by Jane Rule
“Who are you?”
“And as good-tempered as the cat.”
“Look,” Cole said. “I want to know who you are and what you’re doing in this kitchen.”
“I’m feeding the cat, and I’m about to feed you, since Miss Larson seems to want it done.”
“Oh,” Cole said. “I’m sorry. You’re the new girl. Is Cousin A home then?”
“Cousin A?”
“Miss Larson.”
“Yes, she’s gone to bed. How do you want your eggs?”
“Actually,” Cole said, “I’m not all that hungry. I think I’ll just get some juice or something.”
“Coffee?”
“Ah… no, thanks. Well…”
“I’ve made a pot.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Is your room fixed? Have you been shown around?”
“No, not yet. Doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t think Kathy had time to pack or change her sheets or anything,” Cole said, sitting down with juice and coffee at the kitchen table.
“You really do look awful,” Agate said.
“I feel awful.”
If you didn’t know, Agate in her yellow shift did not look pregnant. But Cole did know. Her naturally ample figure would have intimidated his uncertain appetites anyway, but the thought that she was beginning to swell with the blood and milk and sea wash of birth sickened him newly with the pity and horror of it. He assumed that Kathy was dead. Now knowing he would have to watch Agate ripen for the same fate, he couldn’t drink his orange juice.
“Maybe I’ll get some air,” he said, and he fled.
“Christ!” Agate said to the cat. “He’s like something out of an English novel.”
At least he wouldn’t be an important nuisance. With one old lady, nearly dead asleep, and one wilting tulip of a boy out in the air, Agate could begin exploring without fear of interruption or discovery. Her interests, for the moment, were relatively innocent. She did want to find her room and her way about the house. Its treasures, frailties, and secrets would be distractions and entertainments for other days, when she was bored with and powerless over her own.
“Are you interested in these, Dina?” Rosemary asked.
Dina turned away from her Saturday beer and looked at the paperbacks Rosemary Hopwood was holding out to her.
“Where did you get a collection like that?” Dina asked, amusement strong enough to make its way through the murk of her hangover.
“From one of the girls at the hostel.”
“Sure. Never can get enough of these,” Dina said. “I’ll even give you twenty cents a piece.”
“Fine.”
Dina got to her feet and went to the ancient cash register which rang with simple authority. She took out two dollar bills and handed them to Rosemary.
“Thanks.”
“Who was the girl?” Dina asked, carefully not looking at Rosemary.
“Who had the books?”
“No,” Dina said. “The one in your car yesterday.”
“Oh,” Rosemary said. “That was Agate, the girl who’s going to Amelia. Why?”
“I just wondered,” Dina said.
They stood, caught in each other’s misunderstood and misplaced jealousy, with nothing clear to say to each other.
“I owe you a dinner,” Rosemary said finally, not as she had planned to say it. What she had intended to be casual came out as a taunt.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Dina answered, and what she had meant to be truthful sounded simply surly.
“Would you come to dinner?”
“At your place?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Whenever you say,” Rosemary answered.
“I don’t… you know… dress or anything,” Dina said, looking down at herself.
“Tonight? Tomorrow night?”
“I was going down to Nick’s,” Dina said.
“I see. All right,” Rosemary said, and this time the tone, unplanned, was neither angry nor embarrassed. The mistake she was making was beyond that.
“What time tonight?” Dina asked.
“Seven?”
“All right.”
“I’ll see you then,” Rosemary said, and she turned and walked away past the idle curiosity of the boys by the stove, the books, the chairs on the wall, into the heat of the June afternoon.
It was three o’clock. She could deliver Agate’s clothes, see Amelia, and still have time to get to the stores before they closed. The menu had been fixed since early this morning when Rosemary was driving up and down F Street after even Amelia had refused her distraction.
Out of her shower, Dina wandered into the kitchen and poured herself an ouzo, then went back into her bedroom and looked at the clothes in her closet. There was the gray suit she had worn to Nick’s wedding eight years ago, the black suit she kept for funerals, and the violet linen she had bought a year ago in April to wear when she first called on Peter Fallidon, the new bank manager. She had not worn it. Why should she wear it tonight to have dinner with Rosemary Hopwood? She had even eaten at Miss A’s in her boots and trousers, but always she was there on the pretext of furniture of some sort. That was how she presented herself in any house in town, whether Harriet Jameson’s or old Miss Set-worth’s. She wasn’t invited to the Hills’. There were Dolly and Sal, of course, but they were different, apt to be in boots and trousers themselves after business hours. Rosemary hadn’t said, “There’s a bureau I’d like to sell,” or “Could you advise me about what sort of piece I need in the dining room,” or “Stop for a drink when you deliver that bookcase.” She had simply said, “Would you come for dinner?” There wouldn’t be anyone else there. Dina understood that. But they would sit at a dining room table. There would be wine in good glassware.
“I told her I didn’t dress.”
There was a clean pair of chinos she had intended to wear to Nick’s tonight and the sweat shirt she never worked in, but that would be either an ignorant or a belligerent way to dress when someone had asked you—just asked you—to dinner, like a friend. Even if Harriet Jameson had ever said, “Come for a drink,” just for that, Dina would have put on clothes. But nobody ever did say that, and she was out of the habit of dressing.
