by Les Weil
The friend one night surprised her in a patch of darkness under an elm, and kissed her on the lips; after a moment she was willing to smile at him, and in the course of the following week it became clear that he was seriously interested in her -he said that he wanted to get married, and he looked at her almost grimly.
At the end of the summer session, he asked permission to visit her at home (school would not start for almost two weeks), and she agreed. In Groverville he stayed at the railroad hotel, and took his meals at the cafe with the trainmen. She presented him to her father, and that same day he took her for a walk out toward the old limestone quarry, and asked her to marry him; and she withheld her answer, for she wanted to confer with her father.
She went to him in his study on the second floor, while her lover remained in the parlor, and she told her story. At the end, her father said, "Where would you live?"
"In Denver," she answered.
He was silent, and she wondered what it would be like to leave him; she blinked, and was afraid; and finally she ventured to say, "I think I want to marry him, Father. He's been very solicitous."
The light from the window lay across his right side: his hands were on the desk, the fingers interlaced, and she vaguely resented this gesture. He waited a little while, and then he said, "Yes. But I'm not sure I approve," and he looked at her, his expression heavy with a resolution that surprised her. "Can't you have time to think it over?"
Evidently she could have time -she understood that she was engaged upon the great dramatic occasion of her life; she asked her father if he would explain his disapproval, and he said, "I don't like his manner, somehow. It's not respectful."
Mary understood what he meant: images of passion (vague, faintly oppressive) came into her mind when her lover looked at her, and she was secretly glad.
"He's not our sort of person, Mary. We're small-town people, after all; and I'm not sure he'd give you the sort of marriage you ought to have. I remember the marriage your mother and I had together, a Kansas marriage-"
Mary bowed her head, hearing something she was not quite ready to listen to. The past! It had a sovereign claim. Her father did not want her to leave him (and she had a duty toward him, that was clear) ; and certainly he loved her -he had earned a right to oppose her wishes.
"I may never have another chance, Father," she said. "I'm not a young girl anymore."
"I understand," he said. "And still I have to say what I think, don't I? I want you to be happy, dear."
"I know," she said. And then, "I don't think I could oppose you, Father. I'd be afraid-" She hoped that he would say what she wanted to hear, and she watched his face - that well-organized, competent visage. Tranquilly she stared at him; he turned away, and looked hard at the pigeonholes of his desk.
A deep uneasiness began to move in her. "I'm puzzled," she said. "But I want to do what's right." He did not speak; she looked down, and moistened her lips. "I'll say I have to have time to think," and she carried the news to her lover, who agreed reluctantly: after he left (she saw him off at the train station), she went home to her room and prayed for guidance, on her knees, with her hands clasped on the white coverlet of her bed.
She hoped for a favorable decision from her father, and she kept watch upon him, as he went about his business -he did not volunteer to discuss her problem. She had letters from Denver, politely soliciting her decision; school started, and she grew busy.
Late in September, she asked her father if he had found a way to change his mind; he was surprised, and said that he had not. In October, the letters from Denver began to change: they grew very kind, and Mary recognized something familiar. "He's found someone else to marry," she thought.
This suitor faded away as the other had done, and in December there came a letter proposing that perhaps they need not write any more. She felt her loss - a richly decorated, heroic panel crumpled in her idea of the future, and she learned a new fear.
Her father watched in astonishment, and then be became frightened and repentant. She saw that he wished to apologize aand she kept him from it with a politeness that her role suggested. She understood that her father had failed her, and she communicated her sense of this; and he sickened, visibly.
Their life grew painful, and for a few months it appeared likely to remain so; and then recovery commenced -it was inevitable. Mary could not permanently harden her heart against her father, for she loved him. She relaxed her rigor; by spring they were friends again (sharing a feeling of complicity), and life continued, along the paths it had discovered.
She returned to summer school, and finished the course work for the master's degree; the following summer she wrote a thesis (on Shelley), and became a Master of Arts, and it then seemed necessary to find a position that would require the use of her new knowledge; and that winter her father was able to make an arrangement for them both, in Kansas City, Kansas. Mary was to teach English in one high school, while he would be principal at another: they took a house that seemed familiar, and settled down readily.
Mary enjoyed the teacher's year, for the rhythms were persuasive. Autumn brought the faces of the young; winter filled the calendar with duties for which it was impossible to imagine alternatives -which of her students would break away in February, when the wind came darkening down the wide Missouri? The classroom was then a comforting place.
Spring allowed her to imagine that she would enjoy the summer. She had an extensive garden. She invited friends to call, and they drank iced tea in the shade of the maples and elms ...
As a teacher, she was lenient, liberal, moderately effective; she taught the merits of the English essayists (especially Hazlitt and Lamb), the Romantic poets -(and she dared to be brave in making selections from Byron) -Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and George Eliot. She taught her students to scan a line of verse. She allowed them to act out scenes from Shakespeare, and every year, in the fall, she required autobiographies.
She was enthusiastic -some of her students acquired a taste for letters, under her coaching: she understood that such a taste was temporary (it would disappear under the pressure of business or marriage) , and she enjoyed it as a quality of her own life.
Her studies took her along the path of religious questionings, and during her fourth year in Kansas City, under the influence of one of the history teachers (a firm-textured lady who had studied at Columbia), she considered becoming an atheist. She read The Descent of Man and Renan's Life of Jesus. Several times (pleading illness) she stayed away from church, and her father then left the house a little uncertainly on his own.
She grew unhappy, and her father, noticing this, proposed that they make a trip together to Europe and the Holy Land. He had saved his money: he could offer this great benefit.
