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JANE RULE
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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For my mother and father
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A Biography of Jane Rule
AGAINST THE SEASON, WHICH was spring, and against the day, iris limp and azaleas sodden in rain, Amelia Larson was in a burning mood.
“Not the right spirit for the kitchen,” she said to Kathy, the maid she’d soon lose to the unwed mothers’ home. “Just leave Cole’s place set. I’ll wake him when I go up. I think it’s a morning for the attic.”
The girl nodded, a great emotional distance from what was being said to her, but serene there. Amelia’s educated eye estimated another three weeks to a month. Friends were beginning to be critical, under the guise of concern: “Now that Cole’s staying with you, wouldn’t it be better to have permanent help?” or “Don’t you think by now other people could take on this sort of thing?” They implied, of course, that Amelia was too old, too much out of touch, and perhaps always had been too much of an amateur to deal with these girls. The morality of it had, for thirty years or more, threatened propriety; but while Amelia’s sister lived and there were only the two of them, no one could say just why a string of pregnant girls in the house didn’t seem right. Now Cole Westaway, a cousin’s son who was to be with her for his college years, was a new fact, corrupting or corruptible, Amelia wasn’t sure which her friends thought. She must, within the next month, get to know her own mind, which was not as positively made up as she claimed.
Her second cup of coffee finished, Amelia hoisted herself out of her father’s large, carved chair and let her considerable weight down on her lame side. Then in a slow, strong rocking-chair movement, checking the pockets of her smock for scissors, pad and pencil, magnifying glass as she went, Amelia left the large dining room, crossed the hall, and seated herself in the chair lift, installed five years ago, not for her but for her sister, after the first stroke. Amelia had used it since in order not to waste it, she said. Having been born lame, she had never been allowed nor had she allowed herself to be pampered. Still, she was glad not to spend the energy on those stairs any longer, and she liked the ride, sidesaddle, past the mottoes cross-stitched by three generations of Larson women, a stop at the landing to look through the stained-glass window onto her mother’s rose garden, the first blooms heavy-headed in the rain this morning, then on up to the second floor.
“It would be as good as a London tube escalator if you’d put up some ads,” Cole said, standing at the top of the stairs, a little thin and sharp-faced to be handsome, his fair hair soft over one eyebrow, a child’s hair. He looked younger than twenty. “Say, some ladies’ underwear or suntan oil or…”
“Put up anything you like,” Amelia said and then added, pleased with herself, “as long as it’s uplifting.”
Cole laughed. He did not offer to help her up, having been given the simple instruction when he moved in: “When I want help, I’ll ask for it.” He stood, looking past her to the mottoes.
“When you’ve finished your breakfast, bring me some boxes from the back porch up to the attic. I’m going to burn things today.”
“What kinds of things?’ Cole asked.
“I don’t know yet, but the rain’s put me in a destructive mood—or rebellious, maybe. Sister never let me touch a thing up there, and there must be some old valentines or May Day cards from seventy-five years ago that we could live without.”
“Do you think so, Cousin A? A lot of that stuff may be historically valuable by now. Cousin B used to say…”
“I know… that every old photograph and letter should go to the city archives. I’ll be careful, and anything to do with your side of the family you can look at again yourself if you want to.”
“I just meant…”
Amelia was by now at the door to the attic stairs, and she left Cole to just mean whatever he had, if he had. Sister, if she had been on her way up in front of Amelia, would have said: “One: that remark about ‘uplifting’ was uncalled for. Two: you should take your leave of people not when they have no more to say but when they have stopped the actual noise of conversation.” And Amelia would have had to listen very carefully through the heaviness of her own progress to catch the tone in her sister’s voice, for she might be scolding or teasing or approving. Beatrice Larson, five years older than Amelia, formidable even before she was an old lady, prided herself on her own irreproachable social behavior and despaired with great good humor of her sister’s directness. “One day, as a result of you, something is going to happen to us,” she would say, and that, too, could be offered as reprimand or commendation. Whatever the moral tone, there was always hope in it And love in it.
“Memory isn’t the same,” Amelia said aloud as she labored up the narrow stairs, though in a sense she was speaking to Beatrice still, four or five steps ahead of her, there where she had always been.
Amelia had not told Cole the exact truth about her work in the attic. One of these days she must, in fact, begin to clear out a ballroom full of family history, unsorted since the year after her mother died and then with Beatrice’s sense, not her own. Today, however, she was not after old valentines and photographs and letters. She was fulfilling a promise she had made to her sister six months ago, the day before she died.
