by Jane Rule
“Yes,” Rosemary said. “I can see that.”
“A campy sort of place,” Agate said, looking around with mild surprise.
“It belonged to a man who killed himself.”
“Oh.”
“Actually, I like it.”
“Your privilege,” Agate said.
“You’d like a beer, I expect.”
Agate nodded and followed Rosemary into the kitchen.
“You’re nearly through the worst of it,” Rosemary said.
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“The pregnant ones,” Rosemary answered with some sharpness.
“It won’t take me long to drink this.”
“Take your time,” Rosemary said.
“I always do. But I’m not going to take much of yours. You don’t look enough like a punching bag today, and that’s all I wanted, really: that cool, detached character you put on for the public, making speeches about painless, guiltless, trouble-free deliveries. I’ve already shot the balls off Cole, and I can’t really start pounding Harriet—she’s read too many books. And the old lady…”
“A bad time for that to happen.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think she ever says very much,” Rosemary said. “It’s just that she means it.”
Agate shook her head. “She doesn’t, you know. She just doesn’t bitch about anything.”
“Come sit out here. It’s cool this time of day.”
“No,” Agate said. “I’m really not going to stay. I’d be worrying people.”
“Just for a minute. I’ll drive you back.”
“What about the person you’re expecting?”
“I’m really not,” Rosemary said.
“Gone forever? Never to return?”
“About like that,” Rosemary said.
“Well, I hope you’re not pregnant.”
Rosemary laughed, a breaking melody that startled her and touched Agate.
“So, while you’re counting your blessings,” Agate said, “why not list some of mine?”
“It really is nearly over,” Rosemary said.
“If I had to go on like this forever, lumbered with this four-limbed avenger, I’d make the deal. I don’t want to go through with it. I’m terrified.”
“Of having the baby?”
“Yes, that. And just of it. Pointing at me in my own private REPENT poster for the rest of my unnatural life. I can’t take it. How do I get out of it?”
“It won’t be like that,” Rosemary said. “For a while, maybe, but you’ll forget. You really will. You don’t have to feel guilty.”
“That’s just not true.”
“Well, all right,” Rosemary admitted. “But you’ll go on to feel so many other things more important.”
“Like what?”
“Like whether or not you’ll pass your exams. Like whether or not you’re in love. Like whether or not you really shouldn’t sort things out better with your mother or father or sister or brother. Like…”
“I don’t know. I keep getting this sense that some things, this thing, can’t be forgiven. I mean, no matter what I do about it.”
Rosemary covered her mouth with her hand and looked away.
“Do you know what I mean?”
“I don’t accept it,” Rosemary said, “that’s all.”
“No, I guess I don’t either,” Agate answered seriously, “except, maybe, I really don’t want to join the club. Who needs somebody to forgive you who probably never will, whether it’s possible or not?”
“The club?”
“The grown-up club. What else could you be crying about?”
“I don’t believe in that kind of guilt,” Rosemary said.
“I’m not talking about faith,” Agate said, impatiently thumping her stomach. “I’m talking about fact.”
“You want to feel guilty.”
“I do not. That’s what I’m saying. I want to stand right up there with the rest of them and shout, ‘For Christ’s sake, it’s not rape or murder we’re dealing with here. All I’m having is a baby.’”
“Well, go ahead and shout. Feel free.”
“Thank you.”
“And have another beer.”
“What time is it?” Agate asked.
“Nearly five.”
“Well, Harriet’s cooking.”
Rosemary got up and went into the kitchen: “It’s not murder or having a baby we’re dealing with here. All it is is a minor matter of rape, for God’s sake. Join the club.” Rosemary reached for the gin, hesitated, and took the ouzo instead.
Agate, in the patio, looked at the fuchsias to walk the child who would soon be restless with her heartburn.
“Thank you,” she said. “I feel better.”
“Good.”
“Have you seen Miss A?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t. I couldn’t face the hospital,” Agate said.
“She knows that.”
“Does she?”
“Cole told her.”
Agate sighed. It would have been a novelty to end just once in her life with the style of her beginnings, which, however alarming, had flair. Since she knew so well she was a coward about consequences, never could deal with them, perhaps she should learn to stop issuing open invitations. It would be a very dull life, but even that vision had its charms from this angle.
Rosemary drove Agate home, a trip that took longer than they expected because on the hill they found themselves in a line of cars behind Dina’s truck, which had obviously failed the first time and was now laboring in reverse.
“In any other place,” Rosemary said impatiently, “she’d be arrested.”
“Can we pass?” Agate asked. “I’d like to get a look at her.”
“Didn’t you meet her the other day?”
“In disguise,” Agate said. “Or out of disguise. I wondered which.”
“She might let us by after the next light.”
Dina backed around the corner to get out of the way of the traffic and then follow it up the rest of the gentler slope going forward. As she sat waiting, she saw Rosemary and Agate drive past, Rosemary concentrating on the road, Agate saluting. Dina pumped the ancient, mournful horn.
“What a rig! That’s more like it,” Agate said, admiring. “Come in for a drink, will you?”
