by Jane Rule
“I think what I want to say,” Harriet continued carefully, feeling oddly calm, “is a warning. I know you don’t want to love me. I do want to love you, and I’m going to try. I don’t mean I’m going to try to seduce you. I’d be too embarrassingly bad at it. I’m simply going to go ahead and worry about you when I feel like it. If you can’t stand that…”
“I can’t stand worrying about you.”
“Ill try not to worry you then.”
“You are worrying me right now.”
“I’m surprising myself,” Harriet said. “I love your face when it goes together like that, even in a frown.”
“Harriet…”
“I might even kiss you before this day is out. I won’t compete with the tuna fish. I won’t chase you down the beach. I’m a prim, shy woman. But even prim, shy women sometimes kiss people.”
“You’re a very pretty, appealing woman, but I…”
She put a hand over his mouth. “Stop there. That’s all I want to hear. Just go ahead and eat your sandwich.”
He held her hand and kissed her palm gently. Then he gave her the first smile she had ever seen in his eyes also, rueful, guarded. And he gave it to the sandwich as well, as if it might easily be poison, whether he liked it or not.
“Is something the matter, Dina?” Rosemary asked, pulling a footstool nearer the chair Dina was sitting in.
“I couldn’t say.”
“Why not?”
“If you have a real friend,” Dina said, “you begin to see that all the things you just don’t say to other people you can’t say anyway. You don’t know how.”
“Try.”
Dina shook her head.
“Are you afraid I wouldn’t understand?”
“You have degrees in understanding,” Dina said, smiling.
“What is it?”
“Do you ever try to help someone and make it worse instead? Because you find out you really can’t like, don’t care, are even a little afraid?”
“Yes,” Rosemary said.
“What do you do?”
“Call in someone else, usually.”
Dina gave a short laugh. Then she looked at Rosemary seriously. “If you got a little afraid of me, who would you call?”
“I don’t think I could be afraid of you like that. I was talking about my job.”
“Who would I call then?” Dina asked.
“If you felt like that, you wouldn’t have to call anyone. You’d just go away, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m talking about Grace Hill,” Dina said flatly. “To begin with, it was like the kids: better at my place than on the streets. I don’t have to like every one of them. I don’t even have to pay much attention. Furniture’s my job. So a woman needs sometimes, occasionally… a place. She comes occasionally.”
Dina gave Rosemary a clear, uncommitted look.
“And you … don’t even necessarily have to like every one of them,” Rosemary said quietly.
“They come in. They…”
“The way I did,” Rosemary said.
“Yes… like that.”
“And you say, ‘up to you.’”
“Mostly.”
One of many. Like the kids. Well, what else could be true?
“What does Grace want now?” Rosemary asked.
“What she’s always wanted and got: some repairs and refinishing,” Dina said. “One day her husband’s going to get impatient. One day…”
“Can’t you stop her? Can’t you tell her you don’t want…”
“She knows that. Nobody wants Grace Hill. There are people like that.”
“You feel sorry for her,” Rosemary said.
“I don’t really care.”
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“I’m only sorry she’s the way she is. She’s a mistake.”
“Will she come whether you tell her she can or not?”
“I never tell her she can.”
Rosemary had been kneading Dina’s palm with her thumb, and now she felt Dina shift slightly in the chair. Rosemary moved her hand so that it rested lightly on Dina’s arm. She did not want Dina to move away.
“Sal and Dolly are always saying to me, “You’ll get more than you bargained for with that one.’”
“Have they said that about me?” Rosemary asked.
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you think?”
“I thought ‘less.’”
“Who was right?”
“No one.” Dina said. “Do you understand me? Do you understand what I say?”
“Partly,” Rosemary said. “It’s always harder to understand something important when it has to do with me, too, with how I feel and what I want.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“I wish you wouldn’t see her at all. I wish you’d stay here to avoid her.”
Dina shook her head. “I can stop her. I feel guilty about it. And worried. She doesn’t like Peter Fallidon. He wouldn’t lend her money. Now she wants to start some kind of scandal. I can’t stop her at more than one thing at a time.”
“What kind of scandal could she start about Peter?”
“He likes boys,” Dina said. “It’s ridiculous. Men do like boys.”
“You don’t mean he’s homosexual.”
“She would put it that way.”
“But Harriet Jameson…”
“Do you think he’s interested in Harriet?” Dina asked.
“Well, they’re together a lot,” Rosemary said. “No one would pay any attention to a rumor like that, Dina. They’d be crazy to.” As she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. “And, anyway, you can’t ruin your own life to protect someone else from a rumor.”
“It’s not a matter of ruining my life really. I just don’t like her much.”
“Would she try to hurt you?”
“Me? How? There’s nothing to hurt. I don’t owe anyone any money. I’m my own boss.”
“You think Feller might…”
“He might hurt her. He might throw her out finally. She wouldn’t know what to do.”
“He’s got the children to think of.”
“Yes,” Dina said. “She’s not as bad a mother to them as she claims, but she’s not good.”
“Peter could simply say he’d refused to lend her money.”