“Burn my diaries.”
Amelia had no reluctance. She would have gone to the attic the day after the funeral to carry out this last request if she had been free to believe it. But Beatrice no more wanted those diaries burned unread than she wanted anything else destroyed that had been executed by the human hand. Only she had been afraid that one day someone other than Amelia might find them. Or was it, rather, that she knew Amelia would want to burn them and not be able to without the request? Had she been sparing Amelia even then? Or was it that the order to burn them was calculated to arouse Amelia’s curiosity sufficiently to ensure a reading of them before they were burned? Beatrice’s tone had always been the clue, but on that day her impaired speech made it impossible to judge. Not knowing what to do, Amelia had done nothing for six months.
At the top of the stairs, she rested. Then she opened the door to the enormous space that had, in her father’s youth, been a ballroom. She suspected that its gradual deterioration into a storage area had to do not only with “the times” but with her lameness. In her memory, there had never been dancing in the house. First only one corner had been walled off for trunks that mildewed in the basement, but gradually furniture and boxes spilled out onto the dance floor; a cardboard cupboard was partnered with the grand piano, a large bird cage with a commode, a chest with a dress dummy, and these unlikely matings gradually produced clustered families of boxes and parcels. It was not exactly haphazard. There were winding paths and categories of sorts, and always a wide space was left to the raised turret corner where on a hard and dusty seat generations of women had sat, watching the harbor for a ship to arrive or leave. When relatives and lovers no longer traveled in this manner, it was still a place in the house for solitude. Amelia had never used it, obviously because the stairs were a chore but also because she was not of a temperament for solitude. It was first her mother’s place, then her sister’s. Amelia rocked her way over to it, pulled herself up and onto the seat. The rain had closed in the view of the sea and all but the gray line of larger buildings by the old docks. But she could look over the ten-foot-high hedges of her own acre of garden into the neighborhood, which was no longer elegant, more boarding houses than family homes by now. There was talk of buying up the old houses, restoring them, turning them into elegant clubs, exclusive rest homes. But the town—city—was really not that sort yet, and it seemed unlikely that it would ever be. Amelia was interested in the town, its strong but stunted life, and she could have turned her mind to it, but she had come to find the diaries, many pages of which had been written in this very place, though probably with few entries about this view or neighborhood or town. She must find sixty-nine of them, one for each year since Beatrice was six and had learned to write. They were not all carefully stored in several boxes. They were, Amelia believed, in “year boxes,” one book in among all the things Beatrice saved in a year.
Up again with the violent decisiveness that was part of any physical moving, Amelia started down the most likely trail, her magnifying glass out to read the labels, and soon she found “B, 1967,” a box that had brought cat food into the house. She snipped the string, lifted out carefully ribboned packets of letters and postcards, a stack of graduation and wedding photographs, receipts, canceled checks, an appointment calendar, and finally the familiar English diary, the size of a Gideon Bible and always in the drawer by her sister’s bed. She had given up the sort with a flap and key years before, perhaps in her early thirties, either for want of secrets or want of anyone to hide them from, though she had always kept the diary in her sewing bag on Thursdays when the cleaning woman came. Amelia did not turn the pages. She simply set the book aside, replacing the other contents, and wrote BURN in dark letters across the top of the box. She was at the year 1954 when Cole arrived with several empty boxes.
“Those thirteen should go to the basement by the incinerator,” Amelia directed, and to his again uncertain look she explained, “They’re all Sister’s private papers; she asked to have them burned.”
He took three at a time and moved quickly, with unconscious impatience. Amelia knew he had nothing to do that morning, with three days free now before his last exam, which he claimed he couldn’t study for. He always rushed at anything he was asked to do or set himself to do, as if the only pleasure were in having done with a game of tennis, a book, or a chore. But he didn’t enjoy empty time when he arrived at it. He occupied himself then with nervous habits, smoking, biting his left thumbnail, starting conversations he wasn’t interested in about things no one else was interested in either. After his third trip to the basement, Amelia told him to sit and rest for a bit. He folded himself up on the turret bench and stared out the window.
“I wonder if it will rain all day,” he said.
Amelia put the 1951 diary into the box and then turned round to look at Cole. “You’re not a happy boy,” she said.
“Why?” he asked, without turning to her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What are you going to do with yourself this summer?”
