked the right one when the time
came.
Elly, hurrying along the street, ducking around the first corner,
thought that if one more thing happened, she’d just be sick. Her stomach
was a tight knot, and her knees still quivered. Here she hadn’t had a
word from Andrew for more than two weeks; she’d asked at the
general-delivery window every day; the bald, fat-faced clerk had smirked
at her when he handed out the envelope this morning, and before she had
finished reading the letter, there was her father, spying on her! Oh,
accidentally, perhaps. He wouldn’t say anything. But now she’d be
nervous every time she slipped into the post office. She’d had a bad
enough time trying to explain to Andrew why he couldn’t write to her at
the house. He’d gone into one of his white rages—he was terribly proud.
“So I’m not good enough for you, is that it? Got to find yourself some
fancy city fellow with his pants pressed? By God, a Blake’s as good as a
Page any day in the week, and better than a Hill! If you think I’m going
to sneak around—” Elly had cried, said she didn’t want to go away from
Jed’s Point, only what could a girl do when her family just moved right
out? “It isn’t you, Andrew. It’s just that they’re spending quite a lot
of money on my lessons at the Conservatory. They don’t want me to get
married right away.”
“I’ve seen your mother looking at me as if I was so much rotten herring
bait,” said Andrew. Then he’d kissed her wet eyelids and her throat,
taut with crying, and said, “You’re my girl, aren’t you, Elly?”
“It’s just for a year,” Elly had said. “Maybe you could save up enough
to start buying us a place.”
“We could move right in with the folks. That’s the way my father did. We
could have our rooms separate from theirs—why, there’s even a place for
a sink and a stove in the east bedroom.”
Elly thought she’d rather have her own house; but she didn’t dare say
so, not right then when Andrew was just coming out of his mad. She just
kissed him again, the touch of his hard, lean body wildfire in her
blood.
* * * * *
She stopped now, in the quiet morning street, glancing behind to be sure
she was out of sight, and smoothed out the crumpled letter.
“Dear Elly:
“There isn’t much to write about around here. I took up all my
traps and overhauled my engine. I will have to have some new
parts for her in the spring. It’s real quiet around here now. I
saw Tom when he was down and he said you seem to like it real
well in town. I hope you are well and enjoying yourself. If you
was here we could have some good times. Well, I don’t think of
any news.
“From your friend Andrew Blake.
“P.S. I am thinking of shipping on a freighter to South America
out of Boston. Cal Hoxie was home and he says it is a great
trip.”
The period at the end of each sentence was large and black. Elly could
see Andrew hunched over the kitchen table, the lamp pushed back where
his elbow wouldn’t hit it, the bottle of ink uncorked, and Andrew
drawing in those periods slowly, while he hunted for the next sentence.
He never would ship on a freighter; that was just to torment her! He’d
never leave his house, his own coves and islands and tide rips, his
boat. The letter trembled as she folded it into the envelope. The
snowflakes were like petals of old tears on her face, flushed with a
kind of desperate exasperation. Nothing of Andrew in his letter; she
could not hear his voice. The longing for him was like a great thirst,
so that as she went quickly along the street, her lips parted, the full,
short upper lip curling back, and she drew quick breaths of the damp
air; it was like hunger, like a huge, harsh hand shutting around her
waist and wringing her sides together. Perhaps Andrew didn’t love her
any more. How could she know, unless she could see him? Perhaps already
he had another girl. The separation between them was intolerable; it was
like the window against which the imprisoned bird dashes its body, not
understanding the nature of glass, crashing against it until, sometimes,
it dies. Elly could feel herself open the kitchen door, the warmth and
the yellow light and Andrew at the table; she could see him lift his
head, hear his shout, “Elly, Elly, Elly!”
* * * * *
Her mother had said: “It’s just that you’re young and silly, and Andrew
happened to be the boy on hand. You’ll see, you take my word, a year
from now you’ll have other ideas about what you want.” She had gone on,
insistently. All Elly had to do was to take a good look at Eliza Blake,
Andrew’s mother, to see what would happen to any girl unfortunate enough
to tie up with a Blake. Elly didn’t need to look at her, she’d seen her
often enough—a woman with scolding locks always tumbling down from the
tight knot of gray hair, with bright blue eyes and a way of buttoning
down her upper lip when she laughed, to hide the gaps in her teeth (when
she’d lost a few more, she’d get a plate, she said), her body thickened
by childbearing so her skirts always rocked up shorter in front than in
back, a woman who scolded at her menfolks and fed them prodigiously, who
poulticed their sore throats and festered fingers, whose kitchen always
had a sick lamb or an ailing gosling in a box behind the stove, along
with drying boots or a slicker just reoiled, who took prizes at the
county fair for pickles or quilts. Why, Andrew’s mother was an old
woman, thought Elly. Andrew’s father was real old, too. It was as
impossible for Elly to imagine that she ever would be like Eliza Blake,
that Andrew’s tall body would droop like a sickle and he would groan
when he got up from a chair, as for her to imagine what death felt like.
What had anything about old people to do with her and Andrew? Elly
wasn’t very comfortable with Andrew’s mother; the bright blue eyes sort
of picked her to pieces: “What kind of girl are you for my Andrew?”
But because Andrew was so proud and independent and hot tempered, it was
all the more wonderful that he loved her. If he still did! Her fingers
touched the corner of his letter; but she hurried on, not wanting to
read it again. Too like holding an empty flask to parched lips. She ran
up the steps of the square white building that housed the Conservatory,
scarcely hearing the scales and trills, which, early as it was, already
made a wavering dissonance out of the earnest separate efforts in the
practice cubicles. In the hall she met and passed quickly one of the
assistants in the piano department, a little man with a pointed beard
and full, moist red lips. She didn’t like him; his breath was too hot on
her neck, and his hands, for all their muscular development, had thick,
soft pads under the fingertips when he laid them on hers to show her how
to place her fingers. Shut safely in her own little cell, her music on
the rack, she sat down on the piano bench. But her hands dropped to her
lap and curled into each other, her head drooped, the dark hair, heavy
with snow-damp, swung against her cheeks and throat. She’d tried to like
it here, hadn’t she? Singing in church, with people looking up at her,
practising hours and hours, first piano, then voice; going to choir
practice with that awful Mrs. Parker and Miss Withers, who sang what she
thought was contralto, and those men, what was his name, the grocer who
got so sweaty when he took low notes, and Roger Smith. She hadn’t told
anybody the way the town girls made her feel, clubbing together and
acting as if they were so smart, really sniffing at her when some of the
young men students stopped to joke with her. Oh, she’d tried! She’d
looked to see if there was anyone like Andrew, if her mother could be
right, and Andrew had seemed so—well, wonderful—just because she didn’t
know very many boys. She’d let Roger Smith walk home with her; she’d
played a little at flirting with him; she’d pretended to be interested
in his dull stories about the pieces he was studying for the organ and
everything; she’d known just when he began to stammer and to pretend
he’d touched her accidentally; she’d thought cruelly: “Maybe I could
love him. I’ve got to know,” and all the time she’d felt a strange
contempt for his shyness, his stumbling, his hesitancy. But last night
when she’d let him kiss her and he’d tried to pick her up in his thin,
uncertain grasp, she’d broken away from him in a storm of weeping that
had bewildered her and frightened him.
