The Links lived four houses down, on the opposite side of the street from the Kings’. Mr. Link owned a small factory where he manufactured inexpensive paper-soled shoes to be worn on one occasion only—by dead people. He believed in frugality and would not let his wife pay out good money for a hired girl when she had two grown daughters to help with the housework. There was a dining-room and kitchen on the ground floor of the house, but the family cooked and ate in the basement.
When Mary Caroline was seven years old she stopped playing with dolls and instead haunted any house on Elm Street where there was a baby. In dozens of ways she conveyed her dependability with the result that, when other girls were playing jackstraws or skipping-rope, she was wheeling a baby-carriage up and down the shady sidewalks, tipping the carriage to produce a toothless smile and a crinkling of tiny eyelids, jiggling the carriage when the baby fretted, or sitting still while a hand as small and miraculous as it is possible to imagine clasped her forefinger. Any baby would do so long as Mary Caroline could guard it from other children who might want to pick it up, and who in their carelessness might forget about the soft spot on the crown of the head; any baby that was helpless, cried, smiled at her, wet its diapers, was sweet sour smelling and silken soft.
All that Mary Caroline would have asked for, if asking would have done any good, was to belong to a large family where babies recur frequently, and not be forced to roam the neighbourhood in search of them. The year between her eleventh and twelfth birthdays moved so slowly that at times it seemed to her she would never get through it. But once it became a physical possibility for her to have a baby of her own, her whole concern was disparagingly for her mirror. She cut out dresses from tissue paper patterns and pieced them together on the floor of her bedroom—an undertaking that often ended in tears. She tried twenty ways of pinning up her hair and in the mirror she was twenty different women—young, old, animated, bored, modest as a nun, evil beyond shame or boldness. She bathed constantly and took great care of her nails.
All this went on in her bedroom, at the end of the upstairs hall. She presented to the world—to her mother and father and sister, her schoolmates, her teachers—the image of a fourteen-year-old girl with sturdy legs, a thick waist, thick eyebrows, a receding chin, an awkward manner, and a tendency to blush. Where there should have been mysterious shadows in her face, to correspond with the mysteries that absorbed all her waking mind, there was only a painful shyness.
In the town of Draperville, the fourteen-year-old girls were the natural prey of older boys. At their moment of budding, the girls left the boys of their own age (still in knee-britches, in love with bicycles) behind. The older boys were waiting in Giovanni’s ice-cream parlour, with the dark and the whole outdoors (and sometimes the girl, as well) on their side.
The five boys, all of decent respectable families, who lured a Polish miner’s daughter out to the cemetery one May night, would not have dared to do what they did if it had been, say, one of the Atchison girls instead. But they managed, now and then, singly, to seduce some girl whose father was cashier of the bank, or county superintendent of highways, or a hardware merchant or a lawyer or a doctor. The Lathrop boy, so well brought up, so polite always with older people, persuaded Jessie McCormack to go with him out into a cornfield at the edge of town. And afterward, when he urinated on the moonlit weeds, he felt a sensation of burning pain that frightened him and robbed him of all pride in his wonderful new accomplishment. Since there seemed to be no other way to renew this pride except by telling on the girl, he did that—only to one boy, but that was enough. That boy told the others. And in the end, the word cornfield was a signal for Jessie McCormack to turn away and find other company.
What was done to the Polish miner’s daughter was an act of horror, but at least her body was old for her age. The McCormack girl was prematurely pretty, with blue eyes and straight blonde hair and bangs, and her mother dressed her like the doll in Tales of Hoffmann and she had not meant to do anything that the other girls didn’t do. A single word can age people, wash away any youth, any attractiveness they were intended to have. At seventeen, no longer a doll and disappointing as a woman, she sat alone in the porch swing on Saturday evenings and watched the couples go by.