The girdle she found and pulled on held her as firmly as trousers did, and she liked the feel of stockings and the slip Sal had once given her, saying, “Just because you ought to own one.” The dress was not so reassuring, for it left her strong, muscled arms exposed. She had a sweater around somewhere, a white one sent from Greece, from a sister she did not know. The shoes, though odd in balance, posed less problem than skates or skis, on both of which Dina was competent. They made her feel as if going out to dinner at Rosemary Hopwood’s were a kind of sport.
Then she thought of the truck. She couldn’t drive the truck, dressed like this. If it had not been Saturday night, if she had had more than half an hour, Dina Pyros might have gone out and bought herself a car for the occasion. She felt that whimsical.
“So they call you a peasant,” Nick had said to her when she was still a kid. “Be a proud peasant.”
Call a cab. That would mean, of course, that people in town would know where Dina had gone for dinner, dressed as if she had been invited. But Rosemary Hopwood had invited her. She called a cab.
“Hey, Dina!” Freddy said. “You look like a million bucks!” And he scrambled out of the cab to open the door for her.
“Make it fifty thousand,” Dina said, liking to be modestly accurate without anyone’s being the wiser.
“Where are you going!”
“To Miss Hopwood’s.”
Rosemary had sold the family house in the Larson’s neighborhood and bought one that had been built ten years ago by an eccentric only son who then killed himself there. Designed for a single person with too much of a taste for privacy, and then marked by his death, it had not been salable until Rosemary offered h
alf what it was worth and moved in.
“All houses survive people. It’s not the sort of thing that troubles me,” Rosemary had said. “He had excellent taste.”
What for him had been finally an unendurable turning in on himself was for Rosemary a sustaining peace, imitating the nature if not the style of Ida Setworth’s singularity.
This evening she had dressed no less carefully than Dina, discarding the bright tent, held at the throat by gold butterflies and then falling freely to the floor, she often wore when she had someone in for drinks. Instead she put on slacks and a long, tailored tunic. Would Dina like drinks in the patio? She sat often enough at the back door of her shop, taking the sun. Would Rosemary know what to say to her? If she actually turned up. Rosemary was not at all confident that she would.
At seven precisely, the doorbell rang.
“Hello,” Dina said.
“Hello.”
“Am I too early?”
“No, of course not,” Rosemary said. “Come in.”
“I’ve always wanted to see this house,” Dina said. “But I was afraid I’d buy it.”
“Well, come in,” Rosemary said, and she took Dina’s hand. “I’ll show it to you. Then you can decide where we’ll have drinks. I couldn’t.”
“Was this carpeting here when you bought it?” Dina asked as they stepped down into the living room.
“Yes—and a lot of the furniture, too. The family didn’t want any of it, and I liked it.”
“I can see why,” Dina said.
“And I liked the fact that it had a dining room,” Rosemary said.
“I knew there’d be a dining room.”
“Did you?”
“Yes,” Dina said.
“The kitchen’s peculiar to work in. He was tall and left-handed,” Rosemary explained. “Shall I get us a drink while we’re here?”
The bottle of ouzo was on the counter with glasses and a pitcher of water.
“You’re a little bit Greek,” Dina said, taking the glass Rosemary offered. “I thought we’d drink gin.”
“Would you rather? I have some.”
“To me it’s like perfume,” Dina said smiling. “Something to wear, maybe.”
“The best way to the other side is across the patio,” Rosemary said, and she opened one of the glass doors and waited for Dina to go out before her.
“I like this,” Dina said.
“Then let’s stay awhile. I’ll show you the rest later.”
Gradually, as they walked through the house, Rosemary became accustomed to Dina in a dress, perhaps because she seemed so confident in the part she was playing in this costume, easier and surer than she had been in her ordinary clothes. Now, as she walked across the patio, precisely balanced, she was graceful in a way Rosemary could not have imagined of the Dina she had watched before, rooted in boots, strong, stolid.
“I care about fuchsias,” Dina said, looking closely at the hanging baskets, and then she turned to Rosemary. “We’re going to be friends, aren’t we?”
Rosemary could not ask Dina what she meant by that. She felt the hope in Dina’s voice but also the distance. “We are friends,” she said.
Most people, waited on, flutter at or ignore small services. Dina received them with simple attention, a courtesy of compliments natural to her.
“Were you born in Greece?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember it,” Dina said. “I grew up with an aunt and uncle in Chicago. Then I came here to visit Nick. I liked the sea.”
“Will you ever go back to visit Greece? Are you curious?”
“Afraid,” Dina said. “I would not go until my mother died.”
“I didn’t come home until my mother died either,” Rosemary said.
“Are you sorry?”
“No,” Rosemary said. “We didn’t understand each other. There was no point.”
“I wouldn’t understand my mother either,” Dina said, and she smiled. “I don’t speak Greek.”