* * * * *
Suddenly she flung back her head, lifted her hands to the keys, wrists
held just right; her fingers moved with frenzied precision and force. If
she stayed here, she’d lose Andrew. She knew what she would do! As she
played, she planned, ruthless, bright, unwavering. “I’m coming, Andrew,
Andrew, my love, I’m coming home!” She stopped the arpeggios abruptly,
then struck strong, dominant chords. That was Andrew, and this—little
semitones running under the chords—this was Elly! She tried it again,
transposing it into another key. She’d write it down for her exercise in
harmony. She’d liked that best of the work, taking a sheet of the barred
paper, waiting for anything—telephone wires shining in the sun, and
swallows in rows lighting on them—and catching there some of the music
that sounded in her ears. She’d play it for Andrew. He’d get a piano for
her, she could go on with her music, she’d play him the one about the
tide coming in under the moon, not a breath of wind, just the water
swinging, swinging, slipping back, swinging higher, just the heavy water
swinging over the round earth, like that last night at the Point when
she had stolen out of the house to meet Andrew, to say goodbye; she’d
play him the other one, the bay feather-white, the fear in the woman’s
heart, and then the little boat coming into sight, Andrew standing in
it, braced, as it leaped and plunged, Andrew laughing and the gulls
shrieking overhead. “Andrew, I’m coming home!”
* * * * *
Winifred had a terrible time over Elly’s elopement. Elly had schemed so
cleverly that she had a good two days’ start. She had asked her mother
if she could spend the night with a new friend, one of the girls at the
Conservatory. They were going to play duets; it was way over at the
other side of town, a lovely house; Arline’s father was a lawyer; didn’t
Winifred want her to have any friends or any good times at all? Winifred
finally had given a reluctant consent. She didn’t like the idea; but if
Arline was such a nice girl—Elly must have packed a suitcase the
afternoon her mother was at the Ladies’ Aid meeting. Thursday Elly
didn’t come home, and at suppertime Winnie began to worry. She sent John
to the Smiths’ to see whether there was late choir practice. Roger came
to the door. He hadn’t seen Elly all day; he’d meant to come over; he
was afraid she was sick. Winifred had flown up to the room Elly shared
with her sister. John had listened to the frantic sounds of her
search—dresser drawers jerked open, closet door banged—and had gone to
the dining room and seated himself heavily, not looking at Nan. Winifred
had caught her heel as she flung herself down the stairs. She had sat on
the bottom step holding her ankle, shrilling at them, accusing them of
conspiring with Elly. Her best clothes were gone. Nan must have known.
Where had she gone, what had she done? Why didn’t John do something
instead of standing there with that guilty look on his face? What did he
know? They were all against her! Then she’d pressed her hands against
her heart and moaned. John had got her onto the couch, and Nan had run
down the block to the doctor’s house. The telegram had come that evening
from Boston: “Married yesterday. Having wonderful time. Love, Elly and
Andrew.”
Winifred had a heart attack—false angina, the doctor called it. She was
in bed for several days. She wouldn’t speak to John or Nan. They sent
for Tom, and she clung to his hand, crying weakly, begging him to
promise that he’d never break her heart that way. Tom stormed about
Elly, and John surmised that his proprietary anger was a release for his
own uneasiness. If Winnie found out about Kitty now! Then Winifred said
John should go after Elly, bring her back, have the marriage annulled.
John was gentle with Winifred, but firm. “Mother, you can’t wipe out
being married. Folks like us don’t do that sort of thing. Elly’s older
than you were when you and I—”
“Oh, my poor mother!” cried Winifred, and for a moment she was silent,
struggling with a faint comprehension that here was a pattern repeating
itself, that here was an old debt being collected. Only for a moment,
and then she was freshly aware of her own injury. Elly was selfish,
cruel, ruining her life after all her mother had tried to do for her. It
was John’s fault—he hadn’t wanted to leave the Point, he’d kept them
there too long. “I can never forgive her. She’s made her bed. She can
lie in it.”
John wrote to Elly—her mother was pretty upset, but she was getting
better; he hoped Elly would be happy; if she wanted anything, let him
know; best wishes to her and Andrew. He had a letter in return:
“Dear Papa,
“Thank you for your nice letter. If Mamma could see how happy we
are, she wouldn’t feel bad. Maybe I wasn’t very nice to run away,
but it saved all that talk. Andrew is very good to me, and we’ve
fixed up three rooms, one upstairs and two down, for our very
own, and I’m learning to cook. I don’t need anything. Andrew gets
me everything. I wish some of you would come to see how nice
everything is.
“Love from your daughter,
“Elly Blake”
John handed the letter to Winifred, and Nan, who had been subdued and
unusually docile—coming straight home from school, not rebelling at the
tightened string Winifred kept on her—leaned over her mother’s shoulder
to read it. She gave a rapturous sigh and hugged her arms over her firm
young breasts, rocking a little, her eyes bright with the excitement of
her sister’s romance.
Winifred crumpled the letter in her hand and stared at Nan. “Not even a
roof of her own,” she said bitterly. “Just a corner with Andrew’s
people. What is there nice about that?”
“She likes it!” cried Nan.
“She’d say so. And you could have told me and helped me prevent it. You
could have warned me.”
“I didn’t know what she was going to do.”
“I saw her bangle bracelet under your handkerchief pile. She bribed you
to help deceive me.”
“But I didn’t know—” Nan was crying, frightened, and John saw in
Winifred’s determined face both the confirmation of suspicion and the
will to shape Nan’s future.
When Winifred was well enough to go out to church, John was surprised at
the brave face she put on. “You know how romantic young people are. This
was a childhood sweetheart. Of course we wanted Elly to wait, she is so
young.” Roger Smith stared at them solemnly; but he pretended to be so
busy he didn’t see John when, on the way home, John stopped at the
drugstore for the paper. John watched the young man’s narrow shoulders,
stooping a little under the white jacket, laid his money quietly on the
counter, and went out.
* * * * *
Having taken that stand about Elly, Winifred stopped talking about her.
She refused to read the occasional notes Elly sent her father; but John
was pretty sure that when he left them on the sideboard, Winnie read
them, all right. Tom had been very good to his mother as she recovered
from the shock; he spent his vacations right there at the house,
Christmas and Easter, even managed an occasional weekend. John never
knew quite what happened between the boy and Kitty. Maybe they quarreled
because Tom went less often to the Point. Certainly Kitty wouldn’t see
why Elly’s marrying a good-looker like Andrew should make Tom’s mother
so sick he had to stay home with her. In the spring Elly wrote that
Kitty had gone to Portland to take up nursing. “She’d been running
around with a cousin of Andrew’s, and everybody was some surprised when
she suddenly left.”
“Well,” thought John, “Winnie fixed that.” He didn’t know whether he was
sorry or glad. Privately he thought Kitty had more life to her than
Tom’s new girl, Laura Bissett, whose father, J. R. Bissett, was
President of the Citizens’ Commercial Bank on Main Street. Winifred had
met Mrs. Bissett at the Women’s Club—meetings fortnightly, covering in
succession politics, current events, gardening, literature, social
reform, dietetics, art.
