“Quick?” said Edna, softly and receptively. Her fingers, lifting the tiny strands of hair, gave feathery sensations to Dorothy’s scalp.
“Well …” Dorothy lifted both hands under the bib she wore. “What I mean is, we settle too quickly for something like that. ‘I got to be brave.’ Or these. ‘I got to be patient.’ ‘I got to stick up for my rights.’ But those two are almost opposites. You see? Both good. But only part good.”
“Hm,” said Edna in quick response.
“You know,” said Dorothy, “once or twice in my life I’ve had a … well, a funny feeling. As if, for one second, I got out of the crust of myself, as if I saw everything differently, just for one second.”
Edna said, “When you get this feeling … whatever it is … you’re not proud of yourself? It’s not like feeling happy, either?”
“No,” said Dorothy, her eyes widening. Eyes met, by way of the glass.
“Did you want the back curled high?” asked Edna. “Or rolled on the neck, kinda?”
“I guess, on the neck,” said Dorothy. “My husband likes it that way.”
“You know what my husband says? He says he likes my hair gray!”
They laughed.
Dorothy looked at the woman in the mirror, not the one named Edna, but the other one. “Take ‘love,’” she said murmuringly. “The word ‘love’ is all over the psychology books these days. But what it means? Everybody figures that out just for himself. And it has a hundred meanings. A million meanings. Everybody settles for part of them.”
Edna said, and her unhandsome face looked blind, “Does anybody know, I wonder, the whole meaning?”
Dorothy ducked her head suddenly. She said contritely, “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I jerk? I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“That’s O.K.,” said Edna, and worked silently for a while. Then she said, wistfully, “We’re too small, I guess. We’re too busy. Trying to do the right thing and to love our neighbor. We just take it for granted we know what that means. Or else we think other people must know and so we do the way they do. We all go along.”
“No, we don’t,” said Dorothy suddenly. “Not everybody. Not everybody, always. Couldn’t have. Or nothing would ever have changed … in all the centuries. Don’t you see?”
“That’s so,” said Edna. Dorothy saw Edna’s head tilt. Then Edna said in an impulsive rush, “You always give me something to think about, Mrs. Smite.”
Dorothy closed her lids because, for some strange reason, her eyes had filled with tears.
At the dinner table that evening, Bob Smite spoke admiringly. “Say, you must have shot the works, today, hon. Looks pretty nice.”
“Just a shampoo and set,” his wife replied. “Improvement, huh? I guess I had let it go a little too long.” She cut meat. “Anything new at the office?”
“The usual,” he said cheerfully. “Who won?” he asked his son.
“They clobbered us. 28 to 7,” said Larry. “Hoffendorp’s knee went out in the second quarter.”
“Too bad.” His father clicked a sympathetic tongue.
“I’m glad you’re not heavy enough for football,” said Larry’s mother, absentmindedly. She’d said this before. Her son shot her a sharp green glance, but said nothing.
“Take my suit?” Bob asked.
“Ready Thursday.”
“Well, that will do, I guess.”
“Eat your salad, Larry.”
“I am, Mom.”
Such was dinnertime, at the Smite’s. Pleasant people, they were. Mutually interested. Mutually kind.
Not much later, Bob Smite sat in his accustomed chair with the evening paper in his hands. He was trying to make a three-dimensional image of the track of his chair in space. Let’s see. A rolling, that was more or less like a spiral bracelet, which bracelet was also in another spiral, probably. Then the single track of the chair, and its speeds which must alter the shape of the track.… He couldn’t extract it. He bent his brain. Suddenly, he got a whiff in his mind of something shining … distant, beautiful, strange.… A little scary. Bob swallowed. He would like to try to describe this experience. Like to tell somebody. Ah nuts, he thought. The family would think I was nuts. And maybe I am. I better quit trying to sprain my brain on this stuff.