The silences that fell between them through the meal were nothing like the complete silence of their first meal together, nor were they awkward, attentive rather, to let in evening sounds, the wind coming up in the trees, the busy settling of birds. Rosemary looked at her guest, this foreigner, this friend at her table, amazed to see her there.
“Were you really tempted to buy this house?” she asked.
“Yes,” Dina said. “It’s different for me, though,” and she hesitated before she decided to try to explain. “I have to think how to live. I have to decide. Am I a peasant or not? I don’t know. And there’s nobody to tell me exactly. I cracked myself up in a fine car. I’m better off in my truck. So I’m probably better off living over my shop.”
“Why would you think that?”
“My mother and sisters are peasants,” Dina said. “Why should I own a house? Unless it would be my dowry.”
“Dowry?”
“Yes,” Dina said. “Something to offer for a husband.”
“You weren’t joking?” Rosemary asked. “You want to marry?”
“Of course,” Dina said. “It’s different for you. You’re a widow, yes?”
“No,” Rosemary said.
“Yes,” Dina insisted, “to some dead love.”
“By that definition, there’s nobody over fifteen in the world but widows and widowers.”
“I am twice fifteen,” Dina said.
Should Rosemary answer that she was three times fifteen? But Dina was serious. Since there had been no one to tell her how to live, she had invented this dowered virginity against all sense and appetite. It was ludicrous.
“That’s too long to wait,” Rosemary said.
Dina smiled to refuse the argument, nearly unaware of the desire she was about to resist, the assault on her mythology Rosemary intended, for Rosemary would not say again either “I love you” or “I want you like that” until she had made herself sexually clear. It might not be tonight. It might not be this week or this month, but she would finally be Dina’s lover. Then she could say what she wanted. Now she said simply, “I don’t really like your patience.”
“Good,” Dina said, believing she understood that. “I won’t be patient for you.”
VIII
CARL HOLLINGER WAS SUFFERING from nervous embarrassment. In the week since he had proposed to Ida, he had experienced an intensity of emotions he was too old to cope with. At times he deeply regretted having spoken to Ida at all and determined to tell her he now realized what a ridiculous suggestion it had been, but he knew perfectly well that he could say no such thing to her. Aside from its being both dishonorable and unkind, it was for most of each day untrue. What he really regretted was the hope he had made real, for now the discomfort of his loneliness seemed to him intolerable. He hated the pleasant house he and his wife had retired to five years ago. He couldn’t work in the garden or in his study. He could not comfortably read the newspaper in his own living room. He went out for as many meals as he remembered, even for breakfast, and spent a great deal of his time at the public library with random rather than systematic reading so that he often could not remember what he had read or why he was reading what was in front of him. Once a week he visited the General Hospital. Twice a week he called on patients at the Veterans’ Hospital, where he had been the chaplain before his retirement. But none of these tastes and duties which, until two years ago, had made his old age an interesting contentment gave him any satisfaction now. The sorrow he had known during the first year after his wife died gradually gave way to irritable self-criticism which he had known was destructive and had tried to control. But he could not live happily alone. It was not his nature. Why should he endure it when Ida might provide a return to the domestic center of life? His impatient need of her brought him as close to lust as he had been for years. His shame at his inability to deal with loneliness humbled him. Ida had no such need and no such weakness. Why should he hope that answering his would have any appeal for her? But he did hope, and to distract
himself from that was even more difficult than finding an escape from grief.
On Monday morning, he was on the library steps before it opened, a declaration of impatience he had never allowed himself before so that he had never seen before the number of people who were willing to suffer the humiliation of their loneliness so publicly. Old people, more than a dozen of them, who were regulars like himself, stood about or sat on the steps in the sun. Several had learned to talk at each other, but most were silent, occupying small, isolated spaces of their own, staked out the months or years ago when they had resigned themselves to this way of passing the time between important deaths and their own. Probably the talkers went elsewhere, to the benches outside the courthouse, to the train and bus station waiting rooms if the weather was bad.
“Good morning, Mr. Hollinger,” Harriet said as she came up the steps with her key. “You’re early this morning.”
“My watch was wrong,” Carl said.
“It’s a lovely day to be in the sun,” she said. “I should think you’d be tempted into your garden.”
“We missed you Friday night at the concert,” Carl said, and was immediately sorry that he had when he saw the expression change on Harriet’s face. “I hope nothing was the matter.”
“I went to the hospital to see if I could do anything to help Miss A. Kathy was having her baby.”
“Ah,” Carl said. “I didn’t know. I should stop in and see her.”
“I simply forgot the concert,” Harriet confessed.
“It was pleasant enough but nothing to be really sorry you missed.”
Harriet unlocked the large front door, and Carl held it open for her. None of the others seemed in any hurry to come in out of the summer morning.
“I didn’t mind missing the concert,” Harriet said quickly. “But it was very rude to forget Peter.”
“He’d understand,” Carl said.
“I’m afraid he didn’t,” Harriet said, and to the confusion of both of them she began to cry. “I am sorry,” she said, recovering. “It’s not important at all. I think I just don’t like being in the wrong like that and upsetting someone else. It’s silly, really.”