“She has the loveliest house,” said Winifred, coming home from a
committee meeting at Mrs. Bissett’s. “Everything is perfect—the way she
had the tea served, a little white apron on the maid, and sandwiches all
cut in different shapes. Her daughter came in just as the ladies were
leaving, such a charming girl. She’s had every advantage, finishing
school in Massachusetts, travel—they went way out to Estes Park—but her
mother says she’s not at all like some of these modern girls, she’s just
devoted to her home.” There was a little gleam in Winnie’s eye, a
speculative pucker around her mouth. “It would be nice,” she said, “if
Mr. Bissett could make a place for Tom in his business. Tom doesn’t seem
to know what he wants to do, and it would be nice clean work, not too
hard, and if you could see the Bissett house, you’d realize it would be
a wonderful opportunity. Now if you were like some fathers, you’d get in
with Mr. Bissett and help your son.”
“I don’t even know him,” protested John.
“That’s just it!” cried Winnie.
Winifred’s scheme included more than Tom’s business future. She invited
Mrs. Bissett and her daughter for tea, although she said she was
embarrassed because she couldn’t do anything the way Mrs. Bissett did.
It was the Saturday Tom’s Easter holidays started, and of course
Winifred knew the boy would come in from the five-o’clock train.
At supper Winifred asked Tom how he liked Laura.
“She’s all right, I guess,” said Tom carelessly. “Not much on looks.”
Winifred nibbled at her lip, and withheld the remonstrance her eyes
spoke. The next afternoon John had a glimpse of the girl. She came to
the door with a book her mother had promised Winifred. She had a
nervous, high laugh, which she used for no reason whatever. Oh, no, she
wouldn’t come in, she had been simply amazed when she saw how late they
had stayed yesterday. Winifred had persuaded her to come in, had called
Tom. John, gathering up the scattered sheets of his paper, had managed a
glimpse of the girl before he retreated to the kitchen. She was laughing
and waving her hands in kittenish gestures, which didn’t fit her rather
thin, tall figure. John thought: “She’s older than Tom. Easy to see why
she’s devoted to her home—who’d want to pick her out of it?” She had
large light-hazel eyes, which she was rolling at Tom. She looked well
taken care of. But she hadn’t enough chin under her long mouth. She had
no color—dun hair, pale, softish skin. John shook his head.
* * * * *
Later he thought that having no chin certainly couldn’t be a sign of
lack of determination. If ever he saw a girl go after a fellow! Tom
walked home with her that Sunday, and stayed for supper. He told Winnie
they sure knew how to feed at that house. Later that week he took Laura
to a performance at the new Rialto—Mary Pickford in _Daddy Long Legs_.
The next weekend there was Laura at the door again, this time with a box
of pansies, from their small hothouse, her mother had sent. She squealed
when she saw Tom. “I never dreamed you were here! I thought you were way
off at your college.”
John thought, as spring wore on, that Tom didn’t look very happy, and a
few times he had a mind to try to talk to him. But he couldn’t think of
anything to say that didn’t sound disloyal to Winifred. Not even to
himself did he admit that what troubled him about Laura Bissett was a
certain likeness to Winnie. Cut off the same bolt of cloth, without the
pretty trimmings Winnie had had as a girl. “Nasty-nice,” he thought.
Furthermore, an instinctive caution warned John against opening a
discussion with his son on certain subjects like—well, like women. Funny
a man never thought of his household as composed of potential spies and
judges of his conduct—they were just children, and he was their father,
until suddenly they were full-fledged human beings. He didn’t exactly
think Winnie would talk him over with the boy. But Tom, except for the
spell when he’d been crazy about Kitty, always had been his mother’s
boy.
Well, maybe Tom really liked Laura. She sure was crazy about him, the
way she chased him. She never paid much attention to John, and he
thought that she took her cue from Winnie. When it came time for Tom’s
Commencement, Winnie invited her to go with them, and along she went,
dressed to the gills in rose-colored silk. John listened to the fine
words of the Commencement speaker, about the wonderful opportunities for
these young people to give back to their country what they had been
receiving and how Commencement was the true name for this period of
their lives. He watched Tom, second from the end in the front row. A
little fidgety, nibbling at his lip as his mother had a habit of doing.
The next week Tom started work in the office of J. R. Bissett, with his
own desk and sharing a secretary. In the fall he was married—a church
wedding, with Winnie crying tears of pure delight; with Nan the
prettiest of the bridesmaids; with Mr. Bissett giving away his daughter,
the profile of his thin, deeply wrinkled face very much like Laura’s,
except for the stiff brush of gray mustache under the sharp nose and
above the receding chin; with Laura sweeping down the aisle a little too
fast for the music, like a runner who is trying to cross the tape. John
had held out for an invitation for Elly and Andrew. “Unless you ask
them, I won’t move one foot.” Winnie saw he meant it. But Elly wrote she
was going to have a baby, and she wasn’t going anywhere right now. Tom
and Laura didn’t go away for a honeymoon; they settled right into the
new bungalow on the west side of town, a gift from the bride’s parents.
Laura said it seemed foolish to spend all that money on a trip, she’d
rather buy things for the house. Tom didn’t seem to care one way or the
other. Laura had a maid, a middle-aged woman who had worked for Mrs.
Bissett, so she knew just how Laura liked things.
[Illustration: Laura swept down the aisle just a little too fast for the
music, like a runner trying to cross the tape]
* * * * *
John went to see Elly one day in October. He told Race Bronson he was
going to be away—Race could take care of the store or shut it up, he
didn’t know as it made much difference which. Race had said: “What you
talking that way for? Things are going to break fine before long. Just
yesterday I was talking to this man who knows just where to put a little
money in the market. If I can lay my hands on some, it’ll be a big
thing.” John just shrugged, and that night he took two ten-dollar bills
from the cash drawer, putting in a slip with his initials. First time
he’d done that, but he wanted a little something for Elly. He’d asked
Winnie to go, and she had said: “How could I stay with all those Blakes?
Elly never asked me.”
“She couldn’t very well ask you,” said John.
“You can tell Elly if she wants to come home to have her baby, I’ll be
glad to do all I can for her.”
“She wouldn’t want to come away from her husband, would she?” asked
John, and when he saw Elly, he didn’t even tell her what Winnie had
said. He just made up some messages about hoping she was well.
He had a good day at the Point. Elly was different, quieter. She carried
her heavy body with pride. She had one of Andrew’s old gray sweaters
buttoned around her, and thought it was a good joke that all her own
clothes were too small. “Andrew’s sure it’s twins,” she said. Her eyes
were clear and peaceful. She showed her father her kitchen, with the
table set in the end of the room where the enclosed stairs went up to
the bedroom. There was a pump in the sink under a window that had a view
of the bay. “I can see Andrew’s boat come around the Head,” she said,
“and then I start getting dinner. Upstairs is just our bedroom, and
here’s the living room.” A sofa, a Morris chair, a phonograph on a
stand, a slender-spindled Windsor rocker, a round stove with shining
nickel, the kind you burn chunk wood in. John remembered one like that
in his mother’s sitting room. “Andrew set up the stove just this week.
The evenings are getting chilly. Next year we’re going to have a piano.
This year we have a baby—or twins.” She went back to the kitchen window,
nothing light or graceful now in her walk. “There’s Andrew’s boat now!
