by Jane Rule
“Silly to be concerned about someone else’s feelings?” Carl asked, gently teasing her, wanting to comfort her.
“Oh, Peter doesn’t matter to me at all, Mr. Hollinger,” Harriet said. “What I mean is…” and she hesitated, obviously near tears again.
“That you wouldn’t want to worry anyone,” Carl finished for her.
“May I tell you the truth?” Harriet asked with a sudden, angry earnestness.
“If you want to, of course.”
“I would like to worry someone. I really would. But it would have to be someone who cared about me.”
“I feel exactly the same way.”
“You do?”
“It’s something some people never outgrow,” Carl said. “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing. And, Harriet, people don’t worry about people who don’t matter to them, not much anyway.”
The others had begun to come into the building now, and the telephone on Harriet’s desk was ringing.
“Excuse me,” she said.
Carl hesitated a moment and then went into the reading room. If Peter Fallidon had no intention of marrying Harriet Jameson, he should stop seeing her. Carl could not say why he felt Peter would not marry. He was not a cold man, but there was something rigidly self-sufficient about him, not at the social edges but at the center. Peter Fallidon would not find it difficult to go home at night to the task of preparing his own meal and eating it alone. He would never be driven out to escape solitude. Like Ida, he would have made for himself a cheerful discipline, even a pleasure, out of singleness. Still, for Ida it was a necessity which she found the courage to serve. For Peter it was a choice. And he should be free to make it only if he really could live without worrying much about other people or mattering much to them. It was quite wrong of him to teach Harriet the peripheral pleasures of companionship without taking responsibility for them.
The stern tone in Carl’s head warned him. Wasn’t he really lecturing at Ida? And certainly, if she decided she wouldn’t marry him, he would not want her to decide, as well, that she should not see him any more. Would that occur to her? She had said that night, if he wanted a wife, he should stop “hiding” with her. But, at their age, that was ridiculous. Was it less ridiculous at Peter’s and Harriet’s? There certainly didn’t seem to be anyone else who was being discouraged from courting Harriet because of Peter. At least, with Peter, she had the peripheral pleasures, and that was better than nothing. If that was all Peter could offer her, if that was all Ida could offer him, why judge them for it? Carl knew why. He couldn’t stand the idea. He wanted to walk into Peter Fallidon’s office and say not “If you don’t intend to marry Harriet, leave her alone” but “Marry the girl!” Peter should come down here to the library. Maybe now, while he was occupied with business and energetic in his health, being alone had its virtues, but did he want to grow old like one of these rheumy, rheumatic old men who shuffled in out of the sun every day to the files of old newspapers? Carl sighed. He doubted that there was a bachelor among them. Peter, in his old age, would be no more baffled by loneliness than Ida was now. Harriet? Well, she would have lived her whole life in the library, anyway. But what a waste! Even now for him, at his age, it was a waste. Couldn’t Ida see that? If they had no more than five years, no more than six months, why should they live even a moment not worrying much, not mattering much to each other, when from that center flowed the love one had for everyone? A profane view for a minister, but for years Carl had suspected that his love of God was supported by his love for his wife rather than the other way round. And he could not feel guilty about it; it was too good a thing to mistrust. Even now in his loneliness, when to love God was a requirement without comfort, he did not mistrust human love.
“Daily bread,” he said and realized that he spoke aloud, but it was not an unusual thing here among books and old people used to talking to themselves.
Carl closed the book he had not been reading and went back out to Harriet’s desk.
“Are you busy tonight?” he asked. “I’m going to be fairly late at the Veterans’ Hospital, and I won’t want to cook myself supper. Would you have some with me?”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Hollinger,” Harriet said. “That would be very nice.”
“I’ll pick you up around six,” he said.
If he and Harriet had to suffer, there was no real reason why they should suffer alone. He thought of Kathy. Given her shyness, it would be better to call on her with Amelia, Perhaps he would stop at the Larson house now. It was about time for Amelia’s midmorning coffee, and she liked company.