“Work at the mill,” be said, bewildered by so obvious a question.
“Would you rather not?”
“I have to. I mean, I have to have my fees.”
“If I paid your fees, what would you do?”
“I couldn’t let you do that, Cousin A. You already…”
“There’s the money. Why don’t I send you to Europe again?”
“No,” he said. “No, thank you. I’m really not ready for that again. I don’t mean I didn’t enjoy it very much, but it was pretty overwhelming, you know, when you’ve never been anywhere before. All those people.”
“All right, but you don’t have to work at the mill.”
“I don’t mind it,” Cole said quickly. “I’m used to it. It’s something to do.”
“Something to do,” Amelia repeated and then turned her back on him.
“What are those things?”
“Sister’s diaries.”
He put a hand on one, a new interest in his face.
“To be burned, too, but later.”
“Are you going to read them?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Amelia said. “There’s nothing in them I don’t already know, unless I shouldn’t know it.”
“It’s better not to know.”
“At your age?”
“At any age, I think,” Cole said.
Amelia could not find the boxes for the years 1933 through 1935, nor those from 1913 through 1915. Mislaid? She doubted it. Destroyed? Perhaps. But if they were around anywhere, hidden, those were the years Sister would want burned, read or unread. Amelia was tired, too tired to imagine where else she might begin to look. She told Cole to carry the sixty-three books she had found down to her room.
“And, Cole, do you see that little chest there? I think Harriet would like that. If you’ll take that down to the front hall, I’ll show it to her. If she does, I’ll call Dina to mend it.”
She followed Cole down the stairs for a rest before lunch. The boxes of diaries, on the floor by her desk, troubled her. Or was it really that she could hear Beatrice say, “Are you going to put Harriet Jameson in your debt? If so, why?” “Oh, why not, Sister, why not? They’re only things, after all.” And if anyone was in debt to anyone, it was Amelia to Harriet, who, Amelia thought with pleasure, would be here tonight for dinner, along with Peter Fallidon.
May, 1899: Sister falls down and Mama cries. I hurt my own leg and Papa laughs at me.
or
May, 1906: Sister climbed the apple tree again today and shouted across the hedge, “If I can’t walk, I’ll learn to fly.” Papa spoke to us about thinking and showing off, the good and the bad. “Beatrice fails at the first, and Amelia succeeds at the second.” When he is a hard teacher, I cry. Sister never cries.
or
May, 1912: Am I the only one in the world who cannot bear roses?
or
May, 1917: Papa would have loved this day full of gulls.
or
May, 1940: Sister has argued for the last time about this war. She has such a good nature, I don’t understand her international irritabilities. We don’t read the same books. A pity.
or
May, 1955: I have grown up and grown old here, hating roses.
Cole opened the door to Harriet Jameson, awkward with umbrella and an armload of library books.
“This rain,” she said.
“I’ll take the books,” Cole offered. “Any for me this week?”
“One. I don’t think you’ll like it much. It looks like a morality tale simply disguised as science fiction. But I thought you’d be studying for exams anyway.”
“Do you want to go upstairs, or shall I take your coat?”
“Thanks. I won’t bother.”
There was a hall mirror, before which Harriet could appraise herself quickly, knowing she was always neat, even in a high wind, never really groomed, which was for horses and women of other sorts of ambition. She resettled her jacket over thin shoulders, long thin arms, and made sure the rather tastelessly old-fashioned pin was fastened and straight. There were specks of rain on her rimless glasses. Whatever prettiness she had was of the sort admired by old ladies—a healthy, shining head of nevertheless very ordinary hair, a clear complexion, really blue eyes, some refinement of feature, not quite sharp. She looked what she was: a thirty-six-year-old spinster librarian.
“Cousin A wanted you to look at this chest,” Cole said, occupying himself with Harriet’s coat and umbrella. “She’s going to get Dina to mend it and wondered if you’d like it.”
“But it’s beautiful,” Harriet said, an opinion she had without discrimination of everything in this house.
They both heard the heavy sound of Amelia coming toward them from somewhere at the back of the house, probably from where she had been speaking to Kathy about dinner.
“So here you are,” Amelia said, in the soft folds of black she had worn since Beatrice died, holding out both strong, old hands, which Harriet took as she leaned forward to kiss Amelia’s cheek. “Isn’t Peter with you?”
“It seemed silly since we’re on opposite sides of town. Anyway, he was afraid of being late at the bank.”
