“Hello,” we said.
“It’s late, Dan,” his father said in his soft burring voice, and “Nearly nine,” his mother said in the tone of one who confers a blessing.
“I’m coming up now,” he said in happy acquiescence, and turning to us, “See you tomorrow.” Then he went quickly across the wide porch, and into the house.
For a moment we stood and watched the door into which he had disappeared. Then we looked up and saw that his parents had gone back in, and through the lighted doors that opened on the balcony, we heard muted laughter and Dan’s voice. Then the draperies fell across the opening and it was dark as the night around.
“I have to go back,” Milly said. “See you tomorrow.” She turned swiftly, as if with a resolution, and vanished spectrally among the trees.
“My bike’s in front,” Freddie said.
“I’m going this way,” I said.
We said good night, and I went back to the path along the shore. Water lapped mournfully against the piers, and the phonograph music sounded nearer. I cut up through a meadow that lay between the Fords’ house and my father’s, and, through a place I had worn and regularly used, crept under the hedge that separated the meadow from our lawn. On my knees, I saw that the first floor of our house was lighted up. The music came from the living room, and people moved across the windows, dancing. I was about twenty feet from a porch attached to the side of the house, and as I knelt in the damp grass, debating which way to enter, a shadow separated itself from the shadowy trellis of roses that covered the southern end of the porch. It was a man’s figure, moving stealthily, and then seating itself on the railing. The man struck a match to light a cigarette, and I saw that it was my father. I stiffened, and knelt still. Then a burst of laughter came from the open windows, and a new record sounded out. It was “Whispering,” and through the windows I saw my mother dancing with one of the Moore boys. She wore a pink dress and, for some reason, a large pink hat with a droopy brim, and it seemed to me that she had difficulty in keeping the hat on her head while she danced. Laughter bubbled up over the beat of the song. My father’s cigarette glowed. Then it came toward me through the darkness in an arch, as he flipped it away. It hissed softly in the damp grass and went out. The music stopped and someone started it again, and again my mother and the Moore boy seemed to be the only ones who were dancing. They pranced to the thin music of “Whispering,” and the brim of the pink hat flopped on my mother’s yellow hair, and presently it fell off as she whirled. It was a transparent hat, like the hats that bridesmaids often wear, and it sailed off to spastic words that reached across the garden … that you’ll never grieve me … whisper … never leave me … whispering.…
I knelt in the grass for a long time and watched my father watching my mother. Every now and then he lit a new cigarette, and I would see the ruddy flash of his face, or part of it, and the glowing butts always came shooting over to me, as if he were signaling to me in a conspiracy. Did I feel anything—for him? for her? I remember only that my knees grew stiff and aching and that I was shivering in the soft, summer night. Inside, the music stopped, and the pink figure of my mother disappeared, and the shadow of my father remained motionless on the porch. A glass shattered with a sharp sound. Voices rose. My mother laughed, and, not seeing her, I thought the laughter sounded deep and wild. At last I got stiffly to my feet and moved cautiously along against the darkness of the hedge until I could dart safely across the gravel drive to the back door of the house and get up to my room by the servants’ stairs.
How, without revelations that are rare, can we know our parents? Or is that quite what I mean? I should have asked: how can we look back and say, ah! this was the pressure of the casual thumb on the clay that, once the casting was complete, left that inflexible feature in the bronze of my will. And what we forget! All that we cannot bear to know that we cannot live with. Yet live with it we do, and the will is bronze because we do not know, we cannot remember, why it wills as it does. We forget how we feel, and, for the feeling that even then was making us, we retain only, we substitute the mute and bearable tokens, a pink hat or a wisp of song or an iron deer in the darkness, spice odors of melancholy leaking from closed cupboards.
