by Belva Plain
“I was wondering—you said, ‘As long as I'm still here.' Does that mean you are getting ready to leave us?”
Kate stood up and excused herself, while Clarence, in a low voice, went on, “I wanted to say . . . this is hard for me . . . could you, will you stay until this is over for me? Or maybe longer, if she needs help? You know what's the matter. It won't take very long, at least they don't think it will. If you would stay until she gets straightened out . . . You've already done so much. Will you take a salary to stay awhile? Or just not pay any rent? That would even out, wouldn't it?”
Jim was looking for a way to say something painless, something that would neither refuse nor imply a promise that he could not keep, when Kate returned.
“Clarence, you ought to go to bed,” she said softly.
With relief, Jim agreed. “And my Laura is tired, too. It's past her bedtime.”
From the front hall as he left, he watched Kate help her husband up the stairs. Something is different, he thought. Why of course, it was her hair. She had been letting it grow, and the weight of its length had straightened the curls. Now past her shoulders there fell a glossy length of living red. Remarkable that he hadn't even noticed it before this!
And he had a sudden crazy thought that had nothing to do with her hair: They don't fit together, those two. They never could have done so, not really. He adores her, but for her it is the child who unites them. She's far too alert, too quick, for him.
Then as he took Laura's hand and went outside into the night, he said to himself, good Lord, what business is it of mine whether she ever loved him—in the way I think of love—or not?
In the morning his hand began to tremble again, so that while slicing an orange for breakfast, the knife slipped and sliced his arm instead.
“Damn fool,” he muttered when the blood, an astounding amount of it, spilled onto the counter. Then he sighed, for still in sight was that torn-up piece of paper with the question: Have you seen them? It was no small task to bind up the cut with his left hand, then to zip Laura's clothes and tie her sneakers, still with his clumsy left hand and that question leering up at him: Have you seen them?
“Boo boo,” Laura remarked with some interest. “Does it hurt?”
It did indeed, and so much so that it very obviously needed care. After leaving her at Jennie's house, he walked back to his car and stood there hesitating.
There was no possible way to avoid going into town. They had to eat, didn't they? And buy a paper, get a haircut, and—and live. If it was destined to happen (since when did he believe in predestination?), nothing would stop it. He got into the car, and driving slowly with his left hand on the wheel, arrived at Dr. Scofield's house.
“Some nasty cut there, Jim. You must have had your mind on something else when you did that.”
“I guess I did. It happens.”
“By the way, when did you have your last physical?”
He wanted to get out of there, do a few chores, and leave town as fast as he could. Now this talkative old man was trying to keep him.
“A couple of years ago. I don't remember. Maybe last year. I've had a lot—”
“I know, I know. A lot on your mind. That's no excuse for neglecting yourself.”
Jim forced a smile. “I don't neglect myself. I'm strong as an ox.”
“Right now, you're not. You're shaking. Do you realize you came close to cutting an artery? And then what would have become of Laura? Never mind yourself, but what about her? Now go in there, put on a robe, and let me take a look at a cardiogram, blood pressure, the whole works.”
The words had an instant effect. Her father's health was indeed Laura's only safeguard. What if he were to be injured in an accident, or die of pneumonia, or— Fool! He had been taking his health too much for granted.
Back at the doctor's desk an hour later, he learned that although he had no serious organic problems, he was for some reason under too much tension and should try to do something about it.
“I know it's easy to tell a person that he ought to stop worrying, easy and rather ridiculous. I know, too, that you've taken the loss of your wife very hard, as is only natural. But apparently running away hasn't helped you enough. Perhaps you should go back to your friends and your familiar environment.”
This man is clever, Jim was thinking. There are no physical symptoms, and yet he has unearthed what's hidden. And he answered lightly, evasively, “Americans like to make fresh starts, Doctor. They like to go west. And I'm slightly west of where I began, you see.”
“All right, so you've made a fresh start. Maybe then you need some social life. Maybe you need to be with somebody else beside your tiny girl.”
“Not so tiny anymore.”
“Even so. You should join some kind of a group. You need to belong. I'm no psychiatrist, but I do know a thing or two.”
“You're forgetting that I'm only passing through. I'm not staying here.”
“It still wouldn't hurt you to make some acquaintances. Sunday afternoons we always have a pack of relatives at our house, mostly children and grandchildren. It's an open house. Come on down with Laura. Join the crowd.”
“That's awfully nice of you. I'll try to do that,” Jim said, wanting only to get away.
“I hear talk about you everywhere, even at the hospital. Coming here as a stranger and taking up Clarence's cause—what a splendid act of charity! People have long been worried about the Bensons. Well, of course you know all about that.”
Of course Jim didn't, not really. Things didn't just happen. There had to be so much more, so many unknowns, questions of character, of two characters, of Clarence and Kate, and what had made them what they were. It was all too complex, as it always is, as he himself so well knew, and it made his head ache. Besides, it was none of his business.