“Cole’s at work,” a tawny-eyed, ample-bodied girl informed him at the door. “And Miss Larson’s in bed, doctor’s orders.”
“I’m sorry,” Carl said. “Is it serious?”
“She needs rest, the doctor said.”
“How about callers?”
“I don’t know,” Agate said. “Do you want to see her?”
“Could you just tell her that Carl Hollinger is here?”
“All right.”
“Thank you.”
Carl was surprised at the alarm he felt, for at their age it was surely more surprising to find a friend well than sick, but Amelia, much more than Maud Montgomery, who bragged about her strength, or Ida, who simply did not inform people of her ailments, had a strong constitution which seemed hardly affected by emotional or physical strain.
“She says you’re to come up,” Agate announced as she came back down the stairs. “I’ll bring you some coffee.”
“Oh, don’t bother. Ill stay only a few minutes.”
“Miss Larson says you expect coffee,” Agate answered with mock firmness.
The girl’s tone, tilting toward rude familiarity so different from Kathy’s shy politeness, reassured Carl, for she did make Amelia sound like herself.
“What’s this all about?” he asked, standing in the door of her bedroom.
“Nothing but four months of biscuits and too long a night,” Amelia said cheerfully, but her color wasn’t good. “I’m to be starved and bored for a week. So much for modern medicine. Come in, Carl.”
“I was just stopping by to see if I could arrange to take you down to Kathy,” Carl said, taking a chair that had been moved near the bed.
“I was going to call you,” Amelia said. “Rosemary’s going down, and Harriet will, but, since I can’t, I’d be awfully glad if you did as well.”
“Ill go from here. Now what else can I do for you? If Cole’s gone to work, you must need some errands run.”
“That’s no problem. I can send Agate by cab.”
“Quite a change from Kathy,” Carl said, smiling.
“Isn’t she? She doesn’t even know how to bake bread.”
“Is she managing for you all right?”
“Perfectly,” Amelia said. “She’s simply taken over. I think she’s going to be a bit bossy, and she hasn’t a manner to her name, except as a way of being funny, but she is funny. I haven’t laughed so much since Sister died. I’m sure Maud won’t approve.”
“She wouldn’t in any case,” Carl said.
They heard Agate coming up the stairs.
“Here’s your coffee,” Amelia said.
“I hear you’re taking good care of Miss Larson,” Carl said, taking a cup from the tray Agate offered. “Thank you.”
“She just doesn’t want me to tell people what a terrible patient she is; so we made an agreement not to complain about each other. You don’t get coffee.”
“I know. You needn’t remind me,” Amelia said.
“I found the Teflon frying pan in the bottom drawer of the stove. It was full of pork fat, but Kathy didn’t use it before she’d scrubbed it clean. The only Teflon left is around the handle bolts where she couldn’t get at it.”
“So it won’t do?”
“Not without butter, and you’re not having butter.”
“Order a new one then,” Amelia said.
“Yes’m, Miss A,” Agate said an
d did an Aunt Jemima strut out of the bedroom.
“Are they always critical of their predecessors?” Carl asked.
“Not always,” Amelia said. “But it’s not unusual. Kathy was too busy with her own mistakes to notice, or at least she never said.”
“What are all these boxes?” Carl asked.
“Sister’s diaries. I’m reading them before I burn them.”
“Are they witty?”
“I suppose they are,” Amelia said. “Is it always the unhappiest people who are?”
“Beatrice wasn’t really unhappy, was she? Critical, yes, but not unhappy.”
“She was never content with herself. I know that, but I find it peculiar to read her saying so. I was so content with her.”
“Why do you read them?” Carl asked.
“I don’t know. A way of passing through grief, is it?”
“I used to have answers for questions like that,” Carl said, and he took Amelia’s hand.
“We’re bad at missing people, you and I,” Amelia said.
“Is there anything I should take to Kathy?”
“Jawbreakers,” Amelia confessed.
“Out of the penny machine?”
“That’s right. And thank you, Carl.”
