by Jane Rule
May 16, 1913: I have told Papa today that I want to go to the Seminary. He is pleased, though the decision comes two years late by his calendar. I don’t know how I can leave. I know I must.
October 12, 1913: There is no pleasure in this martyrdom of self-exile. There is no good reason for it, either. I paint flowers on paper, on canvas, on china. I have no gifts, except social malice, which is more useful to me here than at home. This morning, walking under the medicinal eucalyptus, I saw a girl with a withered arm and further along, by the bridge, I wept.
December 2, 1913: I will go home for Christmas. Papa has sent the boat ticket. It is easy to lie in letters. Perhaps I will not find it difficult even when I see them all. I am learning a kind of indifference in any particular moment. There is, among these unimportant strangers, at least an absence of guilt and shame.
December 24, 1913: Ida and I walked along the seawall today, the first time I have been away from Sister for more than a few minutes. A cruel choice, I think. Ida admires my independence, knowing nothing about it. Why have I all the opportunities other people envy and might use? When we got back, Bill Hopwood had come to call. He’s in a restless depression. Like me, who enjoys pain, he invents it to endure it.
“Sick,” Agate said, pushing aside some underwear and dropping the books into the drawer.
But, as she was fixing lunch, she thought about Beatrice Larson and wondered why she was so archly self-pitying and self-lacerating. The entries, specifically silly, confessional only in generalities, would never reveal what she felt shamed and guilty about. Probably there was nothing. Did Miss A know, or did she wonder? Was she reading to find clues? There was nothing. Born that way. It was hard to imagine a masochistic baby. A bad subject.
“You know, you’ve got two fortunes in hats up there in the attic,” Agate said as she gave Miss A her lunch tray.
“You’ve found the attic, have you?”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“One day soon all that has to be cleared out,” Amelia said.
“Have you looked at them recently?”
“No,” Amelia said.
“Wait a minute.”
Agate left the room. When she returned, she was wearing a huge hat, crowned with large bunches of violets, the color of the shift she had on, but she carried herself with such dignified theatricality that she might have been about to christen a ship or welcome royalty.
“That’s my mother’s,” Amelia said, smiling; however, Mrs. Larson had never worn it that way, being, though not unnaturally balanced, as dependent on solid ground as Amelia was.
“But there’s a really wild one,” Agate said, and she stepped back into the hall out of Amelia’s sight for a moment. “How do you like this?”
Her head was alive with parrot feathers.
“Good heavens!” Amelia said, laughing.
“Oh, you chicken reel,” Agate sang, “how you make me feel. Say, it’s really so entrancing who could ever keep from dancin’.” And she certainly couldn’t, inventing between Charleston and cakewalk. “Put all the other fine selections right away. That am the only tune I want to hear you play. Keep on playin’ chicken reel all day!”
Amelia was wiping the tears from her eyes.
“But you haven’t seen anything yet,” Agate promised.
The show of hats continued, Agate pacing carefully so that her performance would not really tire Miss A.
“I could swear that was Aunt Setworth’s,” Amelia said. “But what would it be doing in our attic?”
“Did Aunt Setworth have a real nose?”
“No more than Ida.”
“Then it can’t be her hat.”
“There, now that’s Sister’s. How can it be so funny now? She was beautiful in it.”
“She,” Agate said, with great haughtiness, “was beautiful in anything,” dropped out of sight and turned up again in crushed tulle and smashed velvet, tying a shredded bow under her chin, “even bottom-of-the-trunk.”
“Oh dear,” Amelia said, struggling to catch her breath. “You really should be on stage, Agate.”
“I am,” Agate said, taking the hat off. “Most of the time.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I like it. It’s where everybody ought to stay. This one really ought to be burned.”
“Yes,” Amelia agreed.
“And while I’m at it, why don’t I start getting rid of Miss B’s life work here.”
“I haven’t finished with those,” Amelia said.
“Some of them you have.”
“You know, they aren’t all here. You haven’t, looking around up there, found any more?” Amelia asked.
“If I had, I wouldn’t tell you,” Agate said, taking the lunch tray.
“Why not?”
“Just an excuse to stay in bed another week. I’m getting you up on Friday.”
“I hope so,” Amelia said, doubtful.
“By the way, who was so hung up on Dickens?”
“My mother,” Amelia said.
“All the pages are cut. I couldn’t believe it. The only thing anyone read in my grandmother’s library was Godey’s Lady’s Book.”
“And where did you learn ‘Chicken Reel,’ for heaven’s sake?”
“On a crank-up Victrola in our attic. His Master’s Voice.”
A funny mixture of things, that child. If Sister had still been alive, Agate would have killed her, up there in the attic among all the old hats and private papers, down in the study, leafing through Mama’s Dickens. If she found the diaries, she might very well not tell Amelia. Would she read them? She’d discover nothing but the terrible, ordinary pain of a homesick girl or the uncertain bitter sanity of a middle-aged spinster in menopause. Which Amelia already knew.
“Agate?” Amelia called after the girl.
“Yes’m?”
“It’s a good idea. Why don’t you and Cole start burning them?”