He’s early.” Her laugh had a kind of richness in it. “He doesn’t half
pull his traps, he just comes hurrying back, the old silly! As if
anything could happen to me!”
And Andrew, when he padded into the kitchen stocking-footed, boots in
one hand, stared at John in defensive surprise. He got right over that,
when he saw how glad Elly was to have her father there. He talked and
joked at a great rate. But John saw the way he looked at Elly once in a
while, the way his lean, sun-darkened face took on a grave maturity, the
way his eyes crinkled at the corners with tenderness, and thought, “It’s
the real thing with these two!”
* * * * *
After dinner Elly lay down on the couch, and Andrew tucked her up with
an old red-and-brown afghan. “I feel silly, lying down in the daytime,”
said Elly; but Andrew was firm about what the doctor had told her. He
went back after he and John had stepped outdoors, to see if she was warm
enough. They walked around the house to the main kitchen door. “I
fastened up the inside doors between the rooms,” explained Andrew, “so
it would seem more like our own separate house.”
Eliza Blake shooed a tabby cat out of the way, and greeted John with
some truculence. He was quite a stranger; it’d taken him long enough to
pay Elly a visit. John said mildly that the store tied him down pretty
close, he was glad to see Elly so contented, and Eliza replied
caustically: “Yes, she’s awful pleased with herself. You’d think the way
she and Andrew took on nobody’s ever had a baby before.” Andrew said,
“Well, now, Ma, we never did before!” That made them all laugh. Then
Andrew went out for an armful of birch sticks for the woodbox. His
father was late today, it had been low tide at noon, and that was when
he drew up his seine to empty it.
“Elly’s done real good,” said Eliza. “She’s been real company for me. Of
course she’s got a lot to learn yet. It’s hard on Andrew, young as he
is, starting a family so quick.”
“I should think it’s harder on my girl,” said John.
“Women have to manage. It just comes natural.”
Andrew came back, clattering wood into the box, brushing off his hands.
“You look in on Elly in about an hour if we aren’t back.”
Eliza laughed and gave him a shove toward the door. “You run along.
Nothing’ll happen to your Elly.” John, following Andrew outdoors again,
felt grateful to her. Something indomitable about her as she stood in
the doorway looking after them, her hands crossed over her thickened
waist, bulging under the blue-and-white checked apron. Something full of
experience, narrow perhaps, but deep as birth and growth and death, in
the glance of her bright-blue eyes.
John wanted to look at his building on the shore, where he had stored
the few things left after the auction. It was a long building, with the
windows boarded over and slits of light coming through cracks in the
wide doors. John remembered how they had always stood wide open upon the
water of the bay when his own father had worked in the shop. A good
building, sturdily built; the roof was tight.
“You know,” said John, “it wouldn’t be hard to make this over into a
house of sorts.” He grew a little excited, planning it, pacing off in
the cobwebby dimness possible rooms, partitions, a hall. “I might fix it
up for you and Elly.”
Andrew was waiting at the door, impatient at these vagaries of an
elderly father-in-law. “We like where we are,” he said stiffly. You
haven’t done much for us to date, he meant, you and Elly’s mother. “I
can keep an eye on the old folks. Pa isn’t what he used to be. Some days
his hands are so knotted up I have to tend the weir for him. The sea
takes it out of a man early.”
John didn’t pay much attention to him. He paced off the length and width
and made a note of the figures. He’d draw up some plans. Three windows
along each side, and skylights; in a corner the rusty old stove and
steamer his father had used to shape the planking for boats. “Yes, I’m
coming,” he said, and snapped the padlock on the small door. “A building
like that would cost quite a lot these days. Solid as a nut.”
* * * * *
They walked along the shore to the steamship dock, the piles heaved
every which way by the winter ice, most of the flooring ripped up, a
chain across the entrance, even the road that led down the hill had been
gullied out by rains. “We need a town landing,” said Andrew. “There’s
been some talk about putting this back in shape. I don’t know as
anything’ll come of it.” Then he asked if John wanted to see the old
place, calling it the old Hill house. “They’ve done a lot to it.” John
didn’t know as he did, and Andrew, with alacrity, started back to his
own share of the Blake house and Elly. John offered to help him with his
chores, but Andrew said he was too dressed up, he’d better just sit and
talk with Elly. She’d like that better, it had been a long time since
she’d seen any of her folks. Before John knew it, it was time to leave
for the three-mile walk to the junction where the evening train stopped.
He slipped the two ten-dollar bills into Elly’s hand. “Get something you
want for your twins,” he said. “I’d like to send you some more to pay
the doctor.”
“Oh, no,” said Elly. “Andrew can pay for his baby! Give my love to
everybody. I suppose Nan’s so busy in school she couldn’t come down. I’d
love to see her.”
“She flies around a lot,” said John, weighed down with inadequacy. It
was Winnie that Elly meant. “I’ll tell your mother how well and happy I
found you.”
“Yes,” said Elly. “I can’t be sorry, can I?” Her lashes were wet when
she kissed John, but she didn’t really cry.
Winnie listened to John’s report, her mouth buttoned tight. “Did she ask
how I am?”
“Oh, yes, yes. She asked all sorts of questions about you and Tom and
what kind of girl he married and how Nan was getting on.”
“If she needed me, I’d go to her at once. Oh, poor Elly, when I think of
all she might have had!”
It was Nan who asked repeatedly about his day. How did Elly look, did
she really like being married and everything, hadn’t John seen any of
Nan’s friends, Alice Stillwell or Benny? Goodness, what had he done all
day? Winifred finally said: “I wish you’d stop talking about the Point!
We don’t live there any more. You’d better get at your homework, the
marks you’ve been getting, young lady!”
* * * * *
During the next few years, John thought on the whole he was doing pretty
well, once the tussle about Nan was over. That was bad while it lasted,
but the fact that John was making more money, so that Winnie could move
into a new house in the part of town she called the right part, and have
more of the things she wanted, seemed to help Winnie pull out of her
protesting anger about Nan and Phil Stillwell. John thought sometimes
the prosperity of the hardware store was probably temporary, but it was
good while it lasted. Race actually had had some luck on the market. He
paid off the old debts, let John use his own judgment in buying fresh
stock, and there was a boom in building that helped.
Nan hadn’t run away, as Elly had, but she would have if John hadn’t
stood up to Winnie. Elly’s baby, a nine-pound boy, had been born in
November, and Winnie had reluctantly allowed Nan to spend a few days
with her sister at Christmas. Nan had come back in a state of elation.
The baby was a darling, he smiled at you already. Elly was so sweet to
her. It had snowed hard while she was there, and the Point was simply
heavenly beautiful. “And what else?” thought John, watching the girl.
All lit up. He found out soon enough. Phil Stillwell turned up at the
store late one afternoon, very trig in his blue uniform as mate on a big
pleasure yacht that sailed out of Long Island Sound in the summer. Laid
up for the winter now, but the boy had worn the uniform to impress John.
He was a stocky, broad-shouldered fellow, with clipped Maine speech and
quick dark eyes. He and Nan wanted to get married. She wanted to run
off, but he didn’t like that way. He wanted to come right out and ask
what objection anybody had to him! Two hundred a month the year round,
and he’d had this job three seasons now. He could make a down payment on
a little house on Jed’s Point. Did John remember the Reuter place? He’d
be away summers, but Nan would have her home and her sister Elly nearby.
