The Moonflower Vine

by Jetta Carleton

  “He doesn’t mean a thing on earth to me—I haven’t given him one bit of encouragement.”

  “I know.”

  “But if she starts thinking it’s her he hangs around here for—well, she’s just going to get herself hurt, that’s all. She’s too young for such as this.”

  “I guess that’s why I never thought anything about it. I don’t think it’s a thing but just cuttin’ up. But I’ll watch her. I sure wouldn’t want it to be anything else.”

  Leonie had scarcely sounded the warning when Matthew sounded one of his own. “It looks like to me,” he said, that same evening, “that boy’s around here altogether too much.”

  “Well, he started coming to see you, and you wouldn’t talk to him,” said Callie.

  “I haven’t got time. I wish he’d take the hint and stay away. He and Mathy are getting a little too thick to suit me.”

  “Now Matthew, they’re not doin’ anything wrong. I’m right around with them all the time.”

  “Right or wrong, he’s just not the caliber I care to have her associating with. He’s wild and reckless and he always was.”

  “Yes, I remember when he ran off with that Wandling girl,” said Callie. “But she was a fystey thing. Ed seems like such a nice boy.”

  “No telling what he’s like when he gets away. Living the kind of life he does, bumming around the country, associating with rough characters—you don’t know what-all he does.”

  “Folks around here seem to think a lot of him.”

  “Hero worship!” Matthew snorted. “Just because he’s an aviator—strutting around town in those boots—What has he done that amounts to a hill of beans? He hasn’t done an honest day’s work in his life. All he ever wanted to do was play basketball and drive cars. This is the same thing.”

  “He’s a smart boy, though.”

  “Vox, et praeterea nihil!” said Matthew. “He talks big! Always thinks he knows better than somebody older.”

  “Seems like he has a lot of respect for you.”

  “Then he has a poor way of showing it. I get everlastin’ tired of his opinions. And I don’t want him hanging around Mathy any longer!”

  “Well,” said Callie, “what’ll we do?”

  “Tell him to stay away!”

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Sure as we do that, we will start something.”

  “If you ask my opinion, it’s already started.”

  “Then wouldn’t it be better, maybe, just to let it blow over by itself?”

  “With Ed Inwood, you never know how far these things will go. I’m just about of a mind to tell him not to come on the place again!”

  “Now, Matthew, you can’t do that!” Callie faced him accusingly. “You remember what happened to Jessica!”

  He did, and for the moment heartily rescinded his forgiveness of her.

  For a while after that he held his peace, but with reluctance. Ed not only continued to drop in, but brought over his radio set, and the warm night air was glazed with sickly love songs and sawed with static. Matthew sat upstairs of an evening snapping books open and shut and clearing his throat with great angry harrumphs. At breakfast his sulky silence hung ominously over the table.

  What he didn’t know would have hurt him worse. Ed came not only in the evenings but all through the day, while Matthew and Leonie were gone. Sometimes he appeared at midmorning, bright and shiny, and charmed a breakfast from Callie. She and Mathy fed him and sassed him and bossed him around. They made him carry water and beat cake batter. They washed his shirt. He and Mathy ran errands. The mornings were cozy and hilarious, domesticity spiced by the illicit presence of the lover.

  Callie knew in her heart that he shouldn’t be there, and because she knew it she had a thousand complaints of him the minute he left. He was never serious; he was restless; he ate and drove and moved too fast; he hadn’t been properly brought up; he smoked cigarettes; maybe he drank; and who knew how many girls he had. She went on in this manner until one day Mathy said, “Mama, you’re talking to yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re telling me all the things you think are wrong with Ed because you like him as much as I do and you don’t think you should.”

  “Why, I don’t know—” Callie began defensively. “How much do you like him?”

  “Enough to marry him,” said Mathy.

  Callie looked at her in horror, knowing it was true. Ed had taken over both house and hearts, irrevocably, with that sweet gall that corrupts more women than lechery ever could. And she had allowed it to happen.

