Love,
Bo
P.S. Merry Christmas. Tell the kids Merry Christmas too. If Chet is in school now maybe he has learned to write and can write his old man a letter.
Elsa leaned against a tree and sighed, and laughed aloud, and crushed the letter in her hand. Every word from him was full of the tangle of emotional pulls that had wearied her mind for months. He missed her, he missed the boys, he would love a letter from Chet—she could imagine his pride as he showed such a letter around—he honestly wanted her back, he would promise anything. And he sent her gifts that were not gifts, but slaps in the face that shamed her for him in front of everybody, yet the gifts had been well meant. It was only the saving of a few miserable dollars of duty that had made him spoil them. And his optimism, his incurable conviction that this time he was going to make his pile, the old, endless, repetitive story of his whole life ...
A letter from him always weakened her resolution, made her wonder if she were doing right to stay away from him. Before she could soften herself too much with thinking she went home and wrote him a letter, a letter she could not help making kind. But she couldn’t come back. The boys were coming out of their kinks, they had something like a home for the first time, they had friends and playmates and were healthy and happy. She was dreadfully sorry and unhappy, but she couldn’t risk their futures any more. If he wanted a divorce she would agree, because she couldn’t expect him not to want to be free under the circumstances. She had used the two checks he sent for the boys, and was keeping what was left to be spent on them when they needed things. He needn’t feel any responsibility for her. The kids talked about him a lot, they hadn’t forgotten him.
Across the bottom she wrote her thanks for the Christmas gifts, and she could not bring herself to mention how they had been received. It was a lovely coat, the overshoes were very useful in the deep snow they were having. The thought of how much he might be hurt if she told him the truth, how he had spent a lot of money on the coat and was staying up in a lonesome village hoping she might come back to him, kept her pen in the easy platitudes of thanks. She would lie before she would hurt him that way.
6
It was almost as if the necessity of protecting him, of keeping from him the knowledge of what a catastrophe his gifts had been, made the problem of living under the shadow of her family’s unspoken condemnation harder to bear. She found herself on the brink of flaring out and defending him a half dozen times when their talk or their gestures or their very silence steered close to the disapproval they felt. They had known it all the time, their silence said, and now they were half pleased to have their judgment vindicated. Sometimes she felt like shouting at them, and as Kristin’s marriage came closer she felt more and more how impossible it would be to stay on after her one friend was gone from the house. If it hadn’t been for the children, she would not have stayed a week.
Then in mid-April Kristin was married, and after she and George had fled in a shower of rice and old shoes for a honeymoon in Florida that made Sarah lift her eyes in deprecation of such ungodly extravagance, the house was the dull burying ground she had known it would be. Her life went on from day to day by sufferance, not by any will or direction of its own. The weeks crept through their routine of housework and Sunday quiet, Sarah went beside her through the house like a mute, walked the four blocks to and from church like an automaton, spoke hardly ten words a day. Even the lavish flowering of the wild plum tree by the side of the house, and the misty green spread below her bedroom window, were tinged with the melancholy of something long-lost and past reclaiming. Her heart was no longer in this house, there was nothing for her here.
On the last day of April, when she was sweeping the porch, Henry Mossman came by and stood with his hat in his hand and asked her if she would like to bring the boys and come on a picnic the next Saturday afternoon. He asked her lamely, not knowing how she, a married woman, would feel about going out with him, humbly ready to assume that probably she wouldn’t want to.
“I just remembered that other picnic we went on once,” he said. “Pretty near ten years ago. When we had the buggy race and your dad walked on his hands.”
“That was a lovely,day,” she said. “I’ve never forgotten it.”
“Like to come this time? We might be lucky and get another perfect day.”
“I shouldn‘t,” she said. “I might get you talked about, Henry.”
“That’s what I was wondering,” Henry said. “Not about me, about you.”
“It wouldn’t bother me.”
“Then let’s go,” Henry said. “Nobody who ever knew you would talk about you a minute, and the rest of them don’t matter.” He lifted his face and smiled. She noticed how fine his eyes were, what a sweet and quizzical and gentle expression he always wore.
“The boys ought to have fun,” Henry said. “I’ll come around about one, then.”
Standing with her back to the unfriendly house she felt the sudden trembling as if tears were fighting to emerge. She said, “I guess I’ve never known anyone as kind as you, Henry.”
Henry quirked his lips in his half-humorous, self-derogatory smile. “I’d rather hear you say that than anyone I can think of,” he said.
That was on Wednesday. On Friday the boy from the station came up with a telegram for Elsa Mason. It was from Bo, and he was in Minneapolis. He wanted her to meet him there Saturday afternoon.
“I’m dreadfully sorry, Henry,” she said. “It’s just that ... he’s come a long way ...”
“Sure,” he said. “Of course. You want to go.”
He stood behind the counter of his hardware store in a black alpaca jacket, stroking the ends of his mustache, and her own uncertain state made her clairvoyantly sensitive to the stages by which he put away his disappointment,
“You were banking on it,” she said. “I’m awfully sorry.”