“Did Cole show you the chest?”
“Yes, and it’s beautiful, but…”
“Good, I’ll call Dina in the morning.”
Amelia had released only one of Harriet’s hands. Leading her by the other, not for steadiness but for happy possession, Amelia jarred them off toward the library. There, in the room the sisters always used in preference to the larger drawing room, Harriet still felt the absence of Beatrice, with whom she had never been as much at ease as with Amelia but whom she had loved with uncritical admiration: the image of grand age which no one would ever reach again. The force in Amelia was different, without her sister’s faint, ironic haughtiness, nobility of head, command, Amelia took nothing from the setting, simply inhabited it in abrupt, forthright generosity.
“Kathy’s forgotten the ice,” Amelia said.
“I’ll get it,” Cole volunteered.
“He’s a good boy,” Harriet commented as he left the room.
“And it’s too bad in a way, isn’t it?” Amelia said. “For him, I mean. It’s nice for the rest of us, of course.”
“You probably would have said that of me at his age,” Harriet decided.
“No, even then you would have been brighter than you were prissy.”
“I was very prissy,” Harriet laughed.
“Do you keep a diary?”
“A diary? Not exactly,” Harriet said. “I did when I was younger.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. Literary pretensions maybe, or a way to declare I was lonely in a very noisy world. Being the odd one of five children.”
“The odd one?”
“Otherwise there would have been four children,” Harriet said. “Why do you ask?”
“Sister kept a diary religiously from the time she was six years old.”
“Have you got them?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Burn them.”
“Should you?”
“Yes, I should. Do I have to read them first?”
“Don’t you want to?”
“I loved my sister,” Amelia said. “I don’t know whether I can.”
“Do you want someone else… do you want me…?”
“What would anyone be looking for, Harriet?”
“In a diary? Well, greater understanding, maybe, or information or simple curiosity.”
“Would you be curious?”
“If I were you?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe not,” Harriet said.
“I’m not frightened. It isn’t that.” Amelia said.
“What kind of diaries are they? Would they have historical importance? I should think they would. Simply the people who came in and out of this house.”
“She asked me to burn them.”
“Oh.”
“I looked at a few of them this afternoon, just glancing at seasons. She turned a nice phrase often.”
“She certainly did,” Harriet said.
The front doorbell sounded, and Cole, just turning in with the ice bucket, ducked out again to answer it, but he paused a moment before the mirror to brush his soft, falling hair off his temple and to see if the jumping nerve in his cheek was as irritating to look at as it was to feel. Then, guilty of the delay, he wrenched the door open and greeted Peter Fallidon with embarrassingly loud cheerfulness.
“You’re in good spirits tonight,” Peter said, offering to shake hands.
“Trying to beat the weather,” Cole said, who never knew quite how to take hold or when to let go.
Peter, for Cole’s sake, wanted to teach him just such simple protections so that the boy wouldn’t suffer the ordinary as much as he did now. But he was aware that Cole was embarrassed in a kind of pleasure, too. It was, therefore, necessary to be casual with him as well as instructive.
“How did the math go?”
“I still have it to write,” Cole said.
“Are you going to be finished by next Thursday?”
“Yes … Monday.”
“Somebody gave me a couple of tickets to the stock car races Thursday night,” Peter said. “I can’t go, but I thought maybe you’d like them.”
“Great!” Cole said.
“Here, they’re in my coat pocket.”
Peter Fallidon, who had not been a friend to the household until after Beatrice was ill, sensed her absence only in Amelia, when he sensed it at all. His concern, from the beginning, was for her. Coming from out of town to be manager of the bank old Mr. Larson had founded, Peter had first called to win the confidence of the Misses Larson. Beatrice well would have required just that of him. Amelia hadn’t either that kind of patience or shrewdness. She had looked at him, then taken his hand in both of hers and said, “Thank God you’ve come, Mr. Fallidon. I need you.” It had been a surprise to Peter and also an unexpected relief to be so immediately welcomed. He knew that he was somehow a little too good-looking, too solid in stature, too unsolicitous, to be most people’s image of a bank manager. In his dark face, his jade and jaded eyes could easily be mistrusted. What he did not know was that the expression in them was one that often moved people—widows in particular. They looked not hurt or sorrowing so much as capable of those emotions, as if he might have been born to be a widower. In the eighteen months he had been in town, it was decided that he was a widower. Then someone suggested that his wife had died in childbirth. The fact that, at forty-three, he hadn’t married simply didn’t suit him. Because he was not in the habit of speaking about his personal life, people accepted the rumor that became him. Even Amelia might have offered it if someone had asked directly about Peter’s life, though his personal history, because it did not seem to interest him, was of no interest to her either. She had liked his eyes, yes, but she had liked even better his confidence. After having been at the mercy of the cretinous incompetence of Peter’s predecessor, a hand-rubbing, how-are-we-today local, she chose to trust what other people—even perhaps Beatrice—would have called arrogance.