The high school boys compared experiences in the locker rooms and washrooms at school (I don’t ever want to have anything to do with her again. I hate a girl that …), but in all their tattling, their wondering and recounting and imagining, they left Mary Caroline untouched. The boy who asked Mary Caroline to the senior play, her last year in high school, wore glasses and went out for the track team (unsuccessfully) and in his social inexperience let her walk on the outside until somebody shouted “Girl for sale!”
And all the while her eyes saw, on every side, the strong arms and straight backs and widening shoulders. Her ears caught the husky music in voices that had only recently deepened. There was, she discovered, a hollow centre in her body which drained all the strength out of her legs whenever she met James Morrissey in the corridor—James Morrissey who had curly blond hair and a cracked laugh and white teeth and cheeks like apple blossoms, and who wrote notes to Frances Longworth and to Virginia Burris but never to Mary Caroline. And then suddenly it was no longer James Morrissey but now Boyd Mangus who affected that highly sensitive nervous centre. Then it was Frankie Cooper. Then Joe Diehl. Like a cloud shadow, love passed over the field, having nothing to do with actual boys but only with something which for a brief time was given to them.
Mary Caroline had always been studious, but when the Potters arrived and she suddenly started acting like her older sister, gossip lumped both girls together permanently. The gossip of Draperville was often irresponsible and unjust. Mary Caroline was not boy crazy; she had received a sign. She who had looked in the mirror so many times with sickness and dislike for herself had seen mirrored in a human eye her need for love. She had seen it only once, at the Kings’ evening party for the people from Mississippi, but it had been unmistakable.
Although the world firmly and relentlessly pushes young people together, it does so with an object in view and has very little patience with them once it becomes apparent that the object is not going to be served. If this one won’t love you, then for heaven’s sake go find another who will: so says the world, and the young, unless they are unusually obstinate, obey. Mary Caroline came back, day after day, in the hope of seeing again what she had seen the night of the Kings’ party, and always with an excuse in her hands—a dish of home-made fudge, a book of poems for Mrs. Potter (who never read poetry), one of her mother’s coffee cakes, or a bouquet of the same flowers that bloomed so abundantly in Martha King’s garden. When these offerings had been received and disposed of, Mary Caroline sat in a shy silence, never taking her eyes off Randolph, and sometimes it was necessary for Martha King to ask her to meals.
6
“You’ll stay for lunch?” Alice Beach asked at the foot of the stairs.
“I’d love to,” Nora said, “but Cousin Martha is expecting me. I told her I’d be right back.”
“It’s all right,” Lucy Beach called from the dining-room. “I just telephoned Martha. It was perfectly all right. She’s having a light lunch the same as we are. And this way we can have you all to ourselves for once. Everything is ready. Come and sit down.”
From their strange manner, which conveyed a subdued excitement, it was clear that the Beach girls had something on their minds and were debating whether to tell Nora. The secret, like all secrets, came out eventually. Lucy and Alice were thinking of starting a kindergarten. There was a place downtown, it seemed—two rooms over Bailey’s Drug Store that were for rent very reasonably.
“I’ve spoken to Mr. Bailey about them,” Lucy said, “and he’s waiting to hear from us before he lets anyone else have them. There has to be some equipment—the more the better, naturally, but it all takes money and we haven’t got very much. We’re going to have some long low tables, and some chairs that are the right size
for children, and coloured yarns for them to weave, and scissors and blocks and coloured paper for them to cut out——”
“Tell her about the book,” Alice said. “We sent off for——”
“We have a book written by an Italian woman,” Lucy said. “Sometime while you’re here——”
“It’s very difficult reading,” Alice said. “There’s a lot I can’t make head or tail of.”
“You haven’t tried,” Lucy said. “I don’t suppose, Nora, with all you have to do, that you’d have time or even be interested——”
“Oh, but I would,” Nora said. “I’d be very interested. I am already.”
The rest of the lunch party was given over to the kindergarten plans. When Lucy came back from the kitchen with a large dish of sliced peaches and the teapot, she said, “What we want to ask you, Nora, is this: Would you, as a kindness to us, speak to Mother about it? Maybe if you said it was a good idea, she might let us go ahead with it.”