“Well …” Dina said, and then she reached out and took Rosemary’s chin in her hand. “If you ever don’t much like me, you’ll tell me. Yes? Then I’ll go.”
“That’s not my problem, darling, and I can’t imagine that it ever would be. Am I supposed to say the same thing to you?”
“You’re my friend.”
Rosemary understood now what Dina meant by that. She was singular for Dina that way, not simply another of the women, another of the kids, who left themselves like pieces of furniture to be repaired and renewed at George’s. Rosemary was, at the same time, reassured and inhibited by that knowledge, for what set her apart from the others for Dina also seemed to require that she accept Dina’s sexual isolation. That was impossible, for the more familiar Dina became with Rosemary’s needs and desires, the more obsessed Rosemary was with Dina’s aloof body.
“Why don’t you spend the night?” Rosemary asked.
“I don’t sleep in front of anyone,” Dina said.
Rosemary laughed. “You have such a funny, exact way of saying things sometimes.”
“Because English is my second language and I don’t have a first,”
“That’s the way you think about women, too, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think about women much,” Dina said, turning an amused look at Rosemary.
“It’s dangerous to be so arrogant, Dina Pyros.”
It was such a clear, clearly defined face, like a landscape in the high, bright light of day. Rosemary took Dina’s head in her hands with desires she was not allowed.
“It’s dangerous to be anything else,�
�� Dina said.
“There is something faintly ridiculous about any relationship that’s a matter of choice,” Ida said.
She and Carl were sitting out on Ida’s front terrace, watching the late sun on the sea.
“Essentially ridiculous,” Carl said. “And what relationship isn’t a matter of choice?”
“Blood relationships.”
“Do you think so? Amelia and Beatrice didn’t have to live together.”
“No, but they didn’t have to decide to in any public sort of way either. Why essentially ridiculous?”
“Because what we need of each other is, I suppose,” Carl said.
“What I need is to look proud rather than foolish.”
“And surely that’s ridiculous.”
“I suppose so, but there it is.”
“Do you mean that you’d marry me if it didn’t make you look foolish?”
“I mean I can’t get past that difficulty to consider any of the real and serious problems. There may be a good many.”
“Getting married is really a very temporary embarrassment. We could do it somewhere else.”
“Yes, there’s that.”
“Ida?”
“Yes?” She turned to him.
“I would make you proud.”
“I know you would. That’s what makes me feel so foolish. What would that make of the pride I’ve pretended all these years? I’m sorry to behave like a schoolgirl. Give me a month, Carl. I will think, and then we’ll discuss it seriously.”
“All right.”
“Essentially ridiculous,” Ida repeated, as she might have a line of poetry for the pleasure of hearing it again.
XII
AGATE, IN AN ANKLE-LENGTH orange shift and barefooted, opened the door to Harriet Jameson in day-old seersucker with an armload of books.
“What a glorious color!”
“The house needs cheering up,” Agate said. “Could you talk to me for a couple of minutes before you go up?”
“Certainly.”
Harriet put the books on the stairs and then followed Agate down the corridor, expecting to be led into the kitchen. Did Peter think Agate’s refusal to wear uniforms vulgar? Harriet wasn’t easy with the term, applied to Agate. Flamboyant, certainly, and native to some other climate, but Agate wasn’t ample in the way of National Geographic islanders or peasants. Her frame was large, as were her gestures, as if she might be used to living on the stage, an opera singer, and the material that fell from her shoulders was expensively bright. Even her bare feet, long and high-arched, had style.
“Let’s sit in here,” Agate said, turning into the library.
Harriet was surprised at the ease with which Agate took Miss A’s chair. The jars of cream, nail scissors, and book on the table by it obviously belonged to Agate.
“It’s about the diaries,” Agate said. “We’ve got to stop her reading them.”
“Why?”
“They’re making her sick.”
“She has phlebitis,” Harriet said.
“She has an enlarged and heavy heart.”
“Why do you think it’s the diaries?”
“They make her relive a lot of things no one should have to go through more than once. They make her think about things she can’t do anything about.”
“How do you know that, Agate? Does she talk about them?”
“Some,” Agate said. “She doesn’t have to. I just have to look at her after she’s spent a couple of hours with them.”
“Surely, if she wanted to stop reading them, she could.”
“She’s hung up about them. She thinks she’s got to. I want to burn them.”
“They may be very important records,” Harriet said.
“For some timid gossip two generations from now who wants to be known as a local historian? Who cares? They’re killing the old lady.”
“Surely that’s an exaggeration. It’s…”
“She loved that bitch of a woman, Harriet.”
Harriet started at the use of her Christian name. “Who?”
“Beatrice. God knows why. But she did.”
“Beatrice Larson was a witty, handsome, great lady,” Harriet said.
“She was a bitch.”
“Why are you saying that, Agate, when you didn’t even know her? Of course Miss A loved her. She’s still grieving. Miss B hasn’t been dead for more than seven or eight months.”
“All right. Let her grieve—without visual aids.”
