by Jane Rule
“Burn them.”
“Should you?”
“Yes, I should. Do I have to read them first?”
“Don’t you want to?”
“I loved my sister,” Amelia said. “I don’t know whether I can.”
“Do you want someone else… do you want me…?”
“What would anyone be looking for, Harriet?”
“In a diary? Well, greater understanding, maybe, or information or simple curiosity.”
“Would you be curious?”
“If I were you?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe not,” Harriet said.
“I’m not frightened. It isn’t that.” Amelia said.
“What kind of diaries are they? Would they have historical importance? I should think they would. Simply the people who came in and out of this house.”
“She asked me to burn them.”
“Oh.”
“I looked at a few of them this afternoon, just glancing at seasons. She turned a nice phrase often.”
“She certainly did,” Harriet said.
The front doorbell sounded, and Cole, just turning in with the ice bucket, ducked out again to answer it, but he paused a moment before the mirror to brush his soft, falling hair off his temple and to see if the jumping nerve in his cheek was as irritating to look at as it was to feel. Then, guilty of the delay, he wrenched the door open and greeted Peter Fallidon with embarrassingly loud cheerfulness.
“You’re in good spirits tonight,” Peter said, offering to shake hands.
“Trying to beat the weather,” Cole said, who never knew quite how to take hold or when to let go.
Peter, for Cole’s sake, wanted to teach him just such simple protections so that the boy wouldn’t suffer the ordinary as much as he did now. But he was aware that Cole was embarrassed in a kind of pleasure, too. It was, therefore, necessary to be casual with him as well as instructive.
“How did the math go?”
“I still have it to write,” Cole said.
“Are you going to be finished by next Thursday?”
“Yes … Monday.”
“Somebody gave me a couple of tickets to the stock car races Thursday night,” Peter said. “I can’t go, but I thought maybe you’d like them.”
“Great!” Cole said.
“Here, they’re in my coat pocket.”
Peter Fallidon, who had not been a friend to the household until after Beatrice was ill, sensed her absence only in Amelia, when he sensed it at all. His concern, from the beginning, was for her. Coming from out of town to be manager of the bank old Mr. Larson had founded, Peter had first called to win the confidence of the Misses Larson. Beatrice well would have required just that of him. Amelia hadn’t either that kind of patience or shrewdness. She had looked at him, then taken his hand in both of hers and said, “Thank God you’ve come, Mr. Fallidon. I need you.” It had been a surprise to Peter and also an unexpected relief to be so immediately welcomed. He knew that he was somehow a little too good-looking, too solid in stature, too unsolicitous, to be most people’s image of a bank manager. In his dark face, his jade and jaded eyes could easily be mistrusted. What he did not know was that the expression in them was one that often moved people—widows in particular. They looked not hurt or sorrowing so much as capable of those emotions, as if he might have been born to be a widower. In the eighteen months he had been in town, it was decided that he was a widower. Then someone suggested that his wife had died in childbirth. The fact that, at forty-three, he hadn’t married simply didn’t suit him. Because he was not in the habit of speaking about his personal life, people accepted the rumor that became him. Even Amelia might have offered it if someone had asked directly about Peter’s life, though his personal history, because it did not seem to interest him, was of no interest to her either. She had liked his eyes, yes, but she had liked even better his confidence. After having been at the mercy of the cretinous incompetence of Peter’s predecessor, a hand-rubbing, how-are-we-today local, she chose to trust what other people—even perhaps Beatrice—would have called arrogance.
She looked up with pleasure now as Peter came into the library and offered up her hands to him, which he had learned to take, just as Harriet had. Then he turned to Harriet, nodded and smiled.
“Are some of those books in the hall for me?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I left yours in the back of my car.”
“Peter’s got me tickets to the stock car races next Thursday,” Cole said, holding them up.
“I have a couple of tickets to the chamber music concert next Friday night as well,” Peter said. “Could you use one?”
“Lovely,” Harriet said.