It was all Nan wanted—Phil, and babies as nice as Elly’s. She hated
school, she’d die before she’d study to be a secretary or any of the
things her mother talked about. If they wouldn’t let her, she’d find a
way to do it, only Phil didn’t like sneaking off.
Winnie said Nan was too young, she must finish school first, perhaps
they could all go on a nice trip next summer, Papa was going to buy
their first automobile in the spring. “And risk losing Phil?” Nan was
horrified. “All the girls are chasing him. I’m not going to wait for
anything.” It was what Nan said finally about Tom that changed Winnie so
that she threw up her hands, exclaiming: “I’ve tried my best. If all you
want is your selfish, blind way! Someday you will be sorry.” Even John,
an uncomfortable auditor of the scene, had been shocked at Nan’s cold
bitterness, there was something precocious, unyouthful in it. “Look at
Tom!” she had said. “You managed things the way you wanted for him,
didn’t you? You got a fine wife for him, that—that codfish! That’s what
she is, a pasty, clammy codfish, only she’s mean, too! No wonder Tom’s—”
“Tom’s what?” asked Winnie shrilly.
“Oh, nothing. You’ll find out.”
Then Winnie had not so much yielded as withdrawn herself from the
conflict. She made no protest when Nan said she didn’t want a church
wedding, she’d rather get married right there in the living room,
wearing her going-away suit. Phil hated fuss. Winnie was patient and
helpful about the preparations, shopping for the girl, decorating the
house, ordering the cake. Nan was like thistledown in sunlit
wind—ebullient, gay, flighty. The day of the wedding a heavy snow
blocked the single track up from Jed’s Point, so that none of the
Stillwells got to the wedding. Laura was ailing, and Tom came alone.
When Nan and Phil had been driven off in a taxi after a last-minute call
to the station to make sure the train for Boston would run, Winnie
decided she would walk home with Tom. But Tom said he wasn’t going right
home, he had some work at the bank he hadn’t finished.
“But if poor Laura’s sick—” protested Winnie.
“Oh, her mother’s there.” Tom drew his mouth down in a wry grimace, and
shrugged himself into his overcoat.
* * * * *
When Tom had gone, Winnie cried a little. Weddings were almost as bad as
funerals, the way they left the house upset and flowers all around. John
helped her set things in order, and after she had gone upstairs to lie
down, he sat for a long time with paper and pencil, working out plans
for remodeling the boat shed. Maybe he could get down to the Point for a
few weeks in the summer and do some of the work himself. Race took
enough time away from the store to let John off for a while.
The only trace John saw of any effect on Winnie of Nan’s outburst about
her brother was that every time Winnie came back from a visit to Laura’s
bungalow, which was almost every day, she quoted something Laura had
said that proved her devotion to Tom. “She wants me to tell her
everything he likes to eat,” said Winnie. “She has the appetite of a
bird herself, and she doesn’t even like to think about food, but she
wants to please him.” John didn’t say anything. He’d stopped at the bank
one day for his statement. Tom wasn’t at his window, and when John had
gone along quietly to the window at the rear where they handed out
statements, he’d heard a scuffle and the kind of female giggle, protest
and delight, that made his ears tingle reminiscently. The girl who
showed up at the window bore signs of pleasant disturbance in flushed
cheeks and a visible flutter in the soft white throat above the V of her
blouse. Behind her was Tom, so intent on a ledger that he didn’t look up
to see his father. John walked slowly back to his store, thought with a
sheepish mixture of regret and tolerance that the boy was bound to want
some fun. Codfish was right. Only right there in the bank, with old J.
R. at his desk! What a nerve!
In the spring they moved into the new house, and Winnie had her hands
full. Then John bought a car, three hundred dollars down, the balance in
monthly payments, and with some difficulty learned to drive. At first
he’d dream and wake up in a cold sweat because he’d forgotten where the
brake was and couldn’t stop the blasted thing this side of destruction.
Fortunately the Bissetts had a new car, too, and Winnie went for drives
with them, so John didn’t always have her screaming when he did
something wrong.
He liked best to drive along the country roads, and he found, as soon as
he had temerity enough to set out and keep driving, that the car made
Jed’s Point not a remote and longed-for place, but a place he could
visit every time he found a day for himself. He could see Elly and the
baby and Nan. Alice Stillwell was staying with her for the summer while
Phil was off on the yacht, and the two girls were like kids playing at
housekeeping. He ordered the lumber for the remodeling of the boat shed,
got Dice, the carpenter, to work with him. Winnie disapproved of that,
but John said vaguely it was an investment, he’d rent it or something.
* * * * *
Altogether that year and the next were not unpleasant. Elly was going to
have another baby, and she wasn’t so well this time. She looked peaked,
she snapped at young Jacky, who had the dexterity of a monkey and who
was safe and quiet only when he was sound asleep. Once in a while Winnie
would drive out there with John, but only when he urged. She would sigh
as they came in sight of Nan’s house, a story-and-a-half Cape Codder,
the white paint a trifle thin on the old clapboards. Phil had given it
one coat to hold the wood, later he’d do more. Nan was quieter than when
John went alone, exhibiting her possessions or her prowess as a cook,
waiting for Winnie to approve. Winnie was careful what she said. John
would hand her that. Sometimes Elly came over, bringing her lusty son;
but although Winnie admired the baby, she and Elly hadn’t really made
things up. Always, on the way back to town, Winnie would say, “When I
think of what I wanted them to have!”
By the time the work on the boathouse was finished—and it had come out
even better than John had planned—and driving the car had ceased to be a
perilous adventure, John was restless. That was the winter Laura’s
mother, Mrs. Bissett, died, and after several weeks of trying to get
Laura back on her feet after the shock, the doctor had said she must
have a change, and how about a little trip south? Laura couldn’t go
alone, but Winnie, as Laura said, her face wrinkling into fresh tears,
was really like a second mother, if she would go with her. So Winifred
had gone. She didn’t really want to, she said. She hated to leave John.
She made lists and pinned them on the bureau, on the dining-room table,
and gave them to the maid who came in by the day.
John, alone for the first time since his marriage, stretched himself,
looked at his forehead, higher, more deeply wrinkled than it used to be,
at his waistline, a trifle paunchy now, and walked out of his house more
briskly than usual.
Not that day or the next, but sometime toward the end of the first week
of Winifred’s absence, on a dull March afternoon of sleet, rain, wind,
no customers, he heard at his desk in the rear of the store a little
whir that signaled the opening of the front door. He went slowly
forward, snapping on a wall light, and at first paid no special heed to
the woman across the counter. She was bareheaded, and the lights caught
on drops of sleet in her thick chestnut hair as she bent her head over
the parcel she was undoing. “I brought this in,” she was saying with
earnestness, and John looked at her hands, deft, white, dimpled at the
knuckles, “to see if you could possibly mend it for me.” She had it out
of the paper—an electric cord with the plug at the end all adrift. “It
went off with an awful bang and blew out a fuse.” She lifted her head,
laughing, and John thought, “Her eyes are the color of one of our brooks
when it comes out of the woods onto the shore—dark brown in the shadow,
but gold in the sun.”
