Against the Season

by Jane Rule

  “I’ll break your teeth myself. Now get out, and don’t come back.”

  The kids by the stove were standing now, watching and listening. A couple moved over toward the back door.

  “I have witnesses,” Grace Hill shouted, gesturing to them.

  “You heard her,” one of the kids said. “Get out.”

  “My husband’s a lawyer! My husband is Feller Hill!”

  “Poor bastard,” the kid said.

  “And don’t think I can’t wipe the floor with you, you little pot-smoking punk. I’ll have you all in jail,” Grace shouted, but she was moving toward the door. “You’re going to regret this, Dina.”

  Dina had turned away from her and simply stood, waiting to hear the door slam, which it did.

  “Well, that’s fair warning, kids,” Dina said then. “Better clear out now and spread the word that George’s is hot, for a couple of weeks anyway.”

  “What happened, Dina?” one of the kids asked.

  “None of your crapping business, buddy,” another said. “Come on. Dina says out.”

  Cole had not moved from where he stood when he hit Grace Hill, his hand still smarting. Dina put an arm round his shoulder and shook him gently.

  “Come on. Come to,” she said.

  “I hit her.”

  “I should have done it myself… months ago.”

  “She wasn’t lying, was she?”

  “I don’t know,” Dina said. “I think we’d better find out. The trouble is, Feller Hill is Peter’s lawyer.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “I’m going to go over to Nick,” Dina said. “If they have that kid in jail, he can’t even speak English. Nick can find out what’s happened faster than anyone.”

  “What shall I do?”

  Dina paused. Who could help Peter? Harriet Jameson? Not on a thing like this. Miss A? Not yet. “I think you’d better not do anything or say anything to anyone. Will you be at home later on?”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “I’ll phone you there.”

  Cole helped Dina lock up the shop without further conversation. They left together and stood for a moment on the sidewalk.

  “Do you want me to take you over to Nick’s?” Cole suggested.

  “It might be faster,” Dina said, looking at her truck. “I’ve got to buy myself a car.”

  Cole drove with his ordinary nervous care, but he felt criminal in a way he didn’t understand, as if they might be apprehended at any moment and charged with complicity of some sort.

  “Don’t talk to anyone,” Dina said as she got out of the car. “I’ll call you later.”

  “All right.”

  “And, look, if Grace does lay a charge against you, if the police turn up, don’t say anything. Just get Miss A to call her lawyer.”

  Cole nodded, trying to call up an image of himself in a cell with Peter and Panayotis, a prospect which paralyzed him momentarily. He still couldn’t believe that he had hit Grace Hill. It had not ever occurred to him as an idea, not even after he had done it. So to do something unthinkable was as simple as that. Peter and Panayotis. Cole forced his imagination to falter. He was driving out toward the beach. He mustn’t see anyone. He mustn’t speak with anyone. The criminal weight in his chest forced him forward over the steering wheel.

  “Go on. Do what you want to do,” Peter had told him.

  Peter in jail. Indecent assault. Had Panayotis been with him all these days and nights?

  Cole turned off the road and parked in the tall, dry grass that grew in the sandy soil. Sand dunes blocked his view of the sea.

  “Peter.”

  He put his head down on the steering wheel and wept, whether in jealousy or horror or fear or grief he could not have said. An unthinkable pain, the mind lost to it.

  Peter Fallidon did not have a cleaning woman. “What do you want me to do?” one of his sisters had been in the habit of shouting at him. “Go out and clean people’s toilets?” That indignity had been invented by their mother, who apparently once for a week or two when they were small had taken some sort of honest job, something neither of his sisters ever intended to suffer. Though the attitude infuriated Peter, he had never been able to hire anyone to clean for him. It disturbed his privacy, he explained. Actually he didn’t mind the job, and this Saturday morning he was grateful to have something to occupy him. By noon, in that small apartment, there was nothing left to do. Without any interest in eating, he fixed himself lunch, ate it, and tidied the kitchen after himself. Then he went into the living room and sat down with a book. It would be better if he could go out, drive to the beach or up into the mountains, but he had to wait for a phone call or a pounding on the door which might come in an hour or a day or… No, Feller would almost certainly call before evening, once Nick Pyros had talked with the boy and Feller had talked with Nick.

  “I can’t represent you both,” Feller had said at the police station last night. “I’ll have to get the boy another lawyer. It may take a couple of days to get all this untangled. But we will get it untangled, Peter. So just go home and try not to worry about it.”

  “Right. And, Feller, thanks.”

  A manly handshake, self-conscious with all that had been discussed. Without Feller’s help, the police might very well have laid charges. They could still, of course. They had only his word that he hadn’t been harboring the boy all this time, that Panayotis had been with him no more than half an hour before the police arrived. If only the boy could speak English in any useful way, but he couldn’t explain to the police any more than he could to Peter where he had been and why he had chosen to turn up at that hour at Peter’s. Oh, his hopes were crudely clear enough; he had the street language for that. He had been more genuinely baffled than Peter could understand when he was refused. All right, Peter had bought him a few beers one night. Even a kid would not assume from that that Peter might take him in, hide him from the police, keep him as a bed servant. Panayotis had been very angry when the police arrived, sure apparently that Peter had called them, arranged this trap.

