by Van Reid
“She has her bad days, but winter’s past and the sun will do her good.”
He nodded again, looked out at the meadow, then turned back and smiled. “Can I tell you a secret?” he asked.
Dee took a deep breath then, and her eyes widened reflexively. “Yes,” she said quiedy but uncertainly.
He laughed a little. “This last February, I took my old toboggan up here one night, when the moon was out, and spent two hours sliding on the hill here.”
She let out the breath she had been unconsciously holding, put a hand to her breast, and joined him in another laugh. “The next time, you must invite me,” she said.
“I will,” he answered simply.
The tension left her as she laughed, and she patted the stone beside her. “Sit down,” she said, though it was his land she was sitting on.
He hitched a thumb over his shoulder. “I have to get back,” he said, though he hesitated after saying it. “Old Hank will wonder why I left him with only three shoes.”
“Is that the big fellow you brought back from the fair?” she asked. She had admired the tall, gray horse the first time she had seen it pulling Olin Bell’s old carriage through the village.
“Yes,” said Olin with a rueful expression. “He could pull a coach from here to Boston, but he wouldn’t stoop to plow a field for me. I don’t know why I keep him.”
“Oh! He’s so beautiful!” Dee was pleased to see the man blush at this exclamation. Other farmers might think it the height of foolishness to keep an animal strictly for its elegance, but here was a man who had been sledding only last winter. “I haven’t been for a drive since last summer,” said Dee, suddenly preoccupied with the thought.
Olin stood a little longer, looking uncertain. He had already given his farewell speech, as it were, and now he hemmed and hawed a little before saying, “Well, it’s good to talk to you, Dee,” while he looked at his boots.
“Thanks for coming up,” she said as he walked off. When he was some yards away, she shouted after him, “Collect me next February when you toboggan again.”
He turned, smiled, and nodded. She thought he might have wanted to look back as he descended the meadow, and just when she decided he wouldn’t he turned and waved. She waved back, quickly enough to signal to him that she had been watching.
“Oh, be more careful,” said Dee aloud to herself. She had almost asked him to come by for dinner some evening, then wasn’t sure if she was glad or sorry that she hadn’t. She turned back to the Eastern rather than continue watching him, which she had been doing almost without thinking. The top of the hill seemed solitary, of a sudden, but she stayed for a while waiting out the sensation. Her finger hurt a little.
Ezra Porch had almost followed Dee when he saw her go up the field, but he was comfortable where he sat. The lilacs were leafed out and a tiny patch of sunlight had been traveling up his side with the progress of the afternoon. He fell into a nap but snapped awake sometime later at the sound of her returning footsteps.
Dee picked her way back down the road; past the Baptist Church, she saw Mrs. Wellington pruning her roses. “They’re an awful sight,” said Mrs. Wellington. “But the rheumatism has been acting up, and I didn’t have the will to do it till this morning.”
“They’re always so beautiful, Mrs. Wellington,” said Dee from the road.
The woman dismissed this with a wave. “They smell pretty,” she said.
Amos Beachum went by on his wagon and tipped his hat. A sense of well-being filled Dee. The road was less muddy nearer the village and she walked more briskly. The few people in town stood on the porch at Labarge’s General Store or down by the green. There was no one in the post office but Mrs. Stroller, the postmistress, who was having a cup of tea. She got up for the letter Dee took from her skirt pocket.
“How are your cousins?” asked Mrs. Stroller. She had seen the return address on the letter that arrived that morning; it was not inquisitive to ask, only polite. “That Billy does make me laugh,” said the postmistress. “Always with a grin. Three cents,” she said, and Dee dropped the pennies into her hand. “I suppose you’ll be leaving for Portland soon.”
“The end of the month, I guess.”
“Ah, well,” sighed Mrs. Stroller. “It must be fine by the water in the warm months. All those ships, though. I might feel strange just seeing them clutter up the harbor.”
“They do want to lure a body off,” said Dee with a playful squint.
Mrs. Stroller shuddered. “It’s enough to read about them. My brother went up to Bangor with no intention but to see the city. He signed on the first ship he saw and went to China!”
“Your brother Amos?” asked Dee, though she knew the story.
“Yes, you’ve met him. He lives over to Belgrade, you know. He came last Thanksgiving and said grace in Chinese! if you will.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Dee.
“I think it was grace, at any rate. How’s a person to know?”
“Have him write it down,” said Dee without really thinking, “and I’ll have a Chinese man I know in Portland translate it for you.”
“Oh, go on with you,” said the postmistress with a laugh. “You’re as bad as your Cousin Billy,” she said delightedly.
Back home, Dee stood at the gate for a while. The day was warm and she pulled the shawl from her shoulders. She could see the top of the rise, on the other side of which she had talked with Olin Bell. She wondered why he had come up to see her; perhaps only for the novelty of it—a farmer stopping in the middle of shoeing a horse to walk up a field and chat with someone.
But Olin Bell? she wondered to herself again. The thought made her smile and she laughed a little, quietly. She remembered when they were children. He’d been a likeable fellow, typically adverse to female company till he reached a certain age. (’Didn’t know any better, I guess,” he had said.) He left town after school, and Dee had seldom thought of him. People said he’d lived in New Hampshire for a while, that he’d been married and that his wife had died very young.