* * * * *
“Needs a new plug,” he said. “We can fix that.”
“It’s my own fault.” Her wide mouth was humorous. “I knew it was used
up, but I’ve been so busy. Easter’s early this year.”
Clear, thin skin, like a redhead’s. In her thirties, maybe. “If you’ll
give me your name and address,” said John, “I’ll send it around.” It
wouldn’t take him three minutes to repair the cord, but she didn’t know
that!
“Oh, but I need it! That is, I may need it any minute. I never know.”
“As soon as it’s done, I’ll send it.”
“Mrs. Margy Ford. I’m the owner of the Bon Ton Hat Shop on the next
block. Aren’t you Mr. Page? I made that black hat for your wife, the one
she wore when she went on her trip. I wanted to put a dash of red on it,
but she thought with young Mrs. Page’s mother just gone—”
“Oh, yes,” said John. “Yes, I’ve seen your shop.”
“Of course it’s small, but I do have a nice trade. I must run back. I
left the shop all alone. I thought an afternoon like this no one would
even think of a spring hat! You think that won’t take long?”
“I’ll see you have it soon.” John watched her quick step out of the
store. Small, neatly turned. “She’s like a partridge,” he thought.
“That’s just what she’s like.”
He selected the best heavy-duty plug in stock. His hands trembled a
little as he adjusted the small screws. Mrs. Margy Ford. She hadn’t said
anything about a husband. He waited impatiently for Race to show up,
told him he had a couple of errands to do, and went out to the next
block and the window with “Bon Ton Hat Shop” in gold letters on the
glass. “I’m all ready,” thought John, as he pushed open the door.
At first John made excuses for his visits to the shop. He was tall
enough to see over the back of the show window, and if there were
customers, he walked briskly past. After six was the best time. The shop
would be empty, and Margy somewhere in the two rooms at the rear, where
she lived. She would come running out at his knock, and he would say: “I
wondered if you couldn’t use this bracket. Drape some of your trimming
stuff over it. It came in today.” Before long he dropped such pretexts.
He thought he’d never known a woman like Margy. Friendly, talkative,
guileless. She was lonesome, she hadn’t been in town very long. John
found out about her husband. He had died two years ago in a sanitarium.
Margy had kept him there three years, working in the Boston wholesale
house where she’d learned her trade until she had paid off the last bill
and saved enough to start this venture. She had courage, humor, and a
tremendous zest for everything—her work, the short evening drives John
persuaded her to take, and the suppers in her back room, which,
presently, she allowed John to share. She said: “I suppose this is bad
of me. When your wife comes back, you can’t do this, but my goodness,
don’t I enjoy having a man eat what I cook!”
John wouldn’t look beyond the lovely, homely happiness he had found. He
was in no hurry to make love to her; he didn’t want to frighten her. But
he thought: “I am in love with her. I haven’t ever felt like this!” This
was the way he wanted to feel about a woman. He woke up in the night and
lay not knowing which of the images drifting through him were dream and
which were waking illusion—images of life with Margy in the little house
on the shore at Jed’s Point.
* * * * *
Then it was time for Winnie to come home again. One night John stopped
at the drugstore for a quart of ice cream, and went along the alley to
the back entrance of Margy’s place. He liked to watch Margy eat ice
cream, her pointed tongue burrowing into the spoon, her gold-lit eyes
lifting like a child’s. Tonight he had to talk to her. He explained
about Winnie. She didn’t want him, but she didn’t want not to have a
husband around. Then the children. Tom just beginning his career. And
the business. Margy listened, the mound of ice cream softening,
flattening to the very rim of the plate. “I ought to have stopped
earlier,” she said. “I knew how we’d feel! Maybe I’m bad. Am I, John?”
“It doesn’t seem fair to you,” said John.
“I can’t see as it could do anybody any harm,” said Margy, and she went
to him and kissed him. “There,” she sighed, her wide mouth turning up at
the corners, “it’s been a long time!”
So for the next years John Page had spells of deep contentment. He felt
younger, surer of himself. Margy thought he was pretty fine, didn’t she?
Sometimes, humbly, he thought his feeling toward her must be what
marriage was supposed to be. He didn’t mind Winnie half so much, and she
seemed to keep herself rather querulously busy with her clubs and
Laura’s too-frequent ailments. If she had any suspicions as to why John
was placid and hard to ruffle, she didn’t let on. Margy moved into a
little house on the river road, and bought a car. That made it easier
for John to see her. Sometimes several weeks would go by when he
couldn’t get out there, but there always were the holidays when Winnie
and Laura went off together, summer now as well as winter.
John liked to tell Margy about the children and show her snapshots of
them. Elly had three now—Jack, smart as a whip, and two girls. She’d had
a hard time. Andrew worked hard, but luck wasn’t on his side. Elly
herself worked in the summer, going out to cook. She even worked one
summer at the old Hill place. Winnie took that hard. Nan had an easier
time, although Phil spent his money faster than he got it. Nan had two
children, younger than Elly’s, a boy and a girl. Elly was all tied up in
Jack. She was trying to save money for his education. She said she
wasn’t going to have him spending his life in the mud flats of Jed’s
Point. Why, if Andrew had ever had a chance!
* * * * *
It may have been John’s contentment with Margy, or the attention he had
to give to maneuvering his life so that he could see her. Or it may have
been only his lack of business sense that made too late his discovery of
how far along the skids Race had taken them. The years of prosperity had
seemed to continue for the town and for the store. Town and store rocked
with the nation in the financial earthquake of 1929, and even the money
from the sale of the house did not cover their obligations. Winnie,
hysterical, didn’t know how John could have signed away everything! He
didn’t know himself, except that once Race had asked him to sign a note,
and it hadn’t seemed much to do for a partner who had for years let John
have his own way.
There was nothing left except the remodeled boat shed at the Point,
unoccupied all these years. Winnie, after the wild incredulity of the
first news, had pulled herself together, her pale, creased face
bewildered. This was so much worse than anything she ever had imagined
that she was incapable of adequate protest. Tom could do nothing to
help. The other bank in town already had closed its doors, the Citizens’
Commercial had weathered one run. But as J. R. and Tom said, they
weren’t in the banking business now, they ought to put out a real-estate
sign. All they had were foreclosures. “You’re lucky to have a roof over
your heads,” said Tom. He was short-tempered those days, his color
wasn’t good, he had fits of indigestion. John thought, “If he loses his
money, too, what’s going to happen to him?” But John had his hands full,
moving about in a clumsy, apologetic effort to see to everything.
Winnie, her skin like crumpled tissue paper, her eyes reddened but
tearless, didn’t seem to care what they took with them to the Point.
They couldn’t take much, the place was so much smaller. By the time John
had dickered with the secondhand furniture dealer and had the van packed
for the trip to the Point, he felt better. It wouldn’t be so bad.
Something inside his bulky, slow-moving body was expanding, stretching,
sniffing long hours in sunlight, days when a man did what he wished,
each day different from the others. No more monotonous routine, eight to
six, cooped up with gimcracks. He could farm a little, fish a little.
They’d make out.