Henry reached out and swung the handles of three rakes hanging from the rafter. “Well, I won’t say I’m glad he came just when he did.”
She felt driven to explain, to justify Bo and herself. “I guess he won’t come down here,” she said. “He knows they don’t like him. But when he comes all that way I can’t just ...”
“Why sure,” Henry said. “You want to go right up. Don’t worry about me.”
Full of obscure and stubborn shame, Elsa started for the door. “Thank you, Henry,” she said. She always seemed to hurt him, no matter how hard she tried not to. It always came down to a choice, and she always chose against him.
Henry came around the counter and followed her to the entrance. The street outside lay sleepily dead, a tired horse drooped on three feet a few doors down. “Elsa,” Henry said.
She stopped.
“I want to tell you something,” Henry said. “I had a half idea I might tell you at the picnic, sort of reproduce that one ten years ago.” He was perfectly serious, perfectly self-assured. The awkwardness had fallen away, even his stoop wasn’t noticeable. “I don’t want to butt into anything that isn’t my business,” he said, “but I can’t help knowing a few things. Maybe what I’ve heard is right and maybe it isn’t. I don’t care. I just want you to know what I think.”
She watched him. “One thing I want to tell you,” he said, “is that no matter what other folks think of your husband, I always liked him. I never saw Mr. Mason except that one winter a little, but I liked him.”
Elsa wet her lips. “It’s kind of you to say that.”
“I don’t know what’s the trouble between you and Mr. Mason. That’s none of my business either. Sarah said something once, but I didn’t listen much.” He looked out into the street. “I don’t know what the trouble is and there’s no reason I should know. Sarah said you wanted to get a divorce and couldn’t. I don’t know. But if you did do anything like that, and you didn’t want to stay on with your folks ...”
His face turned to meet hers. “I’m no better than I was ten years ago,” he said, “and I’m not any younger. But I’d
be proud to ask you the same thing I did then, if you should find yourself free.”
Elsa bent her head. Every little thing lately seemed to make her cry.
“I like Mr. Mason,” Henry was saying, “and you know I’m not prying at you to get you to divorce him. I just wanted you to know, just in case, so you would have it in mind as a possibility.”
She was crying quietly with her head down.
“Don‘t,” Henry said. “Please, Elsa. You don’t have to say anything, or make up your mind, or anything. You go on up on Saturday and see him and I’ll take the kids to the picnic.”
It was that last kindness that put her to flight. She nodded and walked away before everything flew out of control.
It was different, telling Sarah. She simply announced that she was going up to see Bo in Minneapolis. Sarah stared at her, her placid, smooth face the color of dough, her slightly-bulging gray eyes hard and disapproving. She looked, Elsa thought, twenty years older than her real age, ‘she looked unhealthy, like a fungus.
“Your father won’t like it,” Sarah said.
“I’m sorry,” Elsa said. “Why should he object?”
“You know he doesn’t want you to have any more to do with that man.”
“Then why wouldn’t he help me get a divorce?”
“You know why. You didn‘t, or said you didn’t, have the Reason.”
Elsa laughed, and she heard her laugh unpleasantly harsh in her own ears. “I had reason. I just didn’t have the little narrow reason the church recognizes.”
“Elsa!”
“Don’t shout at me,” Elsa said. “I don’t know what you want me to be. I’m nothing the way I am. You won’t help me divorce him, and you don’t want me to go back to him, but still you act as if I were unclean when I come home to stay.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said stiffly. “We’ve been as kind as we know how to be.”
“With a poker up your back,” Elsa said. “You hush-hush around me as if he had given me some awful disease.”
“He’s not a good man,” Sarah said.
Elsa sighed and shrugged. “Maybe not. I don’t know what a good man is any more. But he wasn’t all to blame. He ...”
She stopped, looking at Sarah’s faded hair, the plump colorless face, the quenched and somehow petulant look in the eyes. She said before she thought, “I loved him once, we were awfully happy at first.”
Sarah turned away and went into the kitchen, and Elsa looked after her, thinking. As she went upstairs to dress for the train trip she knew that unhappy as she was she was not as unhappy as Sarah, and that seemed a strange thing.
She saw him before the train had fully stopped, and as people began crowding to the ends of the car she sat in the seat gripping the handle of her suitcase. Slowly, with a vise on her mind, she stood up. A porter took her bag and she let it go, though she would have liked it to hang to. The steps, the black hand helping her down, the momentary confusion of turning and searching among the crowd, and then Bo’s eyes, gray and sober and intent. He stepped a half step forward, as if unsure of himself, started to speak and stopped, and then lifted her and held her close. His voice was whispering in her ear, “Oh, Elsa, Elsa!”
She shook her head, pulling away from him. Through the weak tears that came to her eyes she saw that he was well dressed, really handsome again in a good gray suit, and when she bent her head to blink the tears away she saw his hand, brown, scarred with signs of labor, still holding her elbow. The hand was more definitely Bo than the handsome man in the gray suit. She knew his hands, lovely big square long hands.