Larry Smite was sprawled on the couch. The seventh line was singing in his head. He’d got it. But now he must put line eight, back-to-back, balanced … sort of reversed, like in a mirror. De dum dum. Couldn’t get it. Missing one word that would carry what he wanted to put … Could he use the word ‘wonderful’? A soiled word. A spoiled word. Could he wiggle it into the line so that it would mean what it ought to mean? Wonder-filled. Nah, and besides, pretty nearly nobody was filled with wonder … for Pete’s sake! … anymore.
Larry let go, realizing that he was using his will, which he had already guessed was not the way. Forget it. Let the right word, meaning and sound, just come to him.
Dorothy finished the dishes and used scented soap on her hands. We are pretty good people, as people go, she was thinking. Bob works faithfully to support us, and does it well. I keep this house as I ought, or I surely try. Larry gets good grades. He’s not a grind; he is one of the fellows. He is doing nicely. And we love each other. We do our best.
She thought with a pang, Do I?
She drifted into the living room. Bob had the paper, of course. Larry was flopped there. The day’s work over, now was their time to relax, together, in their comfortable home … this loving family, these fine and decent people, nobody neurotic, nobody off the beam, all moving with their times.
Dorothy Smite suddenly, with a strong passion, wished she could take the Bible off the bookshelf. There was a passage she wanted to find. But that would be such an odd thing for her to do. She renounced this fierce and selfish desire, and sat down in her chair and brightened her expression.
“What’s on television?” she asked cheerfully.
Bob stirred. He loved her and wished to please her. He flipped the paper open to the Amusement page. There was a symbol drawn there. A star.
A voice spoke in the quiet room. “Starshine,” it said.
“What, dear?” Dorothy turned her face.
Bob felt his mouth to be open. He must have said it. He hadn’t meant to speak. He wished he hadn’t. It was the far-off glinting light he’d “seen,” still haunting his mind, that he’d been reaching to name. But there was no such word as “starshine.” And what was Bob Smite, husband, father, homeowner, job-holder, doing with it falling out of his mouth? “There’s no such word, is there?” he said aloud and rattled the newspaper.
(If Dorothy now said, “How come you thought of such a thing? Is it in the paper?” Bob Smite would be unable to reply. What pressure, he quaked, in the loving curiosity that clamps right down on anything spontaneous … anything sweetly wild. “How did you happen to think of that?” they asked you, the ones who loved you. And you couldn’t explain, because you loved them, too. So you had to cover up what was wild and yet deep.… You wanted to be what they needed and expected. How guarded you had to be!)
But it wasn’t Dorothy, it was the boy who spoke. Sprawled on the couch, he was yet, somehow, totally alerted. “I don’t think there’s such a word,” he said. “There’s the word ‘sunshine.’ And the word ‘moonshine.’ But … ‘starlight’ it would be.” His mouth continued to move, as if it were tasting.
Bob looked at him curiously.
His mother did not look at him, too directly. She was remembering within herself how Larry had always been so fond of words, so ready to play with them, as if he felt for them. She was taking note. He still felt for them, then, although this special interest had gone underground. She loved her son and she would not frighten him for anything. So Dorothy said, dreamily, “Maybe there should be such a word. The stars do shine. There must be such a thing. Too far, of course. Too far for us.”
Her heartbeat quickened. She feared that she had said too much. If, in Bob’s eyes, the
re should be loving amusement she did not want to see it. She did not look.
“Starshine,” the boy repeated. “A mush-mouth noise.…” He cleared his throat and quickly reached for a more normal vocabulary. “I mean, it sounds kinda funny, you know?” he mumbled.
“Not so far,” said Bob Smite slowly. “We walk around in it every day. The sun is a star.”
The boy’s green eyes had opened wide but neither parent saw this.
“There is starshine on us every day,” said Dorothy breathlessly, “but we just don’t … notice?” Her eyes met Bob’s eyes.
The respectably pretty living room was still for half a moment.
Then the boy squirmed, restlessly.