She looked up with pleasure now as Peter came into the library and offered up her hands to him, which he had learned to take, just as Harriet had. Then he turned to Harriet, nodded and smiled.
“Are some of those books in the hall for me?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I left yours in the back of my car.”
“Peter’s got me tickets to the stock car races next Thursday,” Cole said, holding them up.
“I have a couple of tickets to the chamber music concert next Friday night as well,” Peter said. “Could you use one?”
“Lovely,” Harriet said.
“And for you, Miss Larson, a briefcase full of papers to sign, which I didn’t bring tonight—selfishly. Could I bring them round tomorrow afternoon?”
“Of course,” Amelia said.
“Sherry, Cousin A?”
“Gin and tonic for you, Harriet?” Peter asked, moving over to the drink tray with Cole.
It was a game like bridge, the four of them choosing and changing partners through the half an hour before dinner was served. In the last six months they had met to play it at least once every ten days, sometimes oftener. Peter and Harriet had first met nearly a year ago as if by accident one afternoon when she was on her way out of the Larson house and he on his way in. She had, with quickly controlled embarrassment, agreed to stay for a drink. Soon after that Amelia had asked them both for dinner, but it had been a business meeting, to do with Amelia’s concern about the new wing of the town library and ways of financing it. Still Harriet and Peter understood that they were being encouraged to take an interest in each other. When Peter telephoned to ask Harriet to a concert, she had said, “That’s kind of you, Peter, but I…” He interrupted to ask if he could come round for coffee at once. Then he made the speech that he had made to a number of women before. He was neither interested in nor capable of marriage. He did not want an affair. If “no intention” could be considered honorable, he would like to take Harriet out occasionally, but, particularly at their age, it might be misinterpreted by other people as a courtship. That would, if anything, be a convenience for him, but it might be a limitation for her.
“I’m no more interested than you are,” Harriet said.
“Then could I be some sort of relief to you?” he asked. “You would be for me.”
Harriet considered objecting to it and saw no real reason to. Only, increasingly, she would have liked to say to Amelia, “Peter and I have no interest in each other,” and did not know how. For to say so was to give some importance to what she intended to deny. Only by their behavior—usually arriving and leaving separately and speaking to each other as if they had not, as indeed they often hadn’t, talked with each other recently—they tried to indicate to Amelia how casual a relationship it was. But, if Amelia noticed such things, she received them as facts rather than social messages.
“Dinner’s served,” Kathy said, large in the doorway of the library.
“How are you tonight, Kathy?” Harriet asked.
“Fine, Miss Jameson.”
“There are some books for you in the front hall.”
“Thank you.”
Because of the peculiar domestic arrangements, food at the Larson house was, at stretches, either very good or very bad. Amelia did supervise, but the four months she had a girl were not a time for demanding standards. Amelia had to identify the standard she could expect and then accept it. Kathy, a country girl, was a good cook for anyone who did not suffer from gall bladder attacks. And, fortunately, none of these four did. Amelia’s older friends, after one experience, suggested evenings of bridge after dinner until Kathy was delivered. Tonight there was rich cream of chicken soup before the pork roast, and there would be cream again for dessert, which would cover the biscuits they had been eating throughout the meal with sweet butter.
Amelia was gradually aware that, during these meals with Peter and Harriet, conversation shifted from the light gossip and sharp wit Beatrice had always sponsored and encouraged to sets of earnest topics of the sort their father had required: local politics, agricultural information, the war, computerized business. If it was a bit heavy, like the food, she couldn’t help it. Harriet, argumentative, could prime Peter into sharp assertions. Cole’s interest flickered, brightened, died again.
“But, if what turns a town into a city is greed and vanity, then …” Harriet began to protest.
“Ah, but what keeps a town a town is also greed and vanity,” Peter said.
“Does a place have to grow or die?” Cole asked.