This I know. I had had a younger sister, Lucy, who was born five years after me, and who died accidentally as an infant. I hardly remember this child, but I seem to have a memory of my mother as different in my early youth, before that death. I think of a tall blond girl—yes, a girl!—with an easy, swinging walk, a careless girl who brought into our life from the California ranch on which she was born and lived as a child an air of freedom and spaciousness, and with that, an easygoing stridency, too, a certain generous brashness. She always moved, even later, as though she were walking along a road or crossing an open field, and she talked, not loudly, but yet as though she were out-of-doors. From Mexican ranch hands she had learned to play the guitar, and to this she sang their songs of luxuriating sorrow in her coarse, untrained, and strangely moving alto. She rode with natural ease and dash, but with humorous contempt for the English style and Eastern horses. After the death of her child, she ceased to ride, and she seldom touched the guitar on which summer dust collected in the garden house, where it hung over the fireplace; her careless ease turned to laxity, and more and more she gave herself to abrupt and jarring harshness of judgment.
She had taken the child, less than a year old, to the edge of the lake, where she was in the habit of undressing it and sunning it, while she lay in the sun herself; but on this day, as she lay on her back, remembering, possibly, curving, golden ranges or Sierra skies, she dozed, and slept, and when she woke, the child’s blanket was an empty, rumpled square, and the child was dead in the lapping water’s shallow edge, where it had rolled or crept, and a celluloid rattle floated beside it.
Another man might have saved her from the course she took, but my father must have been alarmed by her grief or intimidated by the dumbness of her self-reproach to a degree that left him helpless to counter either with love, and deference was then of no use to her. So the death of this child—and I do not know what else—pushed them apart, pushed her into those sickening frivolities of which a restless drunkenness was only one, pushed him, finally, into suspicious brooding, watching, and self-immolating slackness. There was no quarrel between them, no open conflict, but a gap, and this she filled with the easy and inadequate materials of those queer years. She was then thirty-seven or thirty-eight. At night, when she was in the house, the phonograph hardly ever stopped playing. It played on and on that night—“Whispering” again and again, and “Genevieve,” and “When My Baby Smiles at Me”—on and on as I lay on my back in bed and coldly reflected on my father lurking indecisively on the porch by the rose trellis.
I slept, and much later I awoke with a start. At first I did not know what had troubled my sleep, but then I heard the voices on the drive below, singing over the sound of a racing motor, the voices of young men. The singing died out on the highway and the sound of the motor diminished to a hum, and nothing. Then the heavy predawn summer silence closed down on the house. I heard electric switches clicking off below, and then my mother’s slow climbing step on the stairs. I could picture her, pulling herself wearily up along the banister, tottering in pink satin slippers. She was sobbing softly. Then these sounds stopped, and I knew that she was standing outside my door. I lay absolutely still. The door creaked open slowly, held, and then closed again. She went with lagging steps across the wide corridor to her room, and I heard her door close after her. No one followed.
Some separation took place between them and me. I had been through the stage of imagining ways and devices whereby I might help them. I had been through a short-lived stage of desperately praying that God help them. I had been lonely because of them. But now as I lay in the darkness, I accepted loneliness, I accepted separation. I thought, I don’t need them, either of them; I have friends. I was not unhappy. I fell asleep again, indeed, in the very happy illusion that lo
ve can be a choice before it is a capacity.
There were other children in that summer colony, of course, but except for some of their names, I remember little about them beyond the self-satisfying derision in which we held them, and especially Milly’s passionate dislike for girls, an attitude that, at our age, made her only the more acceptable to us. She strove to excel, when she needed to strive, in every boys’ activity and in the special knowledges of boys. That summer we all had air rifles—Milly, too—and soon her aim was as good as Freddie’s, and the two of them liked to try to pick off sparrows from telephone wires, and occasionally managed. I was much less accurate, and Dan could not bring himself to shoot at live things; he practiced with tin cans on fence posts, and could make them go ping, ping, ping in a rapid succession of shots.