Bob Smite moved. “What’ll you have, Dot?” he said rather gruffly. “Big choice! A whodunit or a western?”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” she said quickly. “Larry?”
“I don’t care, Mom.” The boy relaxed into the couch cushions.
(Funny, he mused, Dad and a word that isn’t a word. And an idea. And Mom getting it, so fast. Larry could have said a lot more about words. He thought about them so much. But secretly. Gosh, here at home, you didn’t want to upset the people you loved with a lot of probably crazy stuff. You told yourself they wouldn’t understand. But now into the boy’s mind crept a question that made him uneasy. What if they could understand?)
He squirmed.
“Meanwhile, back at the ranch …” he droned, achieving youthful scorn.
Dorothy smiled at him but she thought: What is it around us every day that we do not notice? Dare not? Is it Love? The whole thing? Is it a little bit too wonderful? Are we afraid?
She blinked and turned her eyes to the screen.
Picture and music had begun. Bob went back and settled into his chair.
He had a feeling of deep happiness, as if they had all just escaped some unbearable glory … that was, nevertheless, there. But the room was normal, now. It was just home. The evening was going to be typical. On the surface, considerately, they all conformed.
8.
How They Met
It was a temptation to look at Joseph Harte and his wife, Elizabeth, and think what a mercy it was that they had attracted each other. At first glance, certainly, they were an unattractive pair.
Joseph Harte was short, thick-bodied, dark, foreign. He had dark, quick eyes, magnified by glasses. The lower part of his well-fleshed face was dark with the shadow of a beard no matter how recently he had shaved. Although his black hair was thin and he would soon be partially bald, he somehow looked to be a hairy man. Under the strong nose, his lips were well-cut and full and rather surprising. His voice was soft and blurred by the remnant of a middle European accent and a small impediment, not quite a lisp. He was hesitant in his manner. The quick eyes were shy.
His wife, Elizabeth, was different.
Where his effect was dark and heavy, hers was all pale and brittle and narrow and refined. She was taller than he, American Gothic, all vertical lines. She, too, wore glasses, over small mild eyes, and her light hair, framing her pale fine-textured face, had no warmth of yellow in it. Her mouth was prim, thin lips slashed across her sharp-boned chin, and she spoke with precision in a sharp Yankee twang.
Her manner was abrupt and a little snappish. It took a while to realize that this had its origin in her own diffidence and timidity.
After you knew them, you began to change your mind. They took a little knowing. But he, for all the heavy look of him, was as sensitive, as subtly aware of all manner of small delights in the world about him, as a man could be. She had a vein of humor that was dry and delightful when she dared let it out, and her mind was alert and warmly interested in a variety of things.
And so you were attracted and you began to wonder. At least, I wondered, when I came to know them, once upon a time, in the Middlewestern university town where I went to school.
One thing that was attractive about them, that changed your mind, that made you wonder, was the shining fact that they were happy together. He had the air of a man who trusted himself to see a little deeper than some. She had the cool, sweet confidence that a princess or a nun can have, the air of a woman who was sure of something.
I wondered how they had ever discovered and attracted each other. Sometimes a couple, left over in the race to mate, fall together by default and make the best of it. But they must first meet. How had these two met each other?
It couldn’t have been in their schooldays, for they had married late in both their lives. Besides, he had been educated at a large European university. While she, although she came of reading and thinking people, nevertheless had very little formal schooling behind the high school in a small New England town, very much like (but not) Pownal, Vermont.
They couldn’t have met at their place of employment, either. He was a professor of history and a good one, as I should know. She had been a dressmaker. A country dressmaker, nothing chic and nothing fancy. Yet I think she must have been a good one, for she would have been meticulous and she had good taste. But surely there was no point of contact between two such disparate occupations.
Then perhaps they had a common hobby. Well, he was a chess player. She painted dainty little landscapes in watercolor. And although they were interested in a multitude of things, when I knew them, these things, it was plain to see, had interested them together.