  If no charges were laid, if the details of Panayotis’ arrest were kept out of the paper, if Nick Pyros kept the episode to himself … too many of them. Whatever happened, Peter was through in this town. It was too good a story to be left untold: the bank manager and a Greek boy. Even if it didn’t get out, Feller Hill would never look at Peter Fallidon in quite the same light again, whether he believed the story Peter had told or not. For something, obviously, had put the idea in the boy’s mind, however erroneous it was. Feller Hill didn’t go to places like Nick’s. Well, Carl Hollinger did… and saw Peter buying beer for the kids. Why had he done it? He had been feeling sorry for Cole… and for himself. Then, when Grace Hill came in, he had wanted to show her how invulnerable to her insinuations he was, how freely innocent. Would Feller tell his wife? Peter tasted the bile of rage in his mouth. He was through, whatever happened. All the years of patient, negative decency to become the kind of man people could respect, whether they liked him or not, a man with authority and influence, a man with some vision… a New Yorker ad for the trust department. Peter Fallidon, from bitter little bastard angry enough to be awarded the Navy Cross, to bank manager and Rotarian in a place nearly the size of a city, back to bitter little bastard in a night. Because of a bitter little bastard who thought he saw a short cut to such salvation. There wasn’t any.

  “I’ll pay his lawyer.”

  Like buying the beer. The gesture of a free and innocent man. How could Feller Hill ever understand such acts, such people, as himself… or even his own wife? To be born in this town, to inherit it as a right, even without money, was to be given decency as a place to begin and to fall back on. Feller Hill could not know every time he got up on his hind legs that it was an awesome view from a dizzying height. And he had taught his sons to walk long before they would find out that their mother was a bitch, if they ever did. Two-legged creatures, all of them, Cole, too, for all his uncertainties.

&nbs
p; Harriet. He could not bear to think of her, as he had begun to think of her. What an irony it was that the only person in town who might understand his innocence was Grace Hill, because she could understand Panayotis’ need, like her own. And, perhaps, Dina, who put up with Grace in much the same way Peter felt indulgent of Panayotis, for knowing how hard it was to choose decency instead. But Harriet? For Harriet, a ship-jumping, cock-selling kid was not even a legal problem, except that she happened to have been associated for some months with a local bank manager who…

  The phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Peter?”

  “Yes, Harriet.”

  “I bought a roast this morning, and I wondered if you’d like to come over tonight and help me eat it.”

  “Thank you,” Peter said, “but I can’t tonight. I… there’s… it’s…

  “That’s all right. It was just a thought.”

  “How are you?” Peter asked, automatically.

  “Just fine. How are you?”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “Well,” Harriet said with forced cheerfulness, “perhaps some other time.”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “Good-bye then.”

  “Good-bye.”

  It was the only phone call that came. Through the afternoon and early evening Peter waited, trying to spend the time with some thought of what he would do, how he would hand in his resignation if he was allowed to, where he would go, but, until he knew that he would be free to make such decisions, it was impossible to formulate them clearly. At ten thirty, when he was considering taking a drink and trying to get some sleep, there was a knock on his door. The police again, he supposed, come to lay charges this time. He walked to the door and opened it.

  “Feller! You shouldn’t have come over. You could have phoned.”

  “I needed to see you,” Feller said, and he added quickly, “I think it’s safe to say that there’s going to be no problem for you.”

  He was Peter’s age, but he looked ten years older, deep bays of skin defeating his hairline, his crop of hair sparse and graying, his mouth deeply bracketed with lines, his skin stained with customary tiredness, And tonight there was more than the usual strain in the fast-blinking eyelids, the burdened shoulders.

  “Let me get you a drink,” Peter said.

  “Thank you.”

  Feller stood, looking at the books on Peter’s shelves, at the orderliness of all the objects in the room, until Peter came in with a drink for each of them.

  “I can’t tell you how grateful I am…” Peter began.

  Feller shook his head. “Pyros’ version of the boy’s story, though it’s pretty garbled still, makes it clear that he had a mistaken idea that you’d help him. The police are going to want to talk to you again tomorrow. Under the circumstances, I have to advise you that you must have another lawyer.”

  “Besides you?” Peter asked.

  “Instead of me. I can’t deal with the case any further.”

  “I don’t quite understand,” Peter said carefully.

  “It’s difficult,” Feller said.

  “Of course, if you don’t want to… for personal reasons, then…”

  “My wife told me tonight that you’d refused to lend her money.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She’s behind all this, Peter,” Feller said, and then he put his face in his hands in a shame or grief that was silent.

  Peter could not say or do anything. He simply waited.

  “I haven’t really sorted out the legal problems,” Feller said finally. “I don’t know whether you’ll be asked … In any case, you’ve got to have another lawyer.”

  “You mean, she put Panayotis up to this?” Peter asked.

  “Yes,” Feller said, and he looked at Peter. “My wife’s a very sick woman. I’ve got to do what I can to protect her, for her own sake, of course, but for mine, too, and the boys’. It may be, with psychiatric evidence…”

  “Look, surely somehow together we can sort this out,” Peter said. “It’s not as if we were in a big city where nobody gives a damn. Nobody’s going to lay any charges that don’t have to be laid. You persuaded them not to charge me, after all.”