“Yes, thanks, I will.”
The “rig,” as Rosemary arrived back at her house after a leisurely two drinks at the Larson house, was parked out in front, and Dina was sitting in it, her elbows on the wheel, her chin in her hands. Rosemary took her shaking time to park the car in the garage and comb her hair in the rear-view mirror. The saunter was too slow to accommodate her nerves and turned into a march as she approached the truck. Dina reached over and opened the door on the curb side.
“Get in,” she said. “I’m taking you to Nick’s for dinner.”
“Why?” Rosemary asked. “For revenge?”
“Get in.”
Rosemary tried to, but her skirt refused the last four inches. She pulled it impatiently well up her thighs and hoisted herself in beside Dina. They drove with that old, ill-defined silence, in Dina stubbornly bland, in Rosemary hotly embarrassed. The only concession Dina made was to say “Stay there” as she parked. Then she got out and came round to Rosemary’s door, opened it and lifted her down onto the street in full view of Feller and Grace Hill, who were just arriving at Nick’s for dinner themselves.
“Hello,” Feller called. “Will you join us?”
If the idea displeased Dina, she gave no sign of it. And short of simulating a heart attack right there on the street, Rosemary saw no way of avoiding the Hills. The whole circumstance was outrageous, but Dina would discover that Rosemary had one sure talent: she could get through a meal with Grace Hill in a Greek dirty spoon with absolutely impervious good humor, though she would as soon kill the woman as look at her.
“It took Grace years to persuade me to try this place,” F
eller said. “I was a real local yokel about it, but I really did think it was just for the kids.”
Rosemary, who had never been inside Nick’s, was surprised at the dining room, not because it was elegant. The decor was what she could have expected, though more shamelessly elaborate, the walls painted periodically with Greek pillars and gods, represented not as they were in myth but as they had come to the Western world out of the ruins, armless, noseless, castrated statues, here offered not in white but in the very persuasive color of flesh. But comfortable in their company, creating a family atmosphere, were a number of people eating what looked like quite good food at clean, pleasantly set tables.
“Let Dina order for us,” Grace suggested.
“You want a really Greek meal?” Dina asked.
They all agreed.
“I’ll talk to the cook,” Dina said, getting up from the table.
Both women watched her cross the room in freshly pressed chinos and an unstained sweat shirt, then turned testing eyes on each other, but Feller distracted them.
“How’s Miss Larson?”
Through ouzo and hot cheese puffs, Feller and Rosemary chatted easily about the half a dozen topics the town had given them from their childhood. But by the time the meal began to arrive, Feller and Dina had settled to talk about her parking lots in financial figures which surprised and impressed Rosemary. She had known Dina was interested in real estate, but she had not realized just how involved Dina was with property.
“Feller and Peter and Dina are going to go into some sort of partnership,” Grace said. “They don’t talk about anything else these days. They think they can make this place possible to live in and make money at it as well.”
“And you don’t?”
“I wonder,” Grace said. “My psychiatrist says only the natives can stand it now, raised crazy and used to it.”
Rosemary smiled and saw its easing effect. She could talk with Grace about her psychiatrist, tipping the conversation into her own work if it threatened to get too personal. There was also the periodic distraction of the music, delivered with a waiter through the kitchen door with the plates and plates of very good food being brought to their table.
“Like it?” Dina asked Rosemary once.
“Very much.”
“You’re a little bit Greek.”
“Are you going to dance for us tonight?” Grace asked.
“Yes,” Dina said. “I’m going to teach Feller.”
He laughed. “I’ve got two left feet.”
“There is a dance for two left feet,” Dina said.
In fact, all three got up with Dina’s encouragement and in a line learned basic steps with more pleasure than skill, for they had drunk retsina all through the long meal. From other tables, people called to Dina for a solo, and at last she did dance the formal inventions that require strength and control and a sense of spatial isolation. Rosemary admired the performance but saw in it the absolute distance of Dina from anyone who threatened that space. Inviolate dancer against the pink and mutilated gods.
“Has something happened to the Volvo?” Rosemary asked after they had said good-night to the Hills and were walking over to the truck.
“No,” Dina said.
“I enjoyed tonight.”
Dina accepted that without comment. The stubborn energy of her jealous anger was gone as she drove Rosemary back to the house. Now that the shock of what was expected of her had worn off, the fear and need of it balanced her at dead center. She did not know what to do.
“Are you coming in?” Rosemary asked as Dina stopped the truck in front of the house.
“Shall I?” Dina asked.
“Up to you,” Rosemary said, but then she felt Dina’s stillness. She could never voluntarily step out of the space she had made for herself. Rosemary reached across and took Dina’s hand. “Come on. Come with me.”
XX
AGATE’S FIRST PAIN CAME in the middle of a game of Scrabble, which Harriet had introduced into the household as more challenging than gin rummy, coon hollow, or hearts. Agate saw, with that inspiration, that o u c would build nicely down to the h of home, Harriet’s first word. As she set out the letters, both Harriet and Cole turned to her.