But Scofield, in his harmless way, continued. “Clarence is the best there is. Honest, I mean, steady. Yes, the best there is. Trouble is—well, he isn't the smartest there is. Kate was only nineteen when she married him, too young in my opinion. You're so infatuated, you don't really see what you're getting, whether it's the right choice for you. Then afterward the babies come, although they waited a long time for one, and the way it looks, he'll be their only one.”
The good doctor certainly meant no harm, but these intimacies about Kate Benson were for some reason very distasteful to Jim. He rushed to leave before he had to hear any more of them.
Outside on the street he was hailed by Mr. Holden, who crossed it to join him.
“Can I give you a lift to the bank?” Jim asked.
“No, thanks. I live a mile out, and I make it my business to walk both ways every day. But first I have to tell you the craziest thing. You'll laugh. Did you get an ad that came in yesterday's mail, the one with the missing child?”
“No, what about it?”
“Oh, the usual thing, except that the man, the father who apparently kidnapped her, looks a little bit like you. I thought you'd get a laugh out of it, although of course it's not funny.”
A little bit. The hair and the glasses instead of the contacts. Only a little bit. Dear God, please.
“I guess a couple of million guys must look like me.”
“Of course. Like me, too. You know, I have to tell you again that you've surprised us all, coming in with a profit last month. Nobody expected it so soon.”
“It wasn't much of a profit,” Jim said, breathing a trifle more easily.
“You have to remember that they haven't been out of the red for the last five years on that farm, so this is quite some accomplishment. Let me ask you something frankly. Are you planning to stay out there? Scofield tells me you only intended to take a rest in the country. But he says Clarence plans to ask you to stay awhile and help out.”
“He already has asked me. I don't know how to answer.”
“Well, you've been here this long, so a little longer . . .” Holden did not finish.
“I know what you're saying. You're saying
that he's watching his own death.”
“Well, you are doing a lot of good there. You've got an eye for business, and that's what they need right now. The wife and the kid, I mean.”
Talk lightly again, as if you had nothing heavy on your mind. “Business is a kind of game, isn't it? Sharpens your wits.”
It occurred to Jim while the two men talked that the two conversations this morning were the first he had held with any man, except for poor Clarence, in many, many weeks. The company of men was, after all, the normal way of life, yet so fraught with fear had he been that he had not even realized how much he missed it. So even now, and in spite of all the fear that beset him, a friendly warmth spread over him, a sense of being liked and welcomed.
“If you really want to sharpen your wits,” Holden said, “I've got a volunteer job for you. The woman who practically ran the Red Cross drive in town for the last few years has moved away. And now, since everybody depended on her, there's no direction for this year's drive. It looks like the kind of thing you could do, Mr. Fuller, if you wanted to. And it would be a big help if you'd step in for a couple of months at least.”
Jim thought rapidly: If because of that ad any question about me should ever arise, this Red Cross business should help quash suspicions. A fearful man with reason to hide doesn't usually take a public position.
“Yes, I can do it,” he said promptly. “I've always supported the Red Cross, and I'm honored that you asked me. After all, I'm a stranger here.”
“I told you this is a friendly place, didn't I?”
He was sitting on the front steps of the cottage going over accounts when Kate came walking toward him up the hill.
“I didn't know about your arm, Jim, or I would have driven you to the doctor,” she said. “Jennie told me it was awful, and she didn't know how you ever managed to drive, but you insisted.”
“Fortunately, it's my left arm, so I'm able to manage pen and paper all right.”
Remembering his own thoughts last night as he had left her house, he felt uncomfortable and wished she would go away.
But instead, she remarked about the blueberry crop that was even now being loaded onto a pair of trucks parked just within sight below them at the curve of the road. “Clarence says we've never raised a crop this size. It's a record for us.”
“That's only because we ripped out all the market vegetables and concentrated on it. Anyway, if you can't raise rabbit-eye blueberries in Georgia, you can't raise them anywhere.”
“Clarence still can't get over all you're doing here. He can't thank you enough.”
This repeated thanks had begun to grate on Jim's ears. Always a flush of shame went through him because they who thanked and felt indebted to him had no idea that he, too, desperately needed them. Changing the subject, he inquired about Clarence.
“He's growing weaker. That's why he doesn't like going downstairs anymore. I think he only does it at all because he doesn't want to frighten Ricky.”
It won't be long, Jim thought.
“You'll laugh. He says such funny things sometimes. He misses the rooster's crow in the morning.”
“I won't laugh,” Jim said gravely.
“I didn't say that right. What I meant was, it's strange what little things a person in his condition will seize upon. Some of them are happy, like remembering how it rained on our way to the hospital to have Ricky, and then how the sun broke through the minute he was born.”
She had sat down on the step below Jim. He had a feeling that she had done so unconsciously, for she was otherwise too courteous to have interrupted him at his work.
“And then he reminisces about hard things, the time for instance when we lost a thousand three-day-old chicks because somebody left the chicken house door open. I always believed that he himself left it open. His mind wanders sometimes.”
Jim stirred, crossed and uncrossed his feet, wishing again that she would go away and leave him alone. But he saw also that she needed to talk, and there was no one else right then but himself.