  “I didn’t think you’d done anything,” Feller said. “Neither did they. It’s not the first time a kid’s jumped ship here.”

  “But has”—Peter forced himself to that first name—“Grace done anything that has to be charged?”

  “You’ve got to talk to another lawyer. I can’t advise you on this. I simply can’t.”

  “If I’m asked to lay charges, I simply won’t do it,” Peter said flatly. “I don’t need a lawyer to advise me about that.”

  “You do,” Feller insisted. “If there are simply rumors, if you don’t have a chance to clear yourself …”

  “Do there have to be that many rumors?” Peter asked, who had been ready to leave town on the evidence of much less threat only hours before.

  “When I got home tonight,” Feller said, “Grace was hysterical. She’d been assaulted, she said, by Cole Westaway.”

  “Cole!”

  “She went to Dina’s this afternoon. Cole Westaway was there. She thought you’d be in jail and told him you were—for indecent assault of a minor. He slapped her. It was only then that I realized she was the woman Panayotis was talking about; otherwise she wouldn’t have known anything about it. So I confronted her with it. She began to talk about the loan…”

  “I probably should have spoken to you about that,” Peter said. “But she didn’t want you to know, and, since I couldn’t anyway, I…”

  “You’ve got to think of yourself. Whatever you have to do…”

  “I’m not going to do anything.”

  “You must see another lawyer. I insist.”

  “Feller, this is a human thing… between friends, in a human place.”

  “It’s a human place all right,” Feller said bitterly. “What do you think people like the Larsons are going to do with the tales Cole’s bringing home?”

  “I can handle that.”

  “Can you?” Feller asked. “Not one of those people has had anything to do with me since I came home with Grace seventeen years ago. It’s a smug, cruel, narrow-minded little sewer.”

  “Miss Larson?” Peter asked, battled.

  “The elder Miss Larson.”

  “Well, she died before I had much sense of her.”

  “I keep forgetting,” Feller said.

  “I’m not going to do anything, Feller. Not even resign.”

  “We’ll talk about it again when we’ve both had some sleep.”

  “All right, but I won’t have changed my mind.”

  They stood. Peter took Feller by the shoulders. “I’m sorry as hell.”

  “Yes, thanks. So am I.”

  Dina tried to get Cole at home in the late afternoon and again after dinner.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Agate said irritably. “He was supposed to be home for dinner, and then we were going to Nick’s. Maybe he decided he’d rather drink alone.”

  Dina phoned Nick’s, but Cole wasn’t there. She had invited herself to Rosemary’s for the evening and was already half an hour late. She thought of phoning Agate again and asking her to get Cole to telephone Rosemary’s when he got in, but she didn’t want to sound urgent.

  “I’m worried about him,” she confessed to Rosemary, having recounted the details of the long afternoon.

  “Could he have gone to Peter’s?”

  “He thinks Peter’s in jail.”

  “What a sick, sick bitch she is,” Rosemary said.

  “Cole needs to know that, specifically.”

  “Do you want to go out looking for him?”

  “Maybe if we just swung by Nick’s…”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s probably silly,” Dina said.

  “Well, doing something silly is better than sitting around worrying about him.”

  “I should h
ave paid more attention to him this afternoon.”

  “You can’t give absolute attention to everybody, Dina.”

  “No.”

  “I’m getting worried about Cole, Agate,” Amelia said at ten o’clock, when it was time for her to go upstairs to bed. “He doesn’t usually go off like this without saying anything. Are you sure he didn’t say anything?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Agate said. “I bullied him into saying that he’d take me to Nick’s tonight. He didn’t think you’d approve. Anyway, he didn’t want to. He’s probably waiting it out in a movie somewhere until we’ve both gone to bed.”

  “You wanted to go to Nick’s?”

  “It sounded entertaining.”

  “You need some fun. I’ll speak to Cole.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Why should I?”

  “What would Mrs. Montgomery say?” Agate asked, putting on a Maud Montgomery face.

  Amelia smiled. “She’s a good soul, all the same.”

  “But don’t say anything to Cole,” Agate said. “I’ll just hit him over the head a couple of times with a rolling pin when he gets in. That will take care of it. Now, it’s time for you to turn in.”

  “I hope he’s not late.”

  Cole had no idea what time it was when he came in through the kitchen door. Nor could he have accounted for the hours that had passed. The empty ache in his stomach reminded him that he had not eaten. He stood by the refrigerator, wondering if he would attempt food, a gesture toward stopping that simple pain, anyway. He was pouring himself a glass of milk when Agate, in a light summer robe, came into the kitchen. He didn’t so much drop the bottle as simply let it go, tipping over the glass as it fell. He watched the pool of milk form around his feet over bits of broken glass.

  “Why not try a beer?” Agate suggested without moving. “Or is that the trouble?”

  Cole didn’t answer her.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked then, going over to look at him more closely.

  “I dropped the milk,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere,” he said, not evasive, simply factual.