“Ouch,” Agate said, “All right?”
“Is it a real word?” Cole asked.
“‘Ouch,’” Harriet read from The Concise Oxford, “‘a clasp or buckle, often jeweled,’ but I’m afraid it’s archaic.”
“I was thinking actually of an expression of pain,” Agate said in academic tones. “You know, pain? Like in labor pain?”
“This game is supposed to take your mind off things like that,” Cole said.
“Apparently the baby isn’t sufficiently interested. Poor concentration span maybe, which doesn’t bode well for the poor little bastard, does it?”
“You mean…?” Harriet began.
“I think I had a pain,” Agate admitted, “but after this thoughtful analysis, I’m really not sure. It might have been a clasp or a buckle, jeweled.”
“How long ago?” Cole demanded.
“Well… two minutes? Three minutes?”
“Okay,” Cole said, looking at his wrist watch. “Your turn, Harriet.”
“We shouldn’t go on playing, should we?” Harriet asked in a tone that suggested it might be sacrilegious as well as impractical.
“It’ll probably be hours,” Cole said.
“Yes, Harriet, relax,” Agate said. “Cole will tell us what to do when it’s time.”
“There isn’t any point…” Cole began.
“Let’s play Scrabble,” Agate said.
The phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Harriet said, for she was expecting a call from Peter.
As soon as she had left the room, Cole said, “I’ll take you any time you want to go. Only the book says it’s better to time them awhile.”
“And Miss A says … ?”
“She told me just not to lose my head. She said pains were sometimes indigestion.” “Did she say anything about my head?” Agate asked.
“She said I was to keep that, too,” Cole said, grinning.
In the kitchen Harriet was reporting the possibility to Peter in answer to his first question, which was always, “How are things there?” When she had finished, Peter didn’t answer at once.
“Peter?”
“I guess we’ll all meet at the hospital then,” he said. “I’m here now. I dropped in to see Miss Larson.”
“I wouldn’t wait,” Harriet said. “We may be hours.”
“The problem is that she’s worse. I thought probably Cole… but he’s got enough on his plate, hasn’t he?”
“How much worse?”
“Nobody quite knows,” Peter said. “It may be a reaction to some of the drugs; so they’ve stopped some of them… the painkillers.”
“Oh dear,” Harriet said.
“Right now she isn’t really rational; so there isn’t any point in Cole’s seeing her. I’ve gone ahead and asked for private nurses.”
“Private nurses?”
“She’s being hard to handle.”
“Miss A?” Harriet asked, incredulous.
“She isn’t herself.”
“Poor woman.”
“Yes,” Peter said, a light quality in his voice that Harriet had learned to recognize as strain.
“But you aren’t going to stay, are you?”
“I think somebody should,” Peter said.
“Maybe I…”
“I don’t want the kids to know,” Peter said, “not now, and you’d have to tell them if you came down.”
“Isn’t there someone… Miss Setworth?”
“No,” Peter said, as if he’d already considered the possibility. “I’ll call her later if it seems necessary. It’s eight o’clock now. I’ll call you at ten… or sooner. If you come down with Agate before that, just phone this floor, and I’ll come down.”
“All right,” Harriet said. “But I wish y
ou didn’t have to…”
“It’s time I took a turn,” Peter said.
“Is she…?”
“She’s having a bad time,” Peter said.
Harriet wanted to ask specific questions and hear specific answers, but she knew Peter did not want to say more than he had to, out of a negative delicacy in him that he needed to protect.
“Have you something to read?”
“Yes, darling,” he answered, and she could hear the smile in his voice.
“Oh, I know, always the librarian: nothing better than a good book…”
“Just don’t go far from the phone unless you’re on your way down with them, all right? And tell Cole to drive carefully,”
“He will. Don’t worry about us as well.”
“All right,” Peter said.
Harriet went back into the library where Agate and Cole were entertaining themselves by exchanging rudenesses.
“It’s my turn, isn’t it?” she asked.
Apart from her mind, which needed to record rather than order in mortal lunacy, Amelia’s body struggled against hell or a vicious mistake. The pain was not like the old companion from which there were a thousand distractions but insisted instead on absolute occupancy. It was taking her to the grave, and she could not go, not if the pain was there, timeless, unendurable. Not possible. A mistake. But no, not a mistake. They were trying to hold her down, trying to make her lie back. She would not. She could not be laid out in this agony, buried in it, a depth of earth against her suffering.
“No! No!”
Accept it, Aunt Setworth said, putrid with horror. Accept it, her father also. The leg, the pain, the hard poem, death. Climb a tree, fly. Not possible.
“I have to!”
The arms of the dead, restraining, pulling her down, down into pain, to bear it, to die with it.
“NO!”
But they were stronger: Father, Mother, Aunt Setworth. She was exhausted. There was no way to give in or to bear it, no self left, simply pain.
“Help me,” she whispered. “Sister?”
Sister was a handsome, green-eyed man with brutal hands, crying.
“Give her something strong enough,” Peter said to the doctor, standing out in the corridor. “Never mind whether it kills her or not.”