  That night she said carefully to Matthew, “I’ve been thinking. Suppose we send her down to Jessica for the rest of the summer?”

  “Not much!” said Matthew. “That boy wouldn’t do a thing but fly down there after her.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “We’ll keep her right here, where we can keep an eye on her.”

  “Yes, I suppose she’d better see him here than somewhere else.”

  “Why does she have to see him at all?” Matthew said indignantly.

  “Well, I hate to come right out and forbid it. You can’t put the lid on too tight if you don’t want the pot to boil over.”

  “Yes, but you can turn off the fire,” he said. That held her. “I told you this wasn’t going to blow over—I told you you couldn’t trust Ed Inwood. Or Mathy, either. Now I’ve stood all I’m going to stand of this, and I’m going to tell the boy to clear out!”

  “Now, Matthew, remember Jessica!”

  “All right! I’ll remember! I’ll not send him away. But I’ll certainly see that she does!”

  He would rather put a ring in a bull’s nose than have a heart-to-heart with his daughters. Nevertheless, he jotted down some points on an old envelope, in case he needed prompting, and brought up the subject at breakfast. “Daughter, as soon as you’ve finished there, I’d like to see you in the other room.”

  “What for, Papa?” Mathy looked up with her mouth full. “You want Ed to stop coming over?”

  Matthew flushed angrily and shot an accusing glance at Callie. Callie looked as surprised as he was. “We’ll discuss it in the next room,” he said.

  “I wondered how long it would be,” said Mathy.

  “Now none of that!”

  “It’s okay, Papa. If you don’t want him to come over, just tell him not to.”

  “At this point,” he said scathingly, “I think it would be more appropriate if you told him.”

  Mathy reached for the syrup pitcher. “Okay—if that’s what you want.” There was silence, broken only by the sticky sound of syrup and butter stirred together in a voluptuous mess. She glanced up. “Was there something else, Papa?”

  He hesitated, brushing a speck off his sleeve. “I suppose that’s enough said. I’ll expect you to keep your word.”

  “I’ll keep it.”

  He walked away lamely, all the air let out of his tires.

  “You shouldn’t have acted like that!” said Leonie.

  “What did you want me to do, argue with him?”

  “You should have let him have his say.”

  “I thought I’d save him the trouble.”

  “It wasn’t very nice of you,” said Callie. “He might have had some other things to say.”

  “I can imagine,” said Mathy.

  “Well, you should listen to him. He’s only trying to do what’s right. He only wants what’s best for you—that’s what we all want.”

  “You’ll get over it,” said Leonie. “Don’t take it too hard.”

  “Please pass the biscuits,” said Mathy. She ate two more and topped them off with a bowl of Post Toasties.

  6

  In the days that followed they saw no more of Ed. He had apparently left town. Callie had Mathy to herself again. In a burst of happy energy, she did all sorts of things she had been wanting to do. They aired old trunks, made new dresses for the baby, tore up all the pillows, washed and baked the fe
athers and put them back in new ticks. Mathy worked diligently, quick and helpful and good and gay, as if she had never heard of Ed. No more did his old car come rattling down the street or the porch shake under his tread. No more did “Sweet Georgia Brown” ring through the house. The radio was silent. Matthew and Leonie studied in peace. Everyone went to bed on time. Quiet settled over the house.

  It made them so nervous they could hardly stand it.

  It got so no one could sleep at night. They were too busy listening. Mathy had slipped away in the night often enough, with less incentive than Ed.

  “You suppose she would do such a thing?” Callie would say, sitting up in the dark.

  A chair couldn’t snap or a curtain whisper but what one of them turned over and listened. “Remember Jessica” became a watchword, like “Remember the Alamo.”

  “I don’t trust the appearance of things,” said Callie. “She don’t seem to grieve.”

  They began to watch every move she made. If she escaped to the pasture, Callie went to the door and called her back. If she went downtown on a Saturday afternoon, Matthew or Leonie was likely to follow. She could not go to the garden and scarcely to the toilet without being watched. Secretly Callie examined her room for smuggled letters, any signs of packing. If Mathy caught on to their vigilance, she gave no sign.