“I don’t know that I have that much influence over her,” Nora said, “or any, as a matter of fact. But of course I’ll try. Just tell me what it is that you want me to say to her and I’ll——”
Before she could finish, the telephone began to ring, and Lucy jumped up from the table to answer it.
“Yes,” they heard her say. “All right, I will.”
“Who was it?” Alice asked when Lucy put the receiver back on the hook.
“That was your mother,” Lucy said. “She said to tell you that they’re waiting for you to go driving with them.”
“Oh it’s so stupid,” Nora said, rising from her place. “I don’t in the least want to go driving. Couldn’t I stay and talk with you?”
From the upstairs part of the house came the tinkle of a little bedside bell, bought in the open market in Fiesole long ago.
“Couldn’t we——” Nora began.
“That’s Mama,” Lucy said. “I’d better go see what she wants. It was so nice of you to stay and have lunch with us, Nora, and Alice will give you the book.”
7
All her stubbornness aroused, Nora sat under the mulberry tree in the Beaches’ yard, with the dark blue book that had been ordered from Chicago open on her lap, and in a short while her family (quite as if she didn’t exist) came out of the Kings’ house with Bud Ellis and got into the Ellises’ surrey. When Martha and Ab joined them, the surrey started up briskly and without even a backward glance they drove away. That’s what they’re like, she thought. And if anything happened to me, they’d just go on being themselves, so why do I worry so about them?
She waited a little longer, until Rachel came out of the kitchen door with a bundle under her arm, and called, “They was looking for you, Miss Nora. They wanted you to go driving with them.”
“I know,” Nora called back. “I didn’t want to go driving.”
“Well, you’re safe now. You outsmarted them. You got the whole house to yourself,” Rachel said and went off down the driveway.
The book failed to hold Nora’s attention, under the mulberry tree or in the window seat of Austin King’s study. She rejected for a while the temptation to explore the house, entirely empty and for the first time at her disposal, but in the end she put the book aside and wandered from room to room. There was very little that she hadn’t seen before, but observing the house the way it was now, unsoftened and unclaimed by the people who lived in it, she saw more clearly. Rejecting, approving, she tried to imagine what it was like to be Martha King.
The house was so still that it gave her the feeling that she was being watched, that the sofas and chairs were keeping an eye on her to see that she didn’t touch anything that she shouldn’t; that she put back the alabaster model of the Taj Mahal and the little bearded grinning man (made out of ivory, with a pack on his back, a folded fan, and his toes turned inward) exactly the way she found them. The locusts warned her, but from too far away. The clocks all seemed preoccupied with their various and contradictory versions of the correct time. The glimpse that Nora caught of herself in the ebony pier glass was of a person slightly wary, involved in an action that carried with it an element of danger.
A glance into the guest-room, when Nora went upstairs, was enough. This room which might have held some clue on the day they arrived, now offered only an untidiness no different from the untidiness, year in and year out, of a familiar bedroom in the plantation house in Mississippi. Nora hesitated, standing in the upstairs hall, between Ab’s room and the room that belonged to Austin and Martha King. The door of this room (the one she wanted most to see when it was unoccupied) was closed. She went into Ab’s room, looked around, and came out again, no wiser in the ways of children than she had been before. She listened and heard no sound but the beating of her own heart, which grew louder when she put her hand on the knob of the closed door and turned it.
The bedroom was empty and in perfect order.
Nora stared at the mirror, drained of life and purposeless. She went over to the dressing-table and, careful not to upset the bottles of perfume, she pulled out drawer after drawer: face powder and hair-pins, enamelled ear-rings, a little blue leather box containing Martha King’s jewels, tortoiseshell combs, scented handkerchiefs, folded white kid gloves, stockings, ribboned sachets. Here too, Martha King, whom she liked and envied and couldn’t ever seem to know, eluded her. The paraphernalia of femininity, softness, sweetness, and illusion might have belonged to any beautiful woman.