He hadn’t seen Margy during that fortnight. He hadn’t gone down to the
store after the sheriff’s notice was pasted on the door, and he’d been
trying to make up to Winnie by taking care of things. It was a domestic
embroilment, in which Margy just had no part. The night before their
departure for the Point, he drove out to Margy’s house. He knew
something was wrong, because she didn’t come running to the door to meet
him. He found her ironing, starched ruffled curtains all over chairs,
table, ironing board. One of her working sprees. He’d told her once that
where a man went off and got drunk, she worked.
“Oh!” she said. “It’s you! Don’t knock that curtain on the floor.” The
iron flew back and forth. “I wonder you bothered to come at all!”
Margy like this? She’d never blamed him when he couldn’t get out.
“I—I’ve been busy,” he said.
“Well, I’m busy now. You’d better hurry right back.”
“What’s the matter, Margy?”
“Is anything the matter? I’m sure I’d never know from your telling me!”
She set the iron down on its stand, and shook the curtain into long
folds. “For all I knew, you might have jumped in the river.” Suddenly
she flung the curtain to the floor and rushed at him, pummeling his
chest, color rising under her thin skin. “Oh, you big dummy! That
dreadful sign on your door, me not knowing what you would do, how you
were!”
* * * * *
After a moment they went into the living room and sat on the couch.
John, his hands hanging over his knees, his shoulders hunched forward,
told her about the business, about the move to Jed’s Point.
“That’s the little house on the shore you showed me once?”
He nodded.
“You don’t really mind going back there, do you?”
“Some ways, no.”
“What about us?”
“I don’t know,” said John. “I haven’t had much chance to plan things
out. I could get away sometimes, I should think.” A long trip up from
the Point. What would he offer for excuse? How could he explain to Margy
how dazed and helpless Winnie was? “Not as often as I’d want to.”
“I guess we’re through.” Margy got up and walked across the room. She’d
grown a little plumper. He remembered how he’d thought her like a
partridge that first day he saw her. “There’s something about being
married. You never even thought of staying in town. You could have found
a job. You didn’t even talk it over with me.”
“There didn’t seem anything else I could do,” said John.
“No, I see that.” Her mouth pushed up in its generous smile, the lines
in the corners sharper now in the fine skin. “Maybe I’ll go away, too.
Business is awful poor. There was a traveling man here the other day,
feathers and fancies, who spoke of an opening in a firm in Worcester.”
John got to his feet heavily. He didn’t know how he’d get on without
Margy; but she was right. What kind of life would it be for her, when he
couldn’t get back from the Point except once in a long time? Far under
the surface, like the creak of a joint admitting age, was a faint, sad
recognition that it would be a relief not to have to try to manage such
trips. Margy was right, there was something about marriage. It was
Winnie he had to look out for. As he climbed into his car, he heard
Margy call from the door, “Take care of yourself, John!”
[Illustration: John knew that Margy was right. There was something about
marriage, and now he’d have to give her up and take care of Winifred,
his wife]
“Sure,” he said gruffly, and had to swallow hard. “You—you do the same.”
Winifred’s health wasn’t very good after the move back to Jed’s Point.
She faced life there with a kind of determined patience, making no
complaint about such things as lack of plumbing or wood stoves in the
winter. But she seemed to have one ailment after the other, almost as
if, having been deprived of all her little outside interests, she turned
inward upon her own anatomy. The second year she had to go to the
hospital in town for an appendicitis operation, for which Tom paid. John
was making a living for them, he had a garden, he cut wood on shares, he
odd-jobbed around; but he hadn’t any extra. After Winnie came out of the
ether, he walked along Main Street. The Bon Ton Hat Shop was a jeweler’s
shop now; the hardware store offered automobile accessories. John had
had one post card from Margy, from Pittsburgh. “Working in department
store here and like it. Your friend,” it had said.
It took Winnie a while to recover, and then she had neuralgia, so that
John learned to do household chores. Elly was too busy to help her
mother even if she’d wanted to, and Nan had sort of careless ways. But
the years weren’t bad for John. He got away from the house for long
hours, he had cronies to chat with, he liked Andrew, and he had more
pleasant, simple tasks than ever he caught up with. He knew that Winnie
depended on him. She wasn’t any fonder of him than she ever had been;
but her weakness needed his strength, her maladies needed his health,
his presence was necessary. Elly liked to have him drop in, the
grandchildren were fond of him in the careless, heedless way of
children, and his feeling for Winnie had changed into a kind of sturdy
tenderness, now that she no longer expected any more of him than he
could give, now that what he could give her was so indispensable.
* * * * *
The years moved along like the turning of a wheel, season into season,
with few changes. John didn’t think of himself as growing old, although
he complained that too many of the people he knew seemed to be dropping
off. Andrew’s father and then his mother; Lib Saunders was found dead in
bed. Her daughter Kitty came home for the funeral, looking smart and
citified, and stayed just long enough to dispose of the stock. She said
she was married to a doctor, and Winnie, sniffing, hoped she _was_
married to him. Jathro Steele, helping fight a fire that burned over
fifty acres of woodlot, got lost in the woods, and after he crawled out,
twenty-four hours later, came down with pneumonia and died. Smoke and
exposure. He wasn’t old enough to go, thought John. Funny, though. You
all march along together for years, and then suddenly the ranks begin to
thin out.
Elly and Andrew unlocked the doors between their rooms and the main
house, although Elly went on using her own kitchen. She’d been used to
it too long to change, she said. It was nice to have a good front room,
although goodness knows she never had time to sit in it. She’d had her
way about sending Jack to college. Andrew had stood out against it,
probably the only thing they’d ever had a serious quarrel about. Of
course Andrew hadn’t liked Elly’s going out to work for other people,
but she’d laughed him out of that. Andrew and his son never got along
too well. Andrew thought the boy was lazy—nose always in a book, chores
neglected. Elly did her best to stand between them, warning Jack when
she saw Andrew coming, trying to make Andrew proud of the boy’s record
in school. The boy was taller than Andrew by the time he was sixteen. He
was all hands and feet, with a shy, homely face. He exasperated Andrew
because he was slow-motioned, awkward in his ways, as if his mind and
body hadn’t fitted together yet. Andrew said a son should be a man’s
right hand—where did Jack get these high-falutin’ notions about college?
That was for sons of rich men. He, Andrew, needed his son in his work.
Elly had said passionately: “You were your father’s right hand, weren’t
you? Is that all you can wish for your son?”
* * * * *
It was hard on Andrew, and Elly knew it. He had to look at himself and
admit that he’d never have any more or do any more than he had and did
right that day, that the expectation that belongs to youth was gone,
that he would go on in the same way until, like his father, he began to
run down. All he’d meant to do for Elly! He flailed around with the
bitterest words he could find. So things weren’t good enough for Elly,
she’d been dissatisfied all these years, her marriage had been a
mistake, on and on. Elly, loving him, knew that he cried out because of
torment and pain—and perhaps, too, hidden jealousy of the love she had
for her son. She got him quiet at last, his head on her deep bosom, her
face bent over him, a face a little worn and colorless, the piquancy all
gone, a grave, sweet dignity on the wide, low brow, the firm mouth.
She’d had what she wanted, she said. She’d had Andrew.