  “Why don’t she talk about it?” Callie complained. She loved to discuss things, analyze and console. But Mathy gave her no chance. Serene and taciturn, she repulsed Callie’s efforts to draw her out.

  “I think she’s got it all bottled up inside,” said Leonie. “It worries me. You never know what Mathy will take it into her head to do.”

  “God help us!” said Callie, and kept herself awake all night ruing her foolishness. She had visions of Mathy running off to the city, walking the streets, looking for Ed…Mathy riding on a train, accosted by strangers…that little soft-eyed thing…By daybreak she had one of her migraines.

  “Matthew,” she said, waking him, “what are we going to do!”

  “Oh, you’re worrying yourself to death.”

  “I can’t help it. Every time I think about her runnin’ off to find him—that innocent little thing away off from home—” Her voice broke and shot upward. “I just can’t help it!” She buried her face against him and sobbed.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, patting her awkwardly.

  “I’m not going to have it! I’ll not have two of my children slip away like that.”

  “It would just about ruin me in the community.”

  “I’ve got a notion to tell her she can let him come back. Just once in a while, anyway. That way, we’d know what’s going on.”

  “Maybe we would and maybe we wouldn’t.”

  “We’d know more than we do now. Maybe if we’d let them be together once in a while, they’d be satisfied. Maybe—” Callie sat up abruptly and listened. She got out of bed and tiptoed down the hall.

  “She’s there,” she said, tiptoeing back. “Every morning when I go to look, I nearly have heart failure. I reckon I’d be plumb relieved if he was to come back. Matthew? I’m going to tell her to let him—it’s better than having her run away.”

  “But mercy goodness, Callie, we don’t know that she’s planning to!”

  “And we don’t know that she’s not. You remember Jessica!”

  “All right!” he said, hopping out of bed. “Have it your own way. Nothing would do but you had to let her see him. And if nothing will do but to let him come back, I guess there’s no way I can stop it!”

  It wasn’t five minutes till the delicate morning air cracked open. Windows rattled, the bedstead shuddered. A veritable sky-quake shook the house as a plane roared over.

  “Well, there he is,” said Matthew with grand resignation. “Bloomin’ idiot, he probably took the roof off.”

  A half hour later, having hitched a ride from Seabert’s pasture, Ed stood at the door singing for love and idleness and two left feet. He strode into the kitchen and sat down at the breakfast table. “Mr. Soames,” he said, “I’ve come to marry your daughter.”

  7

  They did what they could. Callie wept, Leonie argued, Matthew stormed and threatened. It was only “Remember Jessica!” that stopped him from turning her out of the house. He predicted direly. She would rue the day, he said, she would pay for it dearly (meaning repent; repentance and remorse were the only legal tender for the purchase of such folly). But Mathy would not listen to reason. No plea for her reputation—or his—cut any ice.

  He cried out in extremis, “But don’t you want to finish high school first?”

  “Not particularly,” said Mathy.

  That broke his heart. He went off to the schoolhouse rejected. She was her mother’s daughter, all right; no regard for education. But why, if she had to scorn her advantages and marry at sixteen, why did it have to be Ed? Ed, who had given him more trouble in more ways than any other boy he had tried to teach. But what more could he expect of Mathy? They were alike, those two. Defiant, cocksure, irreverent—you could never teach either of them a lesson, however you tried. Well, let them go. Maybe they deserved each other. Let them learn that life is not all play, all flying around in the sunshine like butterflies. Let them learn their lesson the hard way.

  The front door opened. He looked up and saw Ed climbing the stairs. How many times had he watched that boy come at him down the hall, full of bluff and arrogance! He came at you like a lion tamer, less noble than his beasts but nimbler, all his arguments loaded with blanks. He jabbed and thrust with any old rickety chair of a reason. Polite and relentless, he pushed you back until, maintaining what dignity you could, you hopped up on your box and sat. Matthew felt old and weary at the sight of him.

  “Hi, Prof!”