“Why would you get that impression of Miss B? Whoever has talked about her like that? I can’t imagine.”
“No one. Couldn’t you take a look at one of the diaries? Maybe if you saw one, you’d see what I mean.”
“You haven’t been reading them, have you?” Harriet asked, amazed.
“You and Cole! What difference does it make?”
“A great deal.”
“All right. I’ve read a page or two while I’ve been putting them away. That’s all it takes. Do you want to know the kinds of things I think make Miss A unhappy? Beatrice says things like, ‘Sister is so simply grotesque,’ and ‘Some of us have to be grateful there are cripples who need us,’ and…”
“Not really,” Harriet said quietly.
“They aren’t things she probably didn’t know anyway, but…”
“Not really.”
Harriet stared at the chair, now moved back from the comfortable circle, in which Miss B had always sat, and she tried to recall the presence of the elder Miss Larson, the tones in her voice. Sometimes what she said to her sister, repeated, could have sounded cutting or cruel, but the tone of her voice tempered everything with love, until last year when her speech began to go, of course.
“The way she wrote it down,” Harriet said, “it might seem to have a different tone from the one she intended.”
“So why not get rid of them?” Agate said. “Cole thought you might be able to persuade her…”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you try?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Harriet said, getting up.
She walked slowly back down the hall, picked up the books, and started up the long stairs, pausing to look out at the rose garden, the paler blooms bright in the summer evening. Why hadn’t she encouraged Miss A to burn them in the first place? “Some shy gossip two generations from now” or right now. Harriet had been curious. If all inner thoughts were not irritated or bitter, self-defeating or self-righteous, certainly enough of them would be to make the few good revelations small compensation. Miss B had been a bitter woman. The pride, the wit, the handsomeness made you think of her differently, that was all.
“Is that you, Harriet?”
“Yes,” Harriet called, hurrying then.
“I thought I heard you come in earlier,” Amelia said, as Harriet crossed the room to greet her.
“Yes. I stopped a minute to talk with Agate. I hadn’t really got to know her well enough to know what kinds of books she might like to read.”
“I’m afraid she doesn’t get much time to read. I have too much.”
“Are you still reading the diaries?” Harriet asked to that easy opening.
“Off and on,” Amelia said.
“They trouble you.”
“Yes, they do.”
“Then why go on? She wanted you to burn them.”
“I couldn’t catch her tone,” Amelia said. “There isn’t any point in thinking now about what else one might have done twenty, thirty, forty years ago.”
“No point at all.”
“She was my right arm. I was her lame leg. She always claimed she needed one, that I could have got along quite well without it. I never knew how to imagine such alternatives. I knew what she meant about herself, of course. Well…”
“What did she mean?” Harriet asked.
“That being whole and handsome can be harder. I see that. It’s probably easier to learn not to use the excuse you’ve got than to be born without one.”
“Excuse?”
“For lack of courage. For self-indulgence. I could think, from the time I was a child, every time I climbed a flight of stairs, ‘There, I haven’t indulged myself.’ My father even thought I was developing a kind of smugness. Pride for Sister was harder. She tried to be proud of loving me, but that got tangled with a failure of nerve, need. Perhaps all relationships have something of that in them.”
Harriet watched the mindless activity of Amelia’s hands as she talked. They moved lightly up and down her arms, following the routes of otherwise ignored pain.
“Do stop reading them,” Harriet said.
“No,” Amelia said simply. “By now I’ll finish them.”
There was no more Harriet could say. She could only distract Amelia with other topics for the hour of her visit.
“Did you persuade her?” Agate asked, as she let Harriet out the door.
“No,” Harriet said. “And I’m sorry. It’s something she has to do.”
Agate made no comment.
Though Agate liked the library in the evening, she had discovered the attic as a daytime retreat when Miss A was resting and there was nothing urgent to do in the kitchen. Occasionally she wandered among the furniture and boxes on the dance floor. One morning she found a trunk full of hats that must have gone back to Mrs. Larson’s youth, and she entertained herself with trying them on. She looked at old photographs, too, and from those in Miss A’s room Agate could identify some of the faces. She could also identify a man who must have been Rosemary Hopwood’s father, And there were a number of pictures of Ida Setworth as a girl and young woman, a bump of a nose and an amount of embarrassing hair, often arm-linked with Beatrice, who had been beautiful, even in those comic styles and slightly out of focus. But sometimes Agate did not explore. She sat on the turret bench, high in the morning light, and watched the society of birds. One morning, as she shifted her unaccustomed weight awkwardly to stand up, the seat gave slightly. Examining it, she saw that it opened, not up on hinges, but across on notched slides. It did not move easily, but she got it open far enough to be able to put a hand down into the storage space underneath, and there, one by one, she retrieved the six missing diaries. Here, anyway, were six years Miss A didn’t have to live through again. And the thought of being able to burn them somewhat eased the frustration of not being able to get the others away from Miss A. Agate took them down to her own room, intending to dispose of them when she next used the incinerator in the basement, but, as Miss A had done before her, Agate glanced at a few pages before she put them away in a drawer.