“Tonight,” Agate called back, and then Amelia heard her singing, “I got life! life! life!”
“How did you get her to agree?” Cole asked, as they had supper in the kitchen.
“I gave her a hat show,” Agate said.
“A hat show?”
“That’s right.”
“The ones she hasn’t read as well?” Cole asked, giving up, as he so often did with Agate, any attempt to understand her explanations.
“Well, some of them. We haven’t negotiated the whole lot, but I don’t think there will be any problem once we get going. We’re going to burn up old Sister Bitch, what do you think of that?”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep calling her that,” Cole said, but resignedly.
“Admit it. You didn’t like her, did you?”
“I really did. She was funny… in a dry sort of way.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Well, sarcastic, the way you are.”
“And I don’t crack you up all that often. Why should she?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Cole said. “Do you know that Greek ship went out last night? One of the sailors wasn’t on it.”
“Jumped ship?” Agate asked, interested.
“I guess so.”
“Did you know him?”
“Not really. He was down at Nick’s a lot, is all.”
“Would Nick help him?” Agate asked. Cole had told her enough about Nick’s to make her curious and also determined to go there once Miss A was well enough to be left alone for an evening.
“I don’t think so. Nick’s a pretty tough guy. And he wouldn’t want to get mixed up with the law.”
“So where would he go?”
“I don’t know. He’s just a kid. I mean, he’s a couple of years younger than we are. He doesn’t even really speak English.”
“That makes it kind of rough.”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “I wondered if he’d go to Dina.”
“She’s the one who has the furniture place?”
“Yeah. She’s Nick’s cousin, but
she doesn’t speak Greek either. Still, there’s always a bunch of kids around her place, and she’s not all that particular about things… grass and that sort of thing; so maybe she’d help him. But I don’t see what he thought he could do.”
“Can’t even score very well without English,” Agate said.
“I suppose he’ll get picked up in a couple of days.”
“Poor kid.”
“Yeah,” Cole said.
Increasingly, they had moments of this kind of simple agreement, basic loyalties they shared, no matter how at war their styles. They went upstairs when they had finished cleaning up in a harmony of purpose to begin the task of burning the diaries.
“Not those,” Amelia said, on Cole’s second trip. “Those are the later ones I haven’t read, aren’t they?”
“This one,” Cole said, fishing a diary out of the box, “is 1926.”
“Oh. Then you must have taken the other box down already.”
“Shall I get it?” Cole asked. “Agate’s just starting the fire.” Amelia smiled, shaking her head. “She shifted the boxes. She will have her way, won’t she?”
“I can stop her,” Cole said, turning quickly.
“Don’t. She’s right.”
Down in the basement, Agate was working fast to make a fire of those last years. By the time Cole arrived with the final box, she had got rid of most of them.
“You weren’t supposed to burn those,” Cole said.
“Has she noticed?”
“That you switched the boxes? Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“‘She will have her way,’” Cole said. “You really do get away with murder.”
“Exactly the opposite,” Agate said. “Now you tend this. I have one more small batch to get.”
Cole had begun more slowly to burn the pain of years Amelia had already endured when Agate came back with the six diaries she had found.
“What are those?”
“I found them this morning. Nobody’s going to read them.”
“Does she know?”
“No,” Agate said. “And now, Sister Bitch, whether there’s blackmail money in these or not, whether there’s excuse in them or not for your lame brain, nobody’s ever going to know.”
“What could be blackmail money?” Cole asked, disdainful.
“I think she had incestuous tendencies,” Agate said with deep melodrama.
“For whom?”
“Miss A.”
“Oh, Agate, for God’s sake!”
“Never mind. Whatever might not be fit for a young boy’s innocent eyes is now condemned to flame.”
“How can you even make up such ideas?”
“Talent. Raw talent.”
Cole found himself, for a second, tempted to snatch one of those books from Agate’s hands, and he was immediately ashamed of himself. He knew perfectly well he’d find no such lurid confessions in anything written by Cousin B. And why should he want to know anyway?
Upstairs Amelia did not quite doze, remembering Beatrice young in a hat. Then Bill Hopwood under the tree she had so often climbed as a child. He was crying. It had never been a real choice for Amelia, not after Sister came home to stay. People had always assumed it was Beatrice who gave up a life of her own for Amelia. Beatrice thought so herself, needing to. It didn’t matter. It never had. Then that fragment Agate had been singing repeated itself in Amelia’s head: “I’ve got life! life! life!” Amelia accepted that sentence and was smiling as she fell asleep.