“First one, then the other,” Amelia said. “Here, at any rate. The growth was very fast; the dying very slow. Giving us time to pay for our sins, my father would have said. His father helped to figure out how to drive out all the cheap Chinese labor, not just from the town, from the whole county. To this day, we have no Orientals, no blacks, no race problems.”
“Which could be made very attractive to industry,” Peter said.
“Where’s the work force?” Amelia asked.
“It would come. The town doesn’t have to die.”
“We’ve survived crucial failures,” Amelia agreed, “but we’ve refused to develop the docks or the dead center of parking lots. This is probably the only town of this size in North America without a parking problem. We haven’t supported education…”
“There’s still wealth here,” Peter said.
“But why have a parking problem?” Cole asked. “Why fill the bay with freighters? I wouldn’t want to go to a huge university—I probably couldn’t even get in. And I don’t want to major in the industrial-military complex and race riots.”
“That’s one answer,” Harriet said. “The people who stay here stay because it isn’t a city, nor even threatening to be a city.”
“Is that why you’ve stayed?” Peter asked.
“In part,” Harriet said.
“And why you won’t, for long,” Amelia said to Peter.
“I’m not sure,” Peter said. “It may be Harriet and Cole who have to move.”
“You should have been my generation. We were all girls or remittance men.”
“The two necessities for building North America,” Peter said, smiling.
“You talk this way,” Harriet said, “but you came here to get away from the city, not to build one.”
“Only in a way,” Peter said. “With planning, we could come into the seventies and eighties with responsible industry, a balanced population. Oh, with problems of course, but healthy problems, not the terminal disease of either big cities now or this town now.”
Cole fidgeted with pieces of silver he had forgotten to use.
“Are you going out tonight?” Amelia asked him.
“Some of us were thinking of meeting at Nick’s for a while, but no special time,” he said.
“Let’s go to coffee. Kathy shouldn’t be on her feet too long. Cole, you run along.”
Amelia was never sure whether he went away because he wanted to or because he felt he should. His nervous boredom was no measure. She knew he took that with him to Nick’s or the movies or his room. But, though Peter was good for him and Harriet affectionate with him, it was probably better that he spend time with his own friends. And Amelia, tonight, had things on her mind that she could not discuss in front of Cole.
They had finished coffee and Kathy had come in for the last time to get the tray before Amelia took the random conversation up into her hands and stopped it.
“Kathy won’t be here more than another three weeks,” Amelia said. “My old and dear friends think it’s time for me to have permanent help. They seem to feel, among other things, that the moral influence on Cole couldn’t be a good one. I don’t seem to be able to settle my own mind about it.”
“Unmarried, pregnant girls,” Peter said with measured seriousness, “are probably the best moral influence a young man could have.”
“If he needed a moral influence,” Harriet added.
“Now that’s a question I hadn’t put to myself,” Amelia said. “Maybe Kathy is a real discouragement to Cole.”
“Do they have much to do with each other?” Peter asked.
“Not a great deal,” Amelia said. “But we’ve had other girls who would have been much harder to ignore. There have been vixens and charmers.”
“But very pregnant,’ Peter said.
“Yes,” Amelia agreed.
“Still, I suppose he could want to make an honest woman of someone,” Harriet said.
“Cole doesn’t seem to me that romantic,” Peter said. “Or to have that kind of confidence in himself.”
“And, if he did,” Amelia said, “if he could get that involved…”
“You wouldn’t find anything to object to,” Harriet finished.
“Is that rather naïve of me?”
“I don’t suppose his mother would like it,” Peter said.
“No,” Amelia agreed, but in a tone that suggested what Cole’s mother thought was of no great moment to him or anyone else.
“But it’s all very theoretical,” Peter said, “and unlikely.”
“There’s something else,” Amelia said. It’s not often a girl needs as little as Kathy in the way of company or instruction. Am I getting too old? Friends my age don’t hesitate to say, ‘Yes, you are.’ Be frank with me. Are they right?”
“No,” Harriet said, “not unless you’re tired of it, not unless it does begin to seem too much to you.”
“I’ve never been much of a psychologist,” Amelia said.
“That’s probably why you’ve been such a help to so many people,” Peter said.
“Is that flattery?”
“No,” Peter said, “no, I mean it. I’m with Harriet. If you still want to do it, you should do it. I can’t see that it’s any real problem to Cole. And you know that Mrs. Montgomery, whatever she says, would be disappointed to lose any point of moral speculation.”