“And for you, Miss Larson, a briefcase full of papers to sign, which I didn’t bring tonight—selfishly. Could I bring them round tomorrow afternoon?”
“Of course,” Amelia said.
“Sherry, Cousin A?”
“Gin and tonic for you, Harriet?” Peter asked, moving over to the drink tray with Cole.
It was a game like bridge, the four of them choosing and changing partners through the half an hour before dinner was served. In the last six months they had met to play it at least once every ten days, sometimes oftener. Peter and Harriet had first met nearly a year ago as if by accident one afternoon when she was on her way out of the Larson house and he on his way in. She had, with quickly controlled embarrassment, agreed to stay for a drink. Soon after that Amelia had asked them both for dinner, but it had been a business meeting, to do with Amelia’s concern about the new wing of the town library and ways of financing it. Still Harriet and Peter understood that they were being encouraged to take an interest in each other. When Peter telephoned to ask Harriet to a concert, she had said, “That’s kind of you, Peter, but I…” He interrupted to ask if he could come round for coffee at once. Then he made the speech that he had made to a number of women before. He was neither interested in nor capable of marriage. He did not want an affair. If “no intention” could be considered honorable, he would like to take Harriet out occasionally, but, particularly at their age, it might be misinterpreted by other people as a courtship. That would, if anything, be a convenience for him, but it might be a limitation for her.
“I’m no more interested than you are,” Harriet said.
“Then could I be some sort of relief to you?” he asked. “You would be for me.”
Harriet considered objecting to it and saw no real reason to. Only, increasingly, she would have liked to say to Amelia, “Peter and I have no interest in each other,” and did not know how. For to say so was to give some importance to what she intended to deny. Only by their behavior—usually arriving and leaving separately and speaking to each other as if they had not, as indeed they often hadn’t, talked with each other recently—they tried to indicate to Amelia how casual a relationship it was. But, if Amelia noticed such things, she received them as facts rather than social messages.
“Dinner’s served,” Kathy said, large in the doorway of the library.
“How are you tonight, Kathy?” Harriet asked.
“Fine, Miss Jameson.”
“There are some books for you in the front hall.”
“Thank you.”
Because of the peculiar domestic arrangements, food at the Larson house was, at stretches, either very good or very bad. Amelia did supervise, but the four months she had a girl were not a time for demanding standards. Amelia had to identify the standard she could expect and then accept it. Kathy, a country girl, was a good cook for anyone who did not suffer from gall bladder attacks. And, fortunately, none of these four did. Amelia’s older friends, after one experience, suggested evenings of bridge after dinner until Kathy was delivered. Tonight there was rich cream of chicken soup before the pork roast, and there would be cream again for dessert, which would cover the biscuits they had been eating throughout the meal with sweet butter.
Amelia was gradually aware that, during these meals with Pete
r and Harriet, conversation shifted from the light gossip and sharp wit Beatrice had always sponsored and encouraged to sets of earnest topics of the sort their father had required: local politics, agricultural information, the war, computerized business. If it was a bit heavy, like the food, she couldn’t help it. Harriet, argumentative, could prime Peter into sharp assertions. Cole’s interest flickered, brightened, died again.
“But, if what turns a town into a city is greed and vanity, then …” Harriet began to protest.
“Ah, but what keeps a town a town is also greed and vanity,” Peter said.
“Does a place have to grow or die?” Cole asked.
“First one, then the other,” Amelia said. “Here, at any rate. The growth was very fast; the dying very slow. Giving us time to pay for our sins, my father would have said. His father helped to figure out how to drive out all the cheap Chinese labor, not just from the town, from the whole county. To this day, we have no Orientals, no blacks, no race problems.”
“Which could be made very attractive to industry,” Peter said.
“Where’s the work force?” Amelia asked.
“It would come. The town doesn’t have to die.”
“We’ve survived crucial failures,” Amelia agreed, “but we’ve refused to develop the docks or the dead center of parking lots. This is probably the only town of this size in North America without a parking problem. We haven’t supported education…”
“There’s still wealth here,” Peter said.