Geography? Well, obviously, they must have been in the same place, at least. And it was true, he had taught for a time in a small fine New England college, very much like (but not) Bennington, Vermont. Suppose they had both been in the state of Vermont? It hardly seemed enough.
Mutual friends, I supposed. And yet, how could that be?
When you are curious, you ask, with what roundabout tact you can muster, and when you are curious enough, you eventually find out.
There was a little story. I knew there had to be.
Of course, one has to be very quiet and respectful to be told such a story. Young as I was, I had sense enough to be flattered that she told me, in her twangy voice, barrenly, shyly, and yet very proudly. One saw that to her it was the greatest love story in the world.
When I think of it now, I am not sure but what it was, in a way.
Elizabeth Hall was one of those unfortunates who answer physically the stereotyped description of an old maid. And she woke up in her thirties to the realization that she had become what she looked like. There were circumstances. For instance, the kind of work she did because it was all she could do, but which threw her with women and only women. Then there was the place, a little town from which so many males escaped while too many females stayed behind. And her own timid and somewhat forbidding manner wasn’t helpful.
Nor was she one who could make a desperate decision, transform herself into what she was not, and with no money, dash forth, full of verve and confidence, with a lipstick and a new personality, to better hunting grounds. So, at thirty-two, her people dead and gone, there she was, a woman with a heart as warm as any, but high and dry, doomed, it seemed, to live alone forever.
Late one icy afternoon, she found herself on a bus. She had obliged a customer in the next town over, working late on a final fitting, and she was tired and hungry and dispirited, yet not very anxious to get home. She was a tense and tactful paying guest in the house of a family friend, where two narrow rooms were all the home she had or probably ever would have.
The bus was rather full but she found one empty seat and sat by the window, looking out at the bleak grays of the snowless landscape in the fading light of a gray and sunless sky. There had been frost. The road was icy in patches. The cold was bitter. The mood was gray.
He got on and sat beside her.
She saw him, of course, out of the corner of her eye, and he was not attractive, not a type she knew or wanted to know. Seat-mates in the grab-bag of a public bus, they rode along, as far apart as if they had been in different counties.
She went on looking out the window and in
her mind were melancholy thoughts. The day was dying. The year was dying. And she was growing old.
The bus was no sleek modern vehicle but a high-built clumsy affair, and it blustered along.
Until they came to the hill.
No idea of danger was in her mind so the shock was tremendous when the driver cried out in a high-pitched voice, and everyone realized at once that the bus was slipping … slipping sideways. It was out of control on the icy hill and the embankment was steep at their right. All of a sudden, she was sure they were all going to die.
This was all there was going to be! There wasn’t going to be any more, not here, on this earth, which suddenly changed in her eyes and her heart.
How dear … how inexpressibly dear … it was! How lovely this evening light! How miraculous those gentle colors! How beautiful was the earth and the life upon it! All of it! Everything! It was like looking around home, just as you are going away, and seeing every shabby thing you have loved in the tender light of parting.
And all the sterility of all her days piled into one great sad sum, because the line was being drawn, even now, at the bottom, and the addition would be made, the total arrived at.
Some of the passengers were screaming, some scrambling. All this in seconds of panic. But she turned and looked at the man beside her and felt no difference between them. He was a human being, who had eyes to see and ears to hear, who had been alive on this beautiful earth and soon would not be, for the bus was sliding faster now and in one more second would be over the edge and hurtling to the valley.
She put her hand on his cuff. Out of the bursting love she was feeling for the life, itself, that she was leaving, she said to him passionately, “I love you.”
The bus careened. Then, in the inexplicable way of things, it struck on the hard mass of an old stump, a stubborn relic of the forest that had once clothed this slope, long hidden in the brush. The bus pivoted on this sturdy point and came to rest, quivering, with a wheel smashed and gone, down on its knee, you might say, but stationary and still on the road.
I See You Page 14