That summer, too, we built a raft according to specifications that Milly had found in Popular Mechanics—an ambitious craft designed to convey us up and down the small river that has its source at the head of the lake. Our first project was an overnight camping trip to a place called Picnic Bluff, and it was only after the raft was finished and our supplies were nearly assembled that Mrs. Colby took Milly’s casually announced plan seriously enough to report it to her father and her stepmother, who, of course, told her that naturally it was an impossible idea, one girl out all night with three boys. Milly said, “Don’t worry,” to us, and, “All right, just for the day, then,” to them, and we completed our preparations.
The lake houses were still closed in sleep and silence on the morning that we started. It was hardly five o’clock, the sun was just up, a pink flush fading in the sky over the eastern hills, and silvery mists were lifting along the shores of the lake like veils from ladies’ green faces. Now and then a bird went skimming over the water, but nothing else stirred. We poled our way silently along the shore and into the wide shallow opening of the river, under the great overhanging willows that grew there, and then, as if we had made a successful escape, we began to shout and sing. Dan, who had been reading Mark Twain, had got himself up to look something like Huck Finn, with patched overalls and a checked shirt, a frayed straw hat and a corncob pipe. The rest of us, tolerant of his attraction to such literary mummery, accepted the pipes he had brought along for us. He had a can of something that we called Indian tobacco, the product of a common weed whose blossom dried into a mahogany-colored nubbly stuff that you could strip off the stalk with your hands and that burned easily. We smoked our pipes, and we worked our poles in the shallow water, and when the sun was well up, we undressed down to swimming suits and occasionally we swam along beside the raft or pushed it, or we would tie it up to a tree and dive off it for a while. At noon we ate clumsy sandwiches of sausage and cheese that I had made the night before, and we drank lemonade from a thermos bottle supplied by the Fords.
The place we had in mind was a broad shelf of sand bar sloping up to a narrow strip of scrubby trees directly under steeply overhanging limestone cliffs. On top of the cliffs was a village picnic grounds with a bandstand, but the place that we had chosen below was nearly inaccessible except from the river itself. It was only three or four miles up the river, but it took us most of the day to get there. When we arrived, we beached our raft and made our camp. Dan had brought his BB gun, and he tacked a target up on a tree and practiced his aim while the rest of us fished, and Milly and Freddie each caught a perch which they cleaned for our supper. We built a fire at the edge of the trees, and ate, and then lay on our blankets watching the daylight fade out over the water and our fire redden in the dusk.
Dan bored us with a detailed plot summary of The Barber of Seville. His parents frequently took him to hear opera, and there were long family sessions beforehand over the libretto and a careful study of themes at the piano, so that he was an expert of a kind that we were not, and often made us impatient with his special cultivation. Still, with that deference we had for him, we listened, and, free there and together by the fire in the summer twilight, we all felt happy and relaxed and life could not have seemed better as his light, breathless voice raced on. “… Then there is this girl, her name is Rosina.…”
But presently Milly broke in. “Let’s talk about Dumas. Let’s talk about The Man in the Iron Mask.”
“Or let’s fence,” Dan cried, and leapt up and seized a stripped willow branch from the sand. “Touché!”
“Oh, sit down, Dan,” Milly told him, and we talked about Dumas, and dungeons, and torture, and somehow we came to the subject of blood brotherhood.
It was late now, ten o’clock or half-past ten, and we were rolled up in our blankets under the trees, our feet pointing to the fire. It had settled down to a red glare without flames, yet it cast a pink glow up through the thin tree trunks, onto the pale face of the cliff behind us, and marked our place in the thick, surrounding darkness. Milly was saying, “Some tribes have a ceremony where they drink the blood, but others.…”
Dan broke in sleepily. “What’s that sound?”
It was what seemed to be the miles-distant mutter of an outboard motor. “A boat out on the lake,” I told him. But suddenly, with a shift of breeze, the sound seemed much nearer, and then came an unmistakable call in the night. “Hal-loo-oo,” it went and again, “Hal-loo-oo,” a long, melancholy wail in the night.
Milly struggled up and sat staring hard out at the river. “That’s not on the lake,” she said.