“But why have a parking problem?” Cole asked. “Why fill the bay with freighters? I wouldn’t want to go to a huge university—I probably couldn’t even get in. And I don’t want to major in the industrial-military complex and race riots.”
“That’s one answer,” Harriet said. “The people who stay here stay because it isn’t a city, nor even threatening to be a city.”
“Is that why you’ve stayed?” Peter asked.
“In part,” Harriet said.
“And why you won’t, for long,” Amelia said to Peter.
“I’m not sure,” Peter said. “It may be Harriet and Cole who have to move.”
“You should have been my generation. We were all girls or remittance men.”
“The two necessities for building North America,” Peter said, smiling.
“You talk this way,” Harriet said, “but you came here to get away from the city, not to build one.”
“Only in a way,” Peter said. “With planning, we could come into the seventies and eighties with responsible industry, a balanced population. Oh, with problems of course, but healthy problems, not the terminal disease of either big cities now or this town now.”
Cole fidgeted with pieces of silver he had forgotten to use.
“Are you going out tonight?” Amelia asked him.
“Some of us were thinking of meeting at Nick’s for a while, but no special time,” he said.
“Let’s go to coffee. Kathy shouldn’t be on her feet too long. Cole, you run along.”
Amelia was never sure whether he went away because he wanted to or because he felt he should. His nervous boredom was no measure. She knew he took that with him to Nick’s or the movies or his room. But, though Peter was good for him and Harriet affectionate with him, it was probably better that he spend time with his own friends. And Amelia, tonight, had things on her mind that she could not discuss in front of Cole.
They had finished coffee and Kathy had come in for the last time to get the tray before Amelia took the random conversation up into her hands and stopped it.
“Kathy won’t be here more than another three weeks,” Amelia said. “My old and dear friends think it’s time for me to have permanent help. They seem to feel, among other things, that the moral influence on Cole couldn’t be a good one. I don’t seem to be able to settle my own mind about it.”
“Unmarried, pregnant girls,” Peter said with measured seriousness, “are probably the best moral influence a young man could have.”
“If he needed a moral influence,” Harriet added.
“Now that’s a question I hadn’t put to myself,” Amelia said. “Maybe Kathy is a real discouragement to Cole.”
“Do they have much to do with each other?” Peter asked.
“Not a great deal,” Amelia said. “But we’ve had other girls who would have been much harder to ignore. There have been vixens and charmers.”
“But very pregnant,’ Peter said.
“Yes,” Amelia agreed.
“Still, I suppose he could want to make an honest woman of someone,” Harriet said.
“Cole doesn’t seem to me that romantic,” Peter said. “Or to have that kind of confidence in himself.”
“And, if he did,” Amelia said, “if he could get that involved…”
“You wouldn’t find anything to object to,” Harriet finished.
“Is that rather naïve of me?”
“I don’t suppose his mother would like it,” Peter said.
“No,” Amelia agreed, but in a tone that suggested what Cole’s mother thought was of no great moment to him or anyone else.
“But it’s all very theoretical,” Peter said, “and unlikely.”
“There’s something else,” Amelia said. It’s not often a girl needs as little as Kathy in the way of company or instruction. Am I getting too old? Friends my age don’t hesitate to say, ‘Yes, you are.’ Be frank with me. Are they right?”
“No,” Harriet said, “not unless you’re tired of it, not unless it does begin to seem too much to you.”
“I’ve never been much of a psychologist,” Amelia said.
“That’s probably why you’ve been such a help to so many people,” Peter said.
“Is that flattery?”
“No,” Peter said, “no, I mean it. I’m with Harriet. If you still want to do it, you should do it. I can’t see that it’s any real problem to Cole. And you know that Mrs. Montgomery, whatever she says, would be disappointed to lose any point of moral speculation.”
Amelia smiled at him. Beatrice would have learned to like him.