Amelia smiled at him. Beatrice would have learned to like him.
Harriet was the first to say she must go. Peter, remembering the books she had in the back of the car, got up to leave with her.
“Don’t see us to the door,” Harriet said.
But Amelia did. (“This is not to be a house of people letting themselves in and out”—Beatrice, on Ida Setworth’s once delivering a present, unannounced, in the kitchen.)
When she had shut the door behind them, Amelia put a hand on the small chest she intended to give to Harriet. Then she turned herself to the chair lift. Cole would deal with the lights when he got in. Once in her bedroom at the front of the house, Amelia could still hear Peter’s and Harriet’s voices faintly in the drive. It must have stopped raining. A moment more and the first car door slammed—Harriet’s Volkswagen, then the second, Peter’s, heavier, quieter.
May 1, 1942: The bulk and vulgarity of our latest charge make us accept dinner invitations more readily than usual. “What I can’t stand most,” she complained at breakfast, “is the way I smell.” “Similar to sweet fish,” Sister said. How I wish I could be protected either from or by her impervious accuracy. To Ida tonight, who has the sense to live among the odorless dead.
May 2, 1942: We played Mah-Jongg last night. Ida has been archaic since she was seven years old and has that effect on all of us. Sister seemed to me uncomfortable. If she would ever complain, I would not have to be so sensitive—a complaint I must remember to pass on to her if she’s had a troubled night.
May 3, 1942: We knit for illegitimate children, soldiers, and plant a victory garden. If Sister mentions a cow, I will be gravely disapproving.
May 4, 1942: There is nothing in the world to do about May but live through it. Today Ida’s nephew is missing in action. She seems to have expected it. There is never any comfort for Ida.
May 5, 1942: Since Mother died, the morning sounds of this house have been unnatural. Sister, who used to sit at her desk, pursues them all, as a way, I suppose, of hearing none of them. She walks deaf, and we shout at her.
May 6, 1942: There have been no letters to answer in days. I write to myself without interest.
May 7, 1942:
DINA PYROS RAN SOMETHING between an antique and a junk shop called simply George’s, wedged in between Charlie Ries’s drugstore and Cater’s Ice Cream on F Street, which cut wide and uncertainly commercial across the whole of the uncertain city. Dina’s better customers, like Ann and Charlie Hies from next door, Harriet Jameson, the librarian, and Ida Setworth, one of the town’s finest antiques herself, complained about the space she took up with the empty beer bottles and old paperbacks she bought, But her best customers, like Rosemary Hopwood, who was a social worker, and Peter Fallidon, the bank manager, liked the paperbacks as much as they did the stripped-down and refinished tables and chests. Dina’s friends, like Sal and Dolly who ran the corset shop down the block, wouldn’t have an excuse to visit during business hours unless they could bring the bottles Dina had helped to empty over the weekend. Even more important, those people who weren’t exactly friends and certainly not customers could always collect a dozen empties or a handful of old mysteries and have an excuse to pass half an hour or an afternoon by Dina’s old stove with the cats and the radio. They got in the way sometimes and left sometimes with things more valuable than what they had brought in, though they rarely had either the skill or initiative to carry out furniture. Charlie Ries said they all but ruined Dina’s business and too often spilled over into his drugstore. But Dina imagined Rosemary Hopwood sometimes came in because of them, and Dina’s friends didn’t mind as long as there was some place to sit down and a little air coming in from the back door. For Dina herself, the people around the stove were as important as the old pieces of furniture she brought in, collected from fire sales, real junk shops, old ladies’ attics, sometimes even the dump. She knew good wood and good lines. She had an eye for grain and bone structure in a face as well. Not many phonies of any kind came into the shop and stayed. Anyone who asked, “Who’s George?” or, worse, “Where’s George?” didn’t stay long or come back. Nor did anybody who called Dina “George.” Whether the Rieses or Ida Setworth approved of the tone or not, there was one—a kind of hum that came from power tools even after they had been turned off or the old tubes in the radio or the cats—some sort of constant that made the shop seem at the same time drowsy and alive.