He drew her aside, she mindless and voiceless and almost without power to move her feet, rescued her bag from the porter, and stood her against a post to look at her. His eyes were warming, he was beginning to smile. “Ah, Elsa,” he said, “you had me scared to death!”
She wet her lips, trying to grope back among the fragments of what she had been going to say to him. “Bo.”
“Don’t tell me you meant it,” he said, and laughed. “Maybe you meant it when you wrote it, but you don’t now. Where are the kids?”
“I left them at home. But Bo ...”
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of talking to do. We’re going to talk so much your tongue’ll be tired for a month. You know what I’ve been doing the last three weeks?”
She wanted to tell him that he was taking too much for granted, that she was still determined, that she couldn’t come back, but all she said, feebly, was “What?”
“Ever since the frost started working out of the ground,” Bo said, “I’ve been building a house.”
“A house!” She still had the feeling of idiocy, as if all she could say was senseless sounds, monosyllables, parrotings of his words.
“A two-story, eight-room house. When I left the foundation was in and the frame up. Full cement basement. Four bedrooms upstairs, living room, dining room, kitchen, big front hall. I sold the two lots and kept the best one for us.”
“But Bo, I wrote you ...”
They were outside the station. Bo raised his arm at a taxi and it pulled up to the curb. The street was of cement, and when they got in and started riding Elsa sat marvelling idiotically at how smoothly they went, not a bump or a sway. She brushed her hand across her mouth, trying to get hold of herself, forget how things had started falling in her mind the instant she saw him. But his voice was in her ears, warm, reassuring, and his arm lay across the seat above her shoulders.
“Look, honey,” he said. “I started building the house in spite of your letter. We might have had a lot of hard luck, and what we did and said, me especially, might not be very pretty. But we’re going to start all over, see? That’s why I got the house going, just for a kind of guarantee.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think...”
“I’ll tell you something,” Bo said, and pulled her around to face him. The taxi stopped in front of a hotel, but Bo paid no attention. “I’ll tell you something. When I left Richmond I thought I was leaving you for good. I thought I really was, after that night. You know how long it lasted? About three weeks. I’ve been so lonesome and sick for you I can’t sleep. Then when I thought I had a good start I came back for you and you weren’t there.”
He tightened his hold on her shoulders, and his eyes were so urgent that she wavered. “I just can’t live without you,” he said. “That sounds dippy, but it’s true. And you can’t live without me, either. Can you?”
She did not answer.
“Can you?”
“I . ...”
“How do the kids feel about it?”
“I don’t know. Kids forget so quick.”
“Meaning you can’t forget,” he said. His hands loosened, and he sat back. The little thing like a clock went on ticking in the taxi. The driver was looking straight ahead, whistling through his teeth.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Bo said. “I’ll never let myself go like that again, as long as I live. I got on top of all that when I found out how much I missed you.”
“But how can you promise a thing like that?” she said. “You’ll forget, and lose your temper again, and there you’ll be.”
“All I can do is promise and mean it.”
Because she needed time to think, and because she didn’t like talking in front of the driver, she opened the door. Bo paid the driver and led her into the hotel lobby. It was one thirty by the clock over the desk.
“How about dinner?”
“I ought to be getting back,” she said, and for an instant, looking at his face with her own absurd words slowly making their meaning plain, she laughed.
“What did you bring the suitcase for, then?”
She looked at the bag. In it she had packed nightclothes, a change of clothes, stockings, clean underwear. Her mouth was open and dry, and she swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said.
In the middle of the lobby he burst into loud, triumphant laughter, the kind of full, deep-ches
ted laughter he so seldom voiced. “See?” he said. “I told you you didn’t mean it. You’re coming back with me tomorrow.”
“Oh no,” she said. “No, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
There were a dozen reasons why not. She had been over them a hundred times. But when she opened her mouth her treacherous tongue betrayed her again. “Chester couldn’t just leave school,” she said.
Bo motioned her toward the dining room and she went as if sleepwalking. The waiter pulled out a chair for her and she sat down in it as if afraid it would collapse the way everything else had collapsed. Bo’s eyes across the table were full of mirth, but warm, excited, loving, a look like those she remembered from years back, like the day they had become engaged, when they went walking in the snow and fell down in the middle of a field and sat laughing and kissing. “You’ve got a nice mouth,” she had told him then, “a nice mouth and dappled eyes.”
“Ah, Bo,” she said, smiling at him, unable to think of a single one of the things she had been so resolutely going to say.
“If you come in June,” he said, “I can have the house all finished for you.” He reached for her hand across the table, and his face was twisted with a smile that looked as if it hurt him. “Lordy,” he said, “you don’t know how much you had me scared.”
“Is it really good up there?” she said curiously. “Do you really think we can make some kind of a home there?”
“Listen,” he said. “Canada’s in a war, and they’re howling for more wheat, more wheat, all the time. Homesteaders are already coming into that place by the hundreds. Know what I did? I homesteaded a quarter and pre-empted a quarter right next to it. That’s a half section of wheat land, and wheat is going to be worth its weight in gold.”
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 24