“I’ll come by again in a day or two.”
July 1, 1939: How can Sister really mean that it doesn’t matter how Bill Hopwood died? Of course, if he committed suicide, it shouldn’t be in the paper, but we should know. If he had a heart attack at the wheel, an autopsy would show it. Esther won’t agree to an autopsy. Is she so afraid? Is she so sure? He wasn’t ever stable, not even as a boy. Still, to live to nearly fifty makes suicide unreasonable without troubles over money or something of the sort. He would have been a happier man with troubles. Was it just two months ago he said, “When we die, it will be of boredom”? He never could make a decision, not even to marry. But he wasn’t really unhappy with Esther. Except for losing the boy. But that must be ten years ago now. And Rosemary, even before that, was his favorite. A vain thing people do, loving the children who take after them. Rosemary would be better off with more of Esther’s toughness and less of his temperament, particularly now. An odd thing to see beauty change sexes from father to daughter, mother to son. If I’m going to believe that Bill Hopwood is dead, I must know how and why. Was he having an affair? Was he ill? He could not have been too bored to go on living—that isn’t possible.
July 2, 1939: Ida, come from the Hopwoods, said Rosemary wasn’t speaking to her mother—at a time like this! But Ida knows no more about it than the rest of us. Esther says the funeral has to be tomorrow, whether all the family can get here or not. It can’t be on the Fourth of July. Amelia is arranging to have casseroles sent over. That’s what Esther did for us when Mama died. Should I speak to Rosemary? Sister won’t discuss the idea. Who is close to the child? She can’t behave this way now. If people think Rosemary blames Esther, they’ll also think Bill killed himself. I don’t know what to think.
July 3, 1939: Of course, Esther wouldn’t cry. She’s like Sister in that. And Rosemary is hardly more than a child. It’s hard for any of us to believe he’s dead. Because it was a sudden accident? Because we don’t understand it? Why do I feel frightened in a way I did when Father died? We’ve buried Mama and Aunt Setworth and now Bill Hopwood just in the last eight months. “We begin to bury ourselves,” Ida said. I believed so little in Bill’s life—no more than in my own. It’s a hard walk for Sister to the grave, but she always goes. “Accept it,” is all she will say. Aunt Setworth taught her that: “One of the hard poems, child.” For Ida and me it has to be a joke. I can’t accept it. Why won’t Rosemary cry?
July 4, 1939: Sister and I sat in the turret tonight to watch the fireworks down at the docks. They are no comfort.
July 5, 1939: Rosemary has gone. Esther won’t talk about it more than to say “She wanted to, and I thought it best to let her go.” At sixteen? And she’s moving into Rosemary’s room, as if she expected Rosemary would never come home again. When Ida asked her what she was going to do, she said, “Just what I’ve always done… nothing.” Are we simply born to bury each other? And help each other kill the time until the time.
Carl, driving back into town from the Veterans’ Hospital, had a sudden image of his wife, not as she was in those last sad months before she died but years younger, laughing at him. And somehow that laughter was related to Kathy this afternoon, sitting very solemnly in her bed, sucking one of the jawbreakers he had brought her. He wondered if on the next occasion of her having a baby, there would be an earnest young farmer to take his place who could sit in dumb adoration of that pregnant cheek. Then he heard his wife’s voice, still uneven with laughter: “There must be a great deal of silliness in the day of any good man, Carl. Isn’t that a lucky thing?” But it hadn’t to do with anything he had done or told her about, had it? Wasn’t it some foolishness between them? Some comic turn of love in the day? He couldn’t remember. Did Ida know how to laugh like that? It was probably something you couldn’t learn by yourself. It was certainly easy to forget by yourself. It was as if Kathy with her jawbreaker was his wife. To be reminded of someone by another’s gesture or tone or attitude wasn’t surprising, but to have his bright, articulate wife come to him in the face of Kathy was nearly perverse. Except that to have loved the silliness of one person was to make loving anyone’s silliness possible. The other faces of the day, with that gift, could be endured. If Carl felt a threatening connection between himself and the old men at the library, he was still healthy and independent enough to offer a detached sympathy for the men at the Veterans’ Hospital. Amelia was a different matter. He must speak to Harriet. Amelia was very fond of Harriet.