  Matthew sighed deeply. “All right, Ed, go ahead and marry her.”

  “You mean it!” Ed shouted.

  “Now go on away.”

  “But Mr. Soames—”

  “I don’t want to get into an argument.”

  “I’m not going to argue, sir. I only wanted to say that I love Mathy very much and—”

  “I said you could have her, Ed. Now spare me the rest.”

  Ed hesitated, standing in the doorway. “Thank you,” he said presently. “Prof, I wish—”

  Matthew turned and opened the rolltop desk. After a moment Ed went away.

  So they were married, one day in August, and ascended unto heaven from Seabert’s pasture, witnessed by friends, relatives, and town riffraff. Mathy, in goggles and helmet, tossed her bouquet from the cockpit, while Callie hid her face and wept like Niagara and Matthew stood stiff and solemn and wondered if his debt were paid.

  8

  He could not forgive Mathy this final insult (even though part of the blame was her mother’s). Nevertheless, now that she was gone he missed her considerably. She and Ed were in the South, where Ed did first one thing and then another. He dusted crops, flew taxi flights, taught for a while at a flying school. From the sound of things, he wasn’t setting the world on fire. And Matthew worried a good deal about Mathy. Not that she had merited his concern; she chose this bed, let her lie in it. All the same he worried, wondering sometimes where she slept at night and if she was hungry. Often as he and Callie sat alone in the long winter evenings, their youngest child asleep, and heard the wind sigh in the stovepipe and the big house echo in the cold, he thought of Mathy and Leonie and Jessica, the three of them as they used to sit, their heads dark or fair bent over their books. He found himself nostalgic for those peaceful times. Now and then he smiled sadly over some remembered misadventure of Mathy’s. A funny little girl…who ought at this moment to be sitting here studying her lessons. And might have been, if it hadn’t been for Ed Inwood. And once again he silently cursed the existence of that boy. What fate had sent Ed to torment him apparently without end?

  Late in July, Ed brought Mathy home. She was having a baby in August. They hardly recognized the shiny soft girl who had left them a
year ago. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s, she was burnt like toast and swollen out to there—but as healthy and high-spirited as a colt. A few weeks later she produced a fine boy with no trouble at all.

  Ed, meanwhile, was enjoying fulsome admiration, not only at home (where the women made over him as much as they did over the baby), but all around town. Lindbergh had now made his famous flight, and the people of Shawano, keyed to hysteria like the rest of the country, made Ed their own personal hero. He was a flier, like Lindy; that’s all that was necessary. There was hardly a man Matthew met on the street who didn’t tell him how proud he must be of his son-in-law. “Ed’s doin’ fine, ain’t he!”

  “Yes, he’s flying pretty high,” Matthew always answered. That made them laugh.

  “I always knew he had it in him.”

  Had what, Matthew wondered. He pondered on this glorification. Ed had flown no oceans, set no records. He had merely risked his neck. Did that make the world a better place, help the sick and the needy, improve men’s minds? Ed gave no service. His work was sport—thrills and pleasure. He was flashy, arrogant, irresponsible, and reckless; he defied the laws of God and nature. But that’s what people wanted these days, that’s what the times demanded. And all his faults had become the new virtues. Matthew felt old-fashioned and discarded. Well, never mind; the old virtues would prevail. There would come a day.

  Ed and Mathy came back now and then on brief visits, sometimes flying, sometimes driving an old car which Ed had overhauled. Mathy wore breeches and boots, the same as Ed, and looked like nobody’s mother. The baby, for all their dragging him around, seemed to thrive; he was an amiable, amusing little boy. They lived from pillar to post, a few months here, a few months there, wherever Ed’s fancy took them; gypsies, actually, with no apparent desire to be otherwise. Though they toiled little and spun not, that Matthew could see, and lived as free as the birds of the air, yet were they fed and in their ridiculous way well clothed. It puzzled Matthew how they managed. “But it won’t last,” he kept saying, to Callie’s protest. “They can’t get by like this forever, flitting like butterflies. There’ll come a day.”