XIII
IT WAS SATURDAY, AND Dina was sitting at the back door of the shop with a bottle of beer, out of habit rather than need. She had taken off her sweat shirt and rolled back her shirt sleeves. Instead of boots, she was wearing a pair of new sneakers and thinking of taking them off. She should get some sandals, why not? She didn’t always have to be dressed for moving furniture, even here in the shop. One of the cats, sniffing and then rubbing itself against her toe, took hold of a lace and pulled. Dina reached down and rubbed the base of its tail. Then she pulled off the shoe and looked at her bare foot. “The sun makes a Greek dirty,” her aunt had said. Nick didn’t take the sun either. But Rosemary had laughed at that. “Your face is a gorgeous color. Why not the rest of you?” Was she lying in the sun now? Dina shifted slightly against that thought, but the image of Rosemary’s naked back, softly rounded buttocks, and long, slightly parted legs, was easier to call up than dismiss. Dina took off her other shoe and then stretched until she could feel the edge of the step sharp against her back. She was going to buy a car, but not a sports car again. A Volvo perhaps. Charles Ries next door had one. Ann Ries liked to put the passenger seat right back and take a nap on the way home from work. If Rosemary wanted to go up into the mountains for the day, she could just put the seat back on the way home and sleep, there beside Dina while she drove. “Why don’t you spend the night?” Rosemary had suggested it as a quite ordinary idea. Perhaps, between friends, it was. Dina remembered in school that girls asked each other over for the night. Dina knew so little about being a friend, having a friend. How often, for instance, did friends meet? If you were at school, if you worked together, even if you just drank at the same place, there was no question. You saw each other, as Dina understood was the custom in Greece, every day or nearly every day. But Rosemary didn’t go to Nick’s. “How do I see you next time?” Dina had asked. “Return my invitation,” Rosemary answered simply. While Grace was still apt to drop in, it was not easy for Dina to ask Rosemary to her apartment. Getting rid of Grace was taking time, but soon, perhaps, Rosemary would come over without difficulty. Still, the apartment wasn’t right for her. Maybe, after all, Dina should buy a house, but the only house she had ever really wanted to own was Rosemary’s. One could be built. Extravagant to build a house just to entertain a friend? Not if that was what one did. Dina liked the sun on her undefended skin. One afternoon she would lie in the sun at Rosemary’s. They would have cold, fresh drinks with ice. And they would talk. Perhaps Rosemary would tell Dina about the way she had lived before she came home, the low octave of her voice easy to listen to.
“Dina?”
“Hi, Cole, You haven’t been around in a while.”
“No,” Cole said. “Working at the mill and Cousin A being so sick…”
“How is she?”
“Really better. She gets a bit tired still, but that’s all.”
“Rosemary says Agate’s working out all right.”
“Oh yes,” Cole said, sitting down on the step next to Dina. “But she hasn’t had any time off since she came. I offered to stay home so she could go to a movie or something, but I guess going out on her own wouldn’t be much fun.”
“No,” Dina said.
“Kathy never did, but Agate’s different. She’s used to having fun.”
“Mmm,” Dina said. “She looks it.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“You want a beer?”
“No thanks,” Cole said. “Thing is, Agate would like to go to Nick’s.”
“Well, no harm in that, is there?”
“If I took her?”
“Oh.”
“It would look funny, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Dina said.
“It’s kind of a problem. Agate’s been really wonderful to Cousin A all these weeks she’s been sick. She’s more like a … I don’t know. She doesn’t seem like a maid. She asked me if I would take her to Nick’s.”
“Well, take her.”
“Somebody like Mrs. Montgomery might…”
“I haven’t seen Mrs. Montgomery drinking at Nick’s lately,” Dina grinned.
“And Mrs. Hill,” Cole added.
“You afraid of Grace Hill?”
“Not afraid, exactly.”
“Have you asked Miss A about it?”
“Not yet,” Cole said. “I was going to ask Peter. Then I thought maybe you …”
“It’s not exactly my field,” Dina said. “Why not
ask Peter?”
“I guess I wanted to ask somebody who would say it was all right,” Cole said, smiling.
“Ask Miss A then.”
“You don’t think she’d mind or worry about it?”
“I don’t know,” Dina said, “but I don’t think she’d say no.”
“Probably not,” Cole said. “You been playing tennis?”
“No,” Dina said. “I don’t even know how to play tennis,”
“Oh.”
“These are cooler,” Dina said. “When you have them on.”
“They would be,” Cole said.
They heard the shop door open, but neither of them turned around. There were already half a dozen kids by the cold stove, and there would be more as the afternoon went on. Then the hard, high-heeled steps told them it wasn’t just another kid, but Cole and Dina kept their backs to the sound.
“Wait until you hear this!” Grace Hill announced.
Dina looked up, clear-eyed and bland. Cole looked at his feet.
“Mr. Fallidon is in jail.”
“Don’t make bad jokes,” Dina said sharply.
“He’s not,” Cole said, getting to his feet.
“Oh yes he is,” Grace said triumphantly. “With a smorgasbord of charges to choose from. Everything from aiding and abetting to indecent assault of a minor.”
“What happened?” Dina demanded.
“The police found Panayotis at Mr. Fallidon’s apartment in an ever so slightly compromising circumstance.”
“I don’t believe it!” Cole said. “I don’t believe a word of it!”
“Jealous?” Grace asked. “I wouldn’t be. You could be in jail yourself.”
Before Cole knew what he had done, he had slapped Grace Hill in the face. She stood, stunned for a moment, and then she said, “And now we can arrange that for you on an assault charge. Call the police, Dina.”
“Get out of here,” Dina said quietly.
“Call the police! I have a witness.”
“You’ve got witnesses all right, for all kinds of things. Now get out.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you’re going to side with this little…”