Nora passed on to the bureau, pulled open the big drawers and discovered the little secret one, containing a velvet pincushion, odds and ends of ribbon, and a letter addressed to Austin King. Observing how it lay among the ribbons so she could restore it to the exact same position, Nora lifted the letter out of the drawer, examined the handwriting (feminine) and the postmark (Providence, R.I.). With the letter in her hand she went out into the upstairs hall, bent over the banister and listened, ready, if there was the slightest sound, to slip the letter back in the drawer and be in her own third-floor bedroom by the time anyone reached the landing. There was no sound. With her hands trembling, she drew the letter from the envelope and began to read slowly, for the writing offered certain difficulties.
Austin, my dearest, my precious, my most neglected:
You have sent me all the money there is in the world! I know there cannot be more. And I cannot say anything or even thank you at all. I wonder why we are so inadequately equipped with words that will express? Words are the tools of man and could not express what the spirit can feel.
But if you only knew what a load is taken from me, right off my back, as it were, all because you love me. I’m just going to try with might and main (whatever that does mean!) not to feel obligated. That is the worst of me. I am such a poor receptacle. I want to do all the pouring, or so it seems, and do not get the joy out of great or small gifts because I so want to give those that are greater. That is not right, so I intend to enjoy my relief and forget what you gave me. Perhaps I can even go so far as believing that I gave it to you?
The carpenters are here. It has simply poured all day and to see them sitting about unable to shingle was just too much for all of us. But tonight the wind has shifted to the west and we believe we shall have a fine day tomorrow.
And new shingles are on the south side of the house and the west side of the barn. Tomorrow if the day is fair the barn will be all right and in order and that makes me glad. I have worried over the roof for so long that I shall miss it, the worry. There are no planks under the floor of the barn, in front, you know, where it was rotting, and the eaves are to be fixed too, and the barn is to have some paint, much needed. I think I shall freshen up the walls downstairs, in the dining-room. Did I tell you that Jessie gave me Aunt Evelyn’s table buffet? I have the most annoying time of it trying to remember what I have written you three children. I cannot for my life tell whether I told you, or Charles, or Maud, or each one of you several times. Well, anyhow, told or untold, she did—Jessie gave me the table. It came y
esterday, is sixty inches across and solid mahogany. Enormous. It weighs a ton.
That you weigh one hundred and sixty pounds is a great solace. Do you walk to work each day? Above all, you must get exercise and in fresh air. Last evening your Aunt Dorothy held forth about you and certainly she paid you the highest compliment one human can pay another. I’ll not tell you now. But sometime. She is so fine and level. And kind—and generous. But I’ll not start on her.
About myself. You see I have been acting sort of uppish ever since last summer’s adventures in high finance and I have not responded to all the tests and various treatments according to my usual docility. Now don’t get the idea that I am seriously ill. I’m not, but I am also opposed to being ill if it can be avoided. Yesterday I went to see Dr. Stanton again, and that after a week away, and was told to return in two weeks. Meanwhile, I am loaded with pills and potions, and my leg is still lame and blue.
I have not told all this to Maud because I felt certain she would get ideas, think I was worse off than I am and worry about it. Of course I shall say nary a word to her or to anybody about your generosities, but I cannot understand why your sister should feel as she does.
Last Sunday I heard a wonderful sermon by my pet, Dr. Malcolm LeRoy Jones, which ended with a story about Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. It seems that Franklin took his son, a lad of seventeen, to see Voltaire who was very old. When they entered Voltaire’s room Franklin said, “I have brought my son to you and I want you to tell him something he will remember all his life.” Voltaire arose and said, “My son, remember two words, GOD & LIBERTY.”
Dearest and beloved Austin, take care of yourself. Remember that without health there is no happiness in success. I am very proud of you and no one loves you as I do.
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