The putt-putt of the motor was distinctly nearer, and again the voice called out, like a cry from a lost soul, “Hal-loo-oo, hal-loo-oo.…”
We were all sitting up now. “Scary,” Dan said. “What is it, do you think?”
Freddie knew first. “It’s people looking for us, I’ll bet.”
“For me,” Milly said quietly. “Oh, of course, damn them, not for you, but for me!”
The sound of the motor labored nearer in the darkness, and the voice called out again and again, more human now and more purposeful, and then we saw a yellow glimmer of lights through the screen of willows at the point where the sand bar began.
“Put out the fire!” Milly whispered. “Quick!”
“Too late,” said Freddie, and the boat came gliding like a slow shadow around the bend below us, a lantern at its bow and its stern. A woman’s voice called sharply, “There, Greg, there!”
“Oh, damn, damn, damn,” Milly moaned, and threw herself back on the sand. The motor cut off with a splutter, the boat slid toward the shore, and, when it scraped on the sand, two figures jumped out.
“Milly, are you there?” her father called.
Dan and Freddie and I shook ourselves out of our blankets and stood up, but Milly turned over on the sand, face down. “She’s here,” we said.
They came running awkwardly up through the loose sand and peered at us in the dim light of the fire. “Where?” Miriam Moore cried, but Milly’s father had seen her stretched taut on the sand, and he was kneeling beside her, with his hands on her. “Come on, Milly,” he said, angrily. “You had no—”
But he got no further. Milly struggled away from him, freed herself from her blanket, and leapt up. She ran to a tree behind her and threw her arms around its trunk and cried, “I won’t go! I won’t! You can’t make me!”
He shouted her name in angry surprise, and with depressing deliberation began to walk toward her, where she clung to the tree.
“No, wait,” his wife said. “Greg, wait.” She ran after him and went to Milly. “Milly, dear, come along now,” she said pleasantly, “like a good child.”
Milly turned her face toward the cliff. “Go away,” she said passionately. “I’m not coming.”
“Baby—please.” Miriam Moore said it very gently and put her arm across Milly’s shoulder. Then Milly flew to pieces, all splitting, electric nerves. She let go of the tree and struck the arm from her shoulder and leapt back and her body, wiry and thin as a boy’s, seemed, in the dim light, to shake with rage and indignation, like her voice, as she screamed, “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me!”
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The hate in her voice pushed Miriam Moore back a step or two, as a blow might have, and Gregory Moore rushed forward. She stopped him again, and spoke softly to him. “I can’t, I guess, after all. But be gentle with her, for heaven’s sake. Nothing else. Just gentle. Please.”
And when her father went to her then and, in the tenderest possible voice, said, “Come home now, Milly,” the tautness left her body and she looked up at him miserably and began simply to cry. He picked her up as if she were an infant, and as they passed between us to go back to the boat, with Miriam Moore a step or two behind, Milly’s sobs subsided and sounded no more like weeping but like the dejected whimpering of an injured animal. Her father put her into the boat and came back for her blanket. He looked at us, still standing there, and said in a pleasantly gruff way, “You boys want to push us off?” and went back again. Miriam Moore sat by the motor, and Milly and her father together in the middle seat. Milly seemed shrouded in the blanket, in the protection of his arm, and if she looked at us, we could not see her. We shoved the boat off the sand. Its lanterns cast rippled reflections in the water and picked out, in ghostly gray, the delicate drooping branches of the willows on the shore. The motor coughed and caught, and the boat turned slowly round, and moved away. We stood and listened as the sound faded, and our eyes got used to the darkness.
We came back late in the afternoon of the next day, and Milly was waiting for us on the Ford pier. She must have seen us poling along the shore for at least a half mile, but she made no effort to meet us, and as we came up to the pier, she still did not move, but sat staring glumly at us from one of the two benches at the end.
“Hi—Milly?” Dan called.
She stared and stood up and slouched to the post near the shore where we were tying up the raft. “What did you do today?” she asked.
Dan began, “This morning, we—”
The Wars of Love Page 3