Mary was delighted, and in the summer of 1926 they made the expedition: Mary found Europe excellent beyond anything it had promised at a distance. She registered its age. She attended the formal distinctness of one thing after another, and she discovered that she preferred the southern motives. Italy came up to her attention as more virtuous (ochre and burnt Siena) than she had expected -she felt an alien austerity, and welcomed its holy places.
The Mediterranean was like crystal to her gaze, and Palestine was robed in light. The turbulent ground astonished her; the steplike littoral reminded her of the gods who had opposed Jehovah -here and there were remnants of these in wrinkled stone.
She looked upward at the mountains from the dark little port, understanding that Jerusalem was there, a secret to her hesitant steps, and the river Jordan, winding southward from that sweet blue sea where even now the fishermen were spreading their nets.
She wandered, at her father's side. A thrill of mortality assailed her when she came to a Roman ruin. The fallen columns were impassive, their rough surfaces dark. She touched the cold stone of the temple, in Jerusalem, and felt a response -dire necessity was tingling in her fingertips.
She became happy, knowing she had reached an absolute source: she c
onsented to be derived from so much history, and at the end of the summer she was ready to go home.
Returned to Kansas, she was a sensation at her school and church; she was asked several times to make a talk, and she did this, in a competent, teacher's way.
The years passed. She developed a habit of teaching, she was a pleasant aunt to her sister's children (three boys), who were brought to visit in July or August; and she was a devoted daughter, excessively kind. Her father retired when he was sixty-six years old (the School Board had prevailed on him to stay on for an extra year). Mary was then forty-one years old, and ready for what might come.
She had gained weight, and was now a big woman, dignified and remote. People found it easy to be polite to her, and it did not very often occur to students to make a disturbance in her class. She had friends -other lady teachers who lived with a parent.
Her central occupation was her father, whom she cherished -he never failed to reserve for her the most vivid energies of his day. They read books together, and Mary respected his opinions. They went to plays, concerts, opera (crossing the river to the Missouri side for these); in summer, they traveled to Colorado, and stayed at Estes Park for several weeks; and there they kept track of the wildflowers, sat quietly on the porch of the lodge (reading or looking out over the valley), and drank the mountain air.
Her father enjoyed excellent health into his seventy-third year, when he had a stroke that left him, as he recovered, nervous and a little querulous, and then Mary had a demanding obligation as part of her lifelong habit. He did not quite return to his former powers, and he began to decline: he was slower at walking; his lower jaw grew soft; an occasional hiatus appeared in his attention, as if some rumor from his body had darkened his reverie.
Two days after his seventy-seventh birthday, he had another stroke, and after that he needed a wheel-chair, and, during the day, when Mary was at school, an attendant. He remained cheerful, however, and Mary enjoyed his company to the last. When he died (in his seventy-eighth year, Mary being then fifty-three years old), Mary was astonished at her grief. Her life seemed gone. She could not find a comfortable topic to think about -every object in her house was infected with the past. Her eyes felt injured.
She went to friends and rehearsed her grief; they were patient, and Mary could settle into their living rooms, until, after a few minutes, the familiar shadow attached itself to the edges of consciousness. Once she heard her father say, "Mary, you've been a good girl all day, haven't you?"
At the funeral, she wept freely and began to see herself as one who was grieving (her back was bent -her head down) ; and she began to recover. The thought came to her that she had been faithful to her father, and she was willing to be glad that this was so; and she was sorry in a new way that she had never had children, for now they could be honoring her father by continuing his line.
She arranged her father's belongings. The accidental things (clothes, cuff links, a set of golf clubs) went to the Salvation Army. Others went into a new order in the house -they were given permanent positions. The weight of the globe settled deeper into the casters supporting the stand; the desk (at which sometimes she wrote letters, or cast her accounts) was bare except for a framed photograph that her father had given her on his seventy-fifth birthday; the pigeonholes were empty.
She felt a mild relief at her isolation: her borders had grown. The house did not restrict her; indeed, she wandered freely in it, and the windows encouraged her attention to assert itself.
Her school was her life, and it was sufficient. She took up some new activities there (a Travel Club and a Writer's Circle), she became popular, and she was kind -that was her genius.
Her hair was white; she was ready to grow old, and her body became heavy and relaxed. She was faithful to herself now, having no one else: she had her habits, and they looked after her. At her retirement (when she was sixty-five), she was given a ceremonial dinner by her principal, and there were gifts from her colleagues -an electric clock, three pieces of matched luggage (light blue), an ingenious coffee-maker. She made a little speech, with tears in her eyes, and explained that she planned to make a trip to the West, on which she would use her beautiful new luggage; and then the applause embarrassed her.
She left by train in the last week of July (calm, slow, a little vague), bound for Los Angeles and San Francisco, and her first stop was at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, where she found the buildings pleasant and recognizable. She stayed at the old hotel, a high shingled structure that could have had a respectable place in Kansas City; she went to the rim and was astonished, and she noticed many other people her age along the sturdy rail.
They were enchanted, and beyond them, the gulf was hovering in its great silence. She murmured at the colors, and she knew immediately what she was looking at, for it was an image of heaven -the after-life, in a grandeur like that which had been predicted for it. Gustave Dore had illustrated heaven thus, in her father's edition of Dante--
At her side, she observed the members of her generation, in their tired bodies. She looked down into the canyon: forty or fifty feet away, a small bird was flying, erratic and comfortable.
Dreaming now, she thought it possible that God was asleep behind one of the great mesas; his breathing was the calm of the abyss. In a real heaven, the souls might be peering out from ledges like these.
She stayed two days, and felt happy; and her trip was a success -on her return to Kansas City she was ready to die, and seven years later she accomplished this end: her mind was pure, and once, in the hospital, she thought of her father, remembering how as a child she had been able to call him to her, where she lay pale and cool in the narrow bed -a good father, who would be coming toward her out of the glistening throng.