Bob stood around trying, but he finally decided he couldn’t bring it up and edged toward the door. She felt there must be something obscene, or perhaps just in bad taste, about her being a widow, and she was suddenly angry with him. Before she could say anything John touched her on the arm, so lightly she might not have known if she hadn’t seen his hand there.
“I’d like to come and see you, Janie,” he said, impassive as an Indian. He, of course, had seen her anger. His hand hovered upon her arm, motionless and yet there.
“All right, John.”
“I will. I mean it. I’ve got Bruce’s car to use now. We can go to a movie. Would you want to?”
“Yes, I would,” she said, thinking, Isn’t that pretty brave of you? And he could not at that moment say when, or say anything more, for that matter. She understood that. They said goodbye to Mrs. Pettibone, and left.
She watched them drive down the the long hill and go out of sight on the main road, then went into the living room and picked up the coffee cups.
“I guess I better git to serving,” Mrs. Pettibone said. “Them hungry men are coming in.”
This time the three men stamped to the door and took off their boots and rubbers before coming into the kitchen to eat. They had washed at the spigot by the watering trough, but finished off with soap at the big slate sink in the kitchen.
“Nearly done,” Sam Stevens said as he sat down at his place at the head of the table. There was still some blood caked under his big fingernails. The men ate pot roast, boiled potatoes, pickles, cheese and macaroni, and drank coffee. No one talked until Sam leaned back and pulled out his pipe. Jane and Mrs. Pettibone walked back and forth, serving.
“I hear in Leah they’re going to close the woods,” Sam said.
Aubrey nodded, his full and toothless mouth folding around his food like a cow chewing cud. “Heard the raddio say so,” he said finally.
“Hull state. I guess they know what they’re doing,” Sam said. Adolf nodded his head, too.
“No more of them cigarettes in the woods, Adolf,” Sam said, raising his voice to make Adolf understand, as if Adolf were deaf.
“O.K.,” Adolf said, grinning.
They took about fifteen minutes to eat and to drink their coffee. Sam put his pipe out and stood up, the other two getting up with him.
“Too hot to let that meat alone,” Sam said. “It’d best be froze up quick. Come on, boys.”
They adjusted suspenders, tucked in flannel shirts and went out to put on their boots and rubbers. Mrs. Pettibone started to clear off the dishes again, as she had in the morning.
After Jane and Mrs. Pettibone had eaten they did the dishes and peeled potatoes for supper, set the big table again. The remainder of the long afternoon seemed to come into the kitchen and stop everything, as if the hot sun could stop time and all, as in a photograph. Later Jane went up into the attic and found her old leather-tops she had worn on muddy days a long time ago. Because the leather was dry and dusty, she took them down to the kitchen and rubbed Vaseline into them. The woods were dry even in what had been swampy places, but the boots would protect her ankles.
She carefully skirted the place where old Gray had died, just once seeing the men bowed over as she climbed the back pasture toward the mountain. At the top of the pasture she turned to see Lake Cascom in its valley, parts of the little river leading to Leah in the west, and the thousand hills leading her eyes off into a whitish haze on the horizon. The farmhouse and the barn seemed far down and far away, held to the valley by the little hill road that was like a string going down. In back of the barn the men looked like bugs, and in the cropped grass she could barely see parts of the old horse strewn about.
She turned to the mountain on an old trail through maples and then deep in the spruce, climbed to Porcupine Ledges where she could see on this clear day Leah and Northlee and even part of the Connecticut River toward the green hills of Vermont.
As she sat on an angled outcrop of granite, there was a soft explosion of a partridge in the woods beside her. The big bird came sailing on stiff wings, then made whistling short strokes, then glided again across the trail into the thickest brush. She wanted a cigarette, but hadn’t thought to bring any. The woods were too dry, anyway, even if they hadn’t been officially closed yet. Instead she took long breaths of the air, of the constant hot wind so dry and clear it hurt her lungs. She felt that such breaths should hurt a little. It had been a long time since she’d done anything to make her breathe hard—a long time since she’d climbed any hill.