IX
THERE WERE RESTAURANTS OTHER than Nick’s: half a dozen dairies of varying dullness, a steak house, a seafood restaurant where the food was very good and the service very bad, a few motel and hotel coffee shops a step up from the greasy spoons and drive-ins, but Nick’s was the only place with a style that could make you forget you were going out to dinner simply because you did not want to eat at home. Nick’s could have been successful anywhere else as well, and that’s what happened to restaurants that did succeed: their owners left for the larger appetites and wallets of the real cities. But Nick Pyros would not leave. He had a house, a wife, a couple of children, and this was his sort of town. He’d chosen it.
It was really two halves of one place, a dining room and a café, mercifully separated by the kitchen so that the loud music of the café threatened the nervous systems of the diners only when both kitchen doors happened to open at the same time. Though that occurred on an average of once every five or six minutes, no one enjoying the intervening quiet ever complained. For those who talked, it provided a moment to eat. For those who were silent, it was company. For those of uncertain social habits, the jarring noise relieved them of any guilt of their own. But perhaps the acceptance was for the music as well. It was Greek. Like the menu, the jukebox offered only two or three North American choices, whatever was the musical hamburger of the moment. And a kid could eat a hamburger if he really wanted to, either in the dining room or the café, but it wasn’t the thing to do. Nick had trained his customers to tiropeta—a kind of cheese pie with many layers of thin pastry and a thick, savory filling—if they were snacking, to lamb dishes and eggplant if they were ordering a meal.
But more than the music or the food, it was the dancing that drew people of all ages to Nick’s. Even on a weeknight there was always a nucleus of half a dozen men, either immigrants like Nick or first-generation Greeks, who kept a sense of that rhythm of manhood which would call them to their feet at any time. Singly at first, later often together, some simply assertively and some with real authority, they danced. Local boys, used to showing off to anything but music, watched during the early evening, but, as the hours passed, they too would get up, their first solos drunken and sheepishly imitative, even mocking, but the music allowed for that. Withi
n it a number of them had learned to dance so that the crowd’s response would change from cheerful jeering to stamping and table-beating approval. Weekends the place was always jammed, and after eight the dining room was opened to music and dancing as well. Any night there were Greek sailors in town, it was hard to find a place to stand. Women were not forbidden to dance either by rule or custom, but not many did except when the sailors were there, teaching them what would not have been allowed in Greece.
The sailors had been in town for a week because of a delay in loading lumber, caused by a series of the usual errors in planning. Deadlines here were rarely met, not because there were strikes but because owners of timber clipped trees like coupons, when they needed the cash, without regard to mill needs or foreign orders. The uncertain supply of logs made work at the mills uncertain, and whether there were logs or not, most mills shut down for the opening of the hunting and fishing seasons. Another thirty years and there would be nothing left of the already vastly depleted forests; so why not spin out the process a little longer? If a ship waited in the harbor, sailors danced in the town, and whoever was paying the bill probably knew nothing about it and did not care.
For Nick, it was good business: free meals and drinks for a dozen sailors who, by their presence, tripled his take. At five-thirty the first had arrived, and by six o’clock locals who usually didn’t drop in until after eight were already coming to have dinner and claim their space for later in the evening.
Cole Westaway was already settled at a table by himself when Carl and Harriet came in.
“Hi, Cole,” Harriet said. “Isn’t the new girl a good cook?”
Cole tried to stand up and nearly tipped over the small table in front of him. “I just thought while Cousin A was in bed it would be easier for Agate not to have to bother with me.”
“How is she?” Harriet asked.
“Better, I think.”
“Is it a good idea for her to have company?”
“She’d love to see you,” Cole said. “She always does. And I think she gets a little depressed, just staying in bed and reading Cousin B’s diaries.”