Something dangerous, or dangerously comfortable, about George’s or the young woman who ran it, so Rosemary Hopwood had thought when she first discovered it six years ago just after she’d come back to town. The line of an old rocker had clipped her vision at thirty miles an hour so that she slowed, drove round the block, and parked her rather too expensive car for the price she intended to pay right at the front door. Dina Pyros was alone in the shop that morning, crouched at the bottom drawer of an old chest, fixing the last of the brass handles. She went on working while she exchanged looks of appraisal with her customer. Rosemary Hopwood had time, therefore, to consider that face and the price tag on the rocker before she had to speak. There wasn’t, she was interested to discover, much margin for bargaining in either the price or the face, which she regretted briefly, knowing no other way to have a conversation.
“I’d like the rocker,” she said.
Dina stood up, squarely built, solidly balanced, in a heavy, dark sweater, other uncountable layers of clothing visible at the neck, lined jeans, and boots. She must have said something, but Rosemary’s memory of the transaction was that it was nearly wordless. She had the right change. Dina put the rocker in her car. That was all. The radio had been playing, surely. It always was.
The shop had never been empty again when Rosemary came in, once every two or three months, sometimes honestly looking for a piece of furniture, more often simply lingering at the paperbacks, accepting a cigarette or a cup of coffee, strong and bitter, boiled with its grounds in an old tin pot. Occasionally she met someone she knew: old Ida Setworth or Cole Westaway, the boy who had come to live with Amelia Larson. And the faces of those she didn’t know, collected around the stove, became familiar to her. For her, there was no conversation ever, just the hum of the shop, voices somewhere in it, from the radio or the people by the stove, and the owner’s square, drowsy courtesy. Rosemary would stay a little longer than made sense and go before she was ready to.
At first Dina had been no more than surprised by Rosemary Hopwood, who was not a woman one could reasonably expect to drop in at George’s or, for that matter, anywhere else in this bypassed, sea-sided town. That first day she was still dressing as she had in some other world, in black, with something bright and soft at her throat. Her hair was black—and her eyes—and she had a slow, very white smile. Dina was not so much aware of how little had been said as she was of Rosemary’s voice, low, with breakings in it. When Dolly asked Dina to describe Rosemary Hopwood, Dina could only say, “Around forty, about to age.” And Rosemary had aged in those six years, for Dina nearly at once when she discovered Rosemary’s name, which was as old as any name in town, then again when Dina discovered that she was a social worker.
“What if she’s looking for grass?” Dina asked Dolly.
“It’s not as if you were pushing it,” Dolly said.
“No, but you know… the kids.”
“So? They’re better by your stove than down on the docks.”
“Still, you can smell it.”
“Maybe she’s your type, is she?” Dolly asked.
Dina shrugged, as if to say she wasn’t particular.
“Sal wonders, are you coming over tonight?”
“Don’t know,” Dina said.
It would depend, as Dolly knew, on whether or not Dina got involved with a piece of furniture or a woman. If a woman, she might bring her along, but if a piece of furniture, she was lost to them. Dina never really planned her involvements, as long as they were in something of a constant rhythm, which somehow usually happened without her ever directly initiating anything.
So, for six years, Rosemary Hopwood had been coming into the shop, along with a number of other people, and Dina had got used to her, though never quite to the sound of her voice. Dina sold her a table or made her a cup of coffee or offered her a cigarette, that was all.
Sal, in the shop just a couple of months ago, saw Rosemary for the first time and said, when she had gone, “I wonder where she buys her underwear.”
Dina turned on the sander.
“I don’t believe a word you say,” Sal shouted uselessly. “You gray-eyed Greek!”
It was not a hard exercise in cynicism, since Dina spoke so few, ever.
Saturday morning was always a bad one for Dina because she drank every Friday night at Nick’s, partly out of family loyalty to her cousin Nick, partly out of immigrant loneliness for a country she didn’t remember, partly out of dull habit. It was a rest at the time, the place full of young men: college students and sailors off the few freighters that still did come in to port here. But she always drank too much. Dolly and Sal didn’t know why she opened up on Saturday, except to provide a place by the stove for the drifting kids. That was why. She seemed to herself, on Saturday morning, one of them. Often she did no work at all, sat on the back step with a bottle of beer, and stared at weed patches in the concrete. Even addressed, she might not respond, but George’s was open. The radio was on. The cats came in and out, over and around her.
“Shall I get the phone?” someone asked.
Dina didn’t answer.
“It’s Miss A, Dina,” the same voice said. “She wants to talk to you, if that’s all right.”
Dina put the bottle of beer down carefully between her feet, got up, and backed away from it. To anyone else, if she had bothered to take the call, she would have said, “I don’t repair