Strange that she couldn’t be any more certain than people said. Most people in town knew most everything about most everyone else. Things had changed some during the past half a century, but they really weren’t so very far from the days when you might rely on your neighbor for your life, when it was of signal importance to know just who that neighbor was and what he was capable of, good and bad.
Dee wondered about Olin Bell alone on his uncle’s farm. The thought made her almost sad, so she took a breath and sighed the melancholy out of herself. She passed through the gate and ambled up the walk to the front door of the little Cape, pausing long enough to say, “I see you in the lilacs, Ezra Porch.” Perched in the bush, Ezra Porch widened his eyes for a moment, then closed them down to unfathomable slits and turned his face away.
17. The Ominous Card
Speaking above the noise of the crowd (but politely), Matthew Ephram said, “It is a splendid evening,” to the cab driver.
“The day came off pretty fine, if a little tardy,” agreed the driver. He held the carriage door and excused himself to a couple who were moving past him on the sidewalk.
“Continued fair tomorrow, with possible thundershowers mounting by evening,” said Christopher Eagleton as he stepped down, adding, “Seasonable to warm temperatures expected.”
“High tide at 9:33,” said Thump, close behind Eagleton.
“Setting sail, are you?” wondered the driver.
Thump looked mystified.
“It is forty-seven minutes before ... the curtain,” announced Ephram when he joined them at the outskirts of the crowd, and this departure from his usual phraseology surprised his friends, then made them laugh. Even Thump forgot the driver’s peculiar inquiry and chuckled deeply.
There was a whir of excitement outside the Portland Theater. Men were dressed in their best hats and tails and the women wore elegant gowns beneath their coats and jewelry upon their necks. Laughter rippled among
them, and friends greeted one another with merry voices.
Eagleton paid the driver, then craned his neck to look over the heads of theater patrons before the door. A large bill, decorated with the comely image of Miss Ethel Tucker, stood before the queue, but he could only see the words BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND! and part of the actress’s fashionable coif. “It was a marvelous idea coming to the play,” said Eagleton to Ephram.
Ephram said something modest that was lost in the hubbub.
“It was a wonderful notion,” insisted Eagleton. “Wasn’t it a wonderful notion, Thump?’
If they had learned anything from Mister Walton it was that there is honor in fleeing melancholy. They had not planned on visiting their chairman over the next few days and yet the news that he was to be “out of town” affected them with a touch of gloom. Ephram was inspired to suggest that he and his fellows attend Miss Ethel Tucker’s celebrated return to the Portland stage. They felt a little giddy with this new adventure. It was stimulating to stand in the crowd before the theater and join in the “Hurrah!” when the doors were opened. Without actually eavesdropping they were privy to snatches of conversation around them, and they were much enlivened by the voices of women in the crowd.
Ephram had come down to the theater earlier in the day and purchased tickets for the mezzanine, and it was not long before they were installed by the rail enjoying the prospect of the seats filling below them. The lights dimmed when the time came for the owner of the theater to step onto the proscenium and make a speech, the gist of which few could have recalled when the evening was over, though he did invoke the name of Miss Ethel Tucker which roused a warm round of applause.
As promised, the evening began with renditions of some old favorites, as well as current popular tunes, by a double male quartet, who finished their performance on the rousing notes of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Men in particular joined with this song in a spirited and even martial enthusiasm. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump almost stood, they were so moved, and the atmosphere in the theater was charged with emotion and expectation.
The lights dimmed and the curtains raised upon the first act of While She Waits in Silence and the scene of the palatial home of the heroine and her family. Wrote the Daily Advertiser on the morrow:
From the very first moment, the tale was a spellbinder, and if the audience could see the writing on the wall when Wanda McCintyre (as played by Miss Ethel Tucker) threw off her fiance for the imagined honor of her family they suffered all the more from agonies of suspense. Throughout the scene in which she told her brave lover that she could see him no more there were gasps from the audience and even a cry of “No, no” from someone in the balcony.
Many in the audience stepped out for a breath of air after that breathless moment when the curtain fell upon the first act. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were a little shaken by Wanda’s and her beau’s “final parting,” the more so since Wanda’s family had already shown their true colors; the members of the club remained seated throughout the first intermission.
The second act only complicated matters as the full villainy of the McCintyre family was revealed. Eagleton thought his hair would stand on end during Edward McCintyre’s monologue, in which the blackguard admitted his willingness to imperil even his own daughter for worldly gain! The air in the balcony grew close and warm, but if Eagleton had not been so rapt in the unfolding drama he would never have tugged at his collar in public.
As the second act came to a close, Wanda began to suspect, and finally to understand, the magnitude of her family’s perfidy. But it seemed too late; her relations watched her closely and kept her from speaking to her former beau at a crowded social gala. All seemed lost until the final speech before the second intermission, when she revealed how she had written her name upon a card—she had only that much time—and slipped it into her former beau’s pocket in prayerful hope that he would “rightly characterize its otherwise unexpected appearance as a silent cry for rescue!”