“I was wondering,” she said, “whether, now that so much has changed here, it would make sense for me to—well, to do my own thing. There's that wonderful greenhouse that Clarence had built for me, and it's never been used because we couldn't stock it. Have you ever been inside?”
Jim had been over every square foot of this land and every building in it.
“Yes,” he replied.
“I've taken two courses on bulbs and perennials, and I believe I could make a success if I had some advice on the business end. I never got any advice, and so I never started.” She smiled ruefully. “I don't even know what kind of demand there might be. All I know is, I'd love to do it.”
“There was a four-page feature about that last month in my paper. I'll send for a copy,” he offered.
“I've wondered why you got all those papers from New York when you come from Philadelphia.”
“The international news seems more complete, and I'm interested in it. I used to get the New York papers even when I was in Maine. There's nothing unusual about that.”
The last sentence was barely out of his mouth when he heard its curt echo. She, too, might have heard a subtle defensiveness, because she stood up and gave him her formal thanks.
“I will be very glad if you'd do that for me, Jim. And thank you. Thank you for everything.”
He pushed his papers away and watched her. It was queer that whenever he did pause a moment to consider, she was always walking away. Suddenly he embarrassed himself by seeing her with jeans and shirt removed, seeing most vividly her long-legged, supple body and the heavy sway of her red-bronze hair. Then he turned her around to imagine her coming toward him with arms outstretched.
And as suddenly, embarrassment turned to anger. Ridiculous! Impossible! It was not that there was anything unusual for a man to undress a woman in his mind. In fact, it was more unusual for a man not to do it. But this woman and this tragic situation were exceptional. Her sad husband was dying in that house down there. And he, he himself, known now as Jim Fuller, had no rights anyway under the law, not even to the stolen name he bore.
The earth was peaceful that year. The crops throve, and the business of the farm began to run so smoothly that there was each month a steady, modest gain to show to the creditors. And Jim, who had undertaken his commitments in the town only to seem like an ordinary sociable citizen, had even begun to look like one. The Red Cross effort in a town this size was no burden; he could, as poor Clarence would say, have done it with one hand tied behind his back. From there, he took to helping the Policemen's Benevolent Association, starting with a gift that was generous, but not so generous as to be remarkable. These efforts brought him to a membership, sponsored by Mr. Holden and Dr. Scofield, in a men's club that met once a month at a local restaurant. One of the members asked him to volunteer at a blood drive at the hospital, and he did that, too. After the long flight in terror of pursuit, he even began to have a few brief moments in which he allowed himself to believe that he was on his way back to the world again.
One afternoon, coming up from the outer fields where he had been overseeing the planting of hemlocks on what had been fallow acres, he was arrested by a living picture. Partway up the low hill that separated the Bensons' house from the cottage, there was a leveling, a grassy seat with an outcropping of rock for a back. There, in mingled sun and shade, was a portrait clearly titled Woman and Children, Summer Afternoon. The three had stepped back a century in time; the woman wore not her usual jeans, but a wide cotton skirt striped in pink and green; the little girl had a ribbon in her hair and a floppy book on her lap. The boy was leaning over her shoulder, and Jim had to chuckle at him, displaying as always the authority of his age.
“Daddy! I can read!” Laura cried out. And Ricky cried out, “I'm teaching her. Didn't I tell you I would?”
“You did. I remember it exactly. It was on your birthday.”
“Mom said I can read,” Laura said.
; “‘Mom'?” Jim repeated. “You mean Ricky's mom.”
Kate said quickly, “It's only a name to her. It means nothing. It could just as easily be ‘Annie' or anything. She's simply imitating Ricky.”
He understood. She was assuring him that his child was too young to know what she was saying, and that in time, he would be able to talk to her about her mother.
Pricks of a cold needle went down Jim's back. He was about to say something, to say anything, when Kate added, “I've tried to correct her, but it hasn't worked. It must be painful for you, and I'm sorry.”
With a clumsy wave of a hand, he dismissed the subject. “You never mentioned that article about the woman who started a nursery, the shrubs and perennials.”
“Oh, I read it. And it whetted my appetite. Well, maybe someday I'll do it, too. I hope so.” She stood up. “I never leave Clarence this long, but he wanted a nap. I'd better go and check on him.”
He watched her go down the hill. How could he ever have thought that she was not beautiful? Hers was a classic beauty, calm and strong. It did not invite. It did not twinkle or sparkle. Oh, he had had his fill and more of sparkle!
He had always been a light sleeper, as well as one whose dreams are so vivid that he does not forget them the next morning. That night he had an erotic dream about Kate Benson.
So it happened that he knew he must really leave this place. Somewhere there is a woman who is going to give you great joy, Pratt had said. Great joy for me? With an invisible sword above my head and over Laura's? Not that it would be this woman, this Kate, who would never have me, she with her quick, disturbing glances and her avoidance. If it were not that her husband is dying and that I am helpfully here, she would—oh, ever so kindly and courteously—ask me to leave.
“Mom,” Laura said, wanting attention, “Mom said I can read.”
“Soon you will, and you'll read to me, darling.”
So quick and bright, my little girl! Tiny thing, if you had a mother, somebody like Kate—