Well, Andrew gave in, after that. He grumbled, but when the paper had a
paragraph about the scholarship Jack won the second year as one of five
highest in his class, it was Andrew who carried the clipping in the
pocket of his worn windbreaker until it was all ragged. The boy was
smart, all right. He could have done well in almost anything, but he
settled finally on bacteriology. He talked to Elly about going into
medicine, but that took too many years of training. In science he could
get some kind of laboratory job and then go on studying. He worked in
the summers, coming home for a few days—the same, quiet, shy, slow
fellow he’d always been. The spring that Hitler marched through the Low
Countries and into France Elly scarcely listened to the radio that
Andrew turned on the minute he got into the house. She was deeply
contented about Jack. He was only nineteen, too young for an army. He
was graduating in June, already had a position assured.
Nan’s husband was laid off. The owners weren’t going to launch their
boat, and he had to get some kind of job. Suddenly he’d moved his family
down to Bath, where work was opening up in shipyards and iron works. The
women began to have classes in First Aid and Home Nursing. Winnie perked
up a little and went with Elly to some of the meetings. Jack wrote that
his work was fine. It was under one of the big men at Medical Center, it
was as good as being a doctor, the experiments they were conducting.
Later he wrote that Elly needn’t worry about the draft. The man he
worked with was connected with the government, and the work they were
doing was pretty important. Dr. Cutliffe said he couldn’t get on without
Jack, he was a good assistant, and he’d be deferred. His work was more
useful than anything else he could do. John knew by the way Elly came
running in with the letter just how deep her anxiety had been. “Isn’t it
wonderful?” she had cried. “He’s safe, and yet he’s helping, too! If
he’d stayed here—”
The village seemed to empty out. John thought it was the way a row of
pea vines suddenly shrank and withered, leaving only a few yellow pods.
Old people. Some middle-aged couples, not many children around. The
younger married folks had moved to Rockland or Portland, drawn by tales
of high wages paid in defense work. John went slowly about his small
tasks, wondering at times whether he would live long enough to see the
end of the incomprehensible, constantly widening struggle. Jed’s Point
seemed the only pinhead of peace left in the whole mad world. Even
there, when the wind was right, they might hear an inexplicable mutter
coming up from the south over the Atlantic. Target practice, said
Andrew, that’s all. And even at Jed’s Point, bombers flew over.
* * * * *
In the spring of 1942 Andrew gave up lobstering and built, with what
help John could give him, a new weir. Lobsters were a luxury, he said,
and herring were food. John could row the big dory and help scoop the
shining fish out of the black nets. Sometimes when the smack came in to
buy the fish for the factory down the coast, the men had tales of
blotches of oil on the water, out beyond the islands. John and Andrew
didn’t talk much about the war. Andrew got too excited, he’d fling his
arms around and start yelling. “Don’t argue with him,” Elly said. “He
feels bad because he’s too old to get in it. So he has to fight it out
in words.” So John would say mildly, “Yes, looks bad,” and let it go at
that. The village had several practice blackouts, usually waking up
folks who already had put out all their lights and gone to bed.
One day in early May Andrew and John stayed on shore to get their
gardens in. The herring hadn’t been running well. Andrew said a day or
two’s not hauling wouldn’t hurt. John worked all day by himself, liking
the feel of the good loam between his fingers, the warm sun on his neck
and shoulders, not thinking much. He liked this time of year, when the
leaves were small and you could see the shape of the land through the
trees. The old earth had a way of going on about its business, no matter
what foolish things men did. Late in the afternoon he stood leaning on
his hoe, admiring his neat rows. He’d save the beans until there’d been
a few more days of sun. Then he saw Elly coming along the road—walking
fast, a blind, set look on her face. John started to sing out to her to
look at his garden, but she went straight past him to the house.
Elly hadn’t seen her father. She was running the dark gauntlet of shock
and anguish. Andrew had failed her, someone must help her. Her suffering
had stripped her of maturity, had sent her hurrying in search of her
mother. “Mamma!” she cried, as she pushed open the door. “Oh, Mamma!”
“Why, Elly, whatever—” Winifred set down the bread knife and hurried
from the kitchen.
“Read it,” said Elly, thrusting a letter toward her. She wound her arms
tight over her aching breast and moved her head sidewise, as if she
might shake off acceptance. It was from Jack—just a page, the script as
flowing and unhurried as always, the note as terse. He had enlisted with
a unit of medical men, he hoped his mother wouldn’t mind, he’d thought
it over carefully, he didn’t feel right unless he got right into things.
He was sorry not to get home, but maybe it was just as well. He thought
it best to do it this way, and save all the talk about it.
“You sit down,” said Winifred, “and I’ll get you a cup of tea.”
“Andrew says he’s proud of him,” whispered Elly. “Oh, how could he do
this to me? After all I’ve done for him, hoped for him—”
Winifred pushed her gently toward a chair. “Sit down,” she insisted.
“You look terrible. I don’t want you keeling over.” She brought a cup of
hot tea, and stood over Elly until Elly, in a sort of daze, drank it.
“It’s done,” she said, “you have to stand it.”
“But if he’d only told me—”
Winifred touched Elly’s shoulder, stroking it. Elly hadn’t turned to her
for a long time. Vaguely she tried to gather up some comfort, some
wisdom for her. “That’s the way they do it,” she said. “Why, Elly, you
even said the same thing. You said you ran off to save all that talk.”
Winifred looked down at Elly’s head, the dark hair dulled now with
threading gray. “That’s the way it goes. You weren’t sorry. You had to
go your way. Now your son goes his.”
* * * * *
Elly jerked away from her mother’s hand, feeling a great irritation that
she should think of anything as long past as the remote beginning of her
life with Andrew. “That was different,” she said. “Jack’s whole future—”
“And I myself did about the same thing,” said Winifred. “Why, it all
evens up in the long run.”
“Ever since he was a little boy,” said Elly, “I’ve planned—”
“When you were a little girl,” said Winifred, “I wanted you to—”
Elly stood up then, facing her mother, tears burning her lids. “But you
didn’t feel like this! Jack’s going no one knows where! This terrible
war!”
“Well, I thought I did.” A frown puckered Winifred’s worn face. “You’d
run off with a poor man—It was a long time ago.”
Elly caught her breath. Her throat ached. But her mother’s words had
plucked her out of her personal grief. They had made her part of a long
procession. “I didn’t know I’d made you feel so bad,” she said slowly.
“You don’t think, when you’re young—” She could taste tears on her dry
lips. “It’s like a debt you have to pay.” She touched her mother’s hand,
almost shyly. “Jack had to do what he thought was right.” Up came her
head now, the wracking torment lessened. Now she could bear this with
dignity. “I’m proud of him, too,” she said.
“Here comes your father,” said Winifred. “You want to tell him?”
“Yes,” said Elly. “Show him Jack’s letter.”
The End
Transcriber’s Notes
Published in two parts in: Good Housekeeping, vol. 116, Feb. 1943, pp.
18-19, 137-151 and Mar. 1943, pp. 44-45, 132-145. In the HTML version,
this is reflected in the page numbers by prefixing them with 1 and 2,
respectively.
A slightly longer version of this text was published in: Octave.
Coward-McCann, New York, 1947, pp. 3-58.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public
domain.
The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved.
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