The curtain fell, the crowd applauded, people below the balcony turned to one another with excited expressions and eyes filled with wonder and hope for the story’s third and final act. Eagleton was again stricken silent and immobile; he was shocked at the very idea of such treachery as was exhibited by Edward McCintyre and his clan; he was filled with anxiety for the fate of Wanda and anticipation of her beau’s return to the main plot.
Eagleton shook himself from his meditations long enough to turn to his left. Ephram sat there in much the same straits; his mustaches had taken on an arrhythmic twitch, and Eagleton thought his friend might sneeze.
Eagleton turned to his right and discovered that Thump had left his seat. “Thump,” said Eagleton, looking along the aisle and back to the stairwell, but his friend was gone. “Thump,” he said again, and then, “Thump? Ephram, did Thump tell you he was stepping out?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Thump has left his seat.”
“Has he?”
“It seems unusual.”
“Didn’t he say anything?”
“I turned to him, just now, and he was gone.”
“It does seem odd. It is warm in here, however. Perhaps he went out for some air.”
“Perhaps we should look for him,” considered Eagleton aloud.
“Perhaps we should,” agreed Ephram.
They excused themselves as they stepped past the people in their row, and nodded politely to the women fanning themselves in the aisle and said “Good evening” to the gentlemen talking business in the stairwell. The lobby was filled with people and chatter and Ephram and Eagleton were charmed by the sight of so many ladies in their jewels and finery and most trifling manners.
The breeze coming through the open door was indeed refreshing, but they stepped into the cool May night with only the slightest pause to consider the invigorating air before looking for their friend. Eagleton stood on tiptoes to see over people; Ephram leaned to see past them. Women looked content as they held on to their fellows’ arms; clouds of smoke rose from cigars and pipes and even cigarettes; there was laughter bubbling from one circle or another.
“There he is!” said Ephram.
Eagleton followed Ephram’s gesture but only caught sight of Thump after he had weaved some distance through the crowd. “Thump!” he called as he neared the man, but Thump’s great brown beard was tucked into his chest as he contemplated a small article which he held in his hands. “Thump,” said Eagleton again when he reached his friend’s side. Ephram was close behind, and he lent his own rendition of Thump’s name to the general air of inquiry.
Mysteriously, the only indication that Thump had heard them, or that he was even aware of their presence beside him, was that he lifted the object of his scrutiny so that his friends might better see it.
It was a calling card—a plain beige card, like those used in society for introduction or invitation. Eagleton noted that there was a feminine signature upon it. He reached for the card, hesitantly at first. Thump extended his hand. Eagleton took the slip of paper and gave it his close and fascinated inspection, while Ephram peered past his shoulder. They moved their lips in puzzlement, and even astonishment, as they read:
Mrs. Dorothea Roberto
Thump absently considered the street some paces in front of him.
“Mrs. Roberto!” said Eagleton. He looked from Ephram to Thump and back to the card in his hand. He read what he saw aloud. “Mrs. Dorothea Roberto!” It was extraordinary to be holding not only her card but a hand-written card at that. “When did you see her?” wondered Eagleton quite naturally.
The previous summer, at the Freeport Fourth of July Picnic, they had all seen her, though Thump from a rather unique perspective since he had unintentionally looked up while refereeing a boxing match between two political candidates to discover that the renowned parachutist (and widow) Mrs. Roberto was within an ace of landing on him (in her attractive suit of tights). Thump’s head, in fact, did collide with her boot heel, and wh
en the parachute was lifted from them he was regaining consciousness with his head resting in that extraordinary woman’s lap.
He may have regained consciousness but he had never quite regained his equilibrium. Waking with that soft pillow beneath his head, looking up past certain notable endowments and into her warm brown eyes, Thump was stricken in a manner that is as common as it is difficult to explain. That evening at the Freeport Fourth of July Ball he had danced with Mrs. Roberto, and what was common in his stricken nature rose into the realm of the un-common.
But as far as Eagleton and Ephram understood, there had been only a single, faraway glimpse later in the summer when she repeated her daring descent (in her attractive suit of tights) at Deering Oaks.
“I didn’t,” said Thump in answer to Eagleton’s query. “That is just the matter. I found it in my coat pocket this past New Year’s.”
Eagleton passed the card to Ephram, who held it with great care. Thump may have been struck in some uncommon way, but they each had been greatly impressed by the lovely woman. “Mrs. Roberto!” said Ephram quietly.
“New Year’s, you say,” said Eagleton. He found a handkerchief in his coat pocket and dabbed at his forehead.
“New Year’s Day,” said Thump.
“Did she give it to you last Fourth of July?” wondered Ephram.
“I never knew it. And I found it in my winter coat. I was never wearing my winter coat in July.”
“No,” said Ephram, looking at the card again. “Mrs. Roberto.”
“It is very strange,” said Eagleton.
“I have thought so ever since I discovered it,” agreed Thump, but he did not venture the reason for showing them the card that night.
“She has very nice handwriting,” said Ephram.
“Thump!” said Eagleton suddenly.
“Hmmm?” said Thump.
“Ephram!” said Eagleton.
“Yes, my friend?”
“The card!”