Harriet was the first to say she must go. Peter, remembering the books she had in the back of the car, got up to leave with her.
“Don’t see us to the door,” Harriet said.
But Amelia did. (“This is not to be a house of people letting themselves in and out”—Beatrice, on Ida Setworth’s once delivering a present, unannounced, in the kitchen.)
When she had shut the door behind them, Amelia put a hand on the small chest she intended to give to Harriet. Then she turned herself to the chair lift. Cole would deal with the lights when he got in. Once in her bedroom at the front of the house, Amelia could still hear Peter’s and Harriet’s voices faintly in the drive. It must have stopped raining. A moment more and the first car door slammed—Harriet’s Volkswagen, then the second, Peter’s, heavier, quieter.
May 1, 1942: The bulk and vulgarity of our latest charge make us accept dinner invitations more readily than usual. “What I can’t stand most,” she complained at breakfast, “is the way I smell.” “Similar to sweet fish,” Sister said. How I wish I could be protected either from or by her impervious accuracy. To Ida tonight, who has the sense to live among the odorless dead.
May 2, 1942: We played Mah-Jongg last night. Ida has been archaic since she was seven years old and has that effect on all of us. Sister seemed to me uncomfortable. If she would ever complain, I would not have to be so sensitive—a complaint I must remember to pass on to her if she’s had a troubled night.
May 3, 1942: We knit for illegitimate children, soldiers, and plant a victory garden. If Sister mentions a cow, I will be gravely disapproving.
May 4, 1942: There is nothing in the world to do about May but live through it. Today Ida’s nephew is missing in action. She seems to have expected it. There is never any comfort for Ida.
May 5, 1942: Since Mother died, the morning sounds of this house have been unnatural. Sister, who used to sit at her
desk, pursues them all, as a way, I suppose, of hearing none of them. She walks deaf, and we shout at her.
May 6, 1942: There have been no letters to answer in days. I write to myself without interest.
May 7, 1942:
II
DINA PYROS RAN SOMETHING between an antique and a junk shop called simply George’s, wedged in between Charlie Ries’s drugstore and Cater’s Ice Cream on F Street, which cut wide and uncertainly commercial across the whole of the uncertain city. Dina’s better customers, like Ann and Charlie Hies from next door, Harriet Jameson, the librarian, and Ida Setworth, one of the town’s finest antiques herself, complained about the space she took up with the empty beer bottles and old paperbacks she bought, But her best customers, like Rosemary Hopwood, who was a social worker, and Peter Fallidon, the bank manager, liked the paperbacks as much as they did the stripped-down and refinished tables and chests. Dina’s friends, like Sal and Dolly who ran the corset shop down the block, wouldn’t have an excuse to visit during business hours unless they could bring the bottles Dina had helped to empty over the weekend. Even more important, those people who weren’t exactly friends and certainly not customers could always collect a dozen empties or a handful of old mysteries and have an excuse to pass half an hour or an afternoon by Dina’s old stove with the cats and the radio. They got in the way sometimes and left sometimes with things more valuable than what they had brought in, though they rarely had either the skill or initiative to carry out furniture. Charlie Ries said they all but ruined Dina’s business and too often spilled over into his drugstore. But Dina imagined Rosemary Hopwood sometimes came in because of them, and Dina’s friends didn’t mind as long as there was some place to sit down and a little air coming in from the back door. For Dina herself, the people around the stove were as important as the old pieces of furniture she brought in, collected from fire sales, real junk shops, old ladies’ attics, sometimes even the dump. She knew good wood and good lines. She had an eye for grain and bone structure in a face as well. Not many phonies of any kind came into the shop and stayed. Anyone who asked, “Who’s George?” or, worse, “Where’s George?” didn’t stay long or come back. Nor did anybody who called Dina “George.” Whether the Rieses or Ida Setworth approved of the tone or not, there was one—a kind of hum that came from power tools even after they had been turned off or the old tubes in the radio or the cats—some sort of constant that made the shop seem at the same time drowsy and alive.