CHAPTER 7
Gladys Cotter came running back into the dining room and stopped short.
“I knew it before the phone stopped ringing,” she said. “I just remembered that instant.” John and William Cotter looked at her, waiting. “It was the Fresh Air lady.” She turned and tapped a painted tray with her fingernail. William Cotter leaned back in his chair, letting his head fall back.
“No!” he said. “No! You said you’d call that off. Well, I hope you told her.”
“I couldn’t. I meant to send a letter when Bruce first—Oh, I don’t know what to do!”
“You’ve got to call back and tell her what the situation is here, and that we can’t take the kids. Next year, maybe, but not now.” He watched his wife carefully as she turned back to the table.
“I never heard anything about this,” John said.
“Your mother said she’d take a boy and a girl for two weeks—from the slums. The New York slums. You know, up here in the fresh air.”
“Fresh air!” John said, wonderingly.
“We can’t have them now,” Gladys Cotter said, but she made no move toward the hall and the telephone.
“It’d be an awful strain right now. You couldn’t do it,” William Cotter said.
“I know it.”
“I don’t think the kids would have much fun in this house now,” John said.
“I know it,” Gladys Cotter said. She had her mind made up. John wondered just how he could get out of it. He’d have to take off. But he couldn’t. He’d promised his father he wouldn’t take off.
“Damn it! I’ll call myself!” William Cotter said.
John tried to back him up. He let his voice rise, and stood up. William Cotter had to stand up, too, because of his threat to call the Fresh Air lady himself.
“Don’t be foolish!” John said, “There’s Bruce over there and we don’t know whether he’s dying or not! And you want to take on two kids you don’t know what they’re like, for God’s sake! They’re probably problem children anyway. Probably unhappy or something. Probably steal everything they get their hands on!”
“I didn’t say I’d take them,” Gladys Cotter said, her face beginning its familiar collapse.
She was getting the martyred, persecuted look. His father saw it and gave up. John sat down.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people!” Gladys Cotter said, crying.
John thought, For God’s sake she’s crying right at us, as if she were arguing that way. It was her way of arguing, in fact, not even putting her hands up to her face. And his father, used to being beaten down one way or another, looked away.
“You don’t know what’s wrong with us,” John said. “Why don’t you figure what’s wrong with you for a change! Can’t you see what a stupid thing this is?”
She cried harder.
“Johnny,” his father said, admonishing him in a weak voice.
John went into the living room. He looked out to Maple Street as the dusk came over it slowly, softening, bluing everything. His mother sniffed and hiccuped in the dining room. One of them, his father, probably, was pouring more coffee. After that his father would go out to the kitchen and pour some bourbon into it. There he went—the cupboard door squeaked. His father came back through the dining room and stood beside him.
“You’re being kind of cruel,” his father said in a low voice.
Cruel?
“You don’t want those kid
s to come, do you?” he whispered to his father. No answer. “You’ve got to help me, for once. You’ve got to do something, too. We can’t take a bunch of kids around here now. You know that!” His mother had gone out to the kitchen.
“Haven’t I ever helped you?” his father asked.
“I don’t know,” John said, angry at both of them. He sat down in a deep wingchair, out of sight in the darkening room.
“Maybe you’re right,” William Cotter said. He turned, carrying his cup, and went slowly out of the room and up the front stairs. One step, two steps, crunch, creak. John counted seventeen stairs, balcony and two more. The bedroom door shut, and above him the bed moved.
His mother came in and stood in the light from the dining room.
“Johnny…” she said.
“For Christ’s sake I don’t want a conference!” he said, and then he was ashamed. He went past her, almost running, out the back door to Bruce’s car. He had to back onto the lawn to get by his father’s Buick, and as he left the driveway one rear wheel thumped over the curb.
He drove down Maple Street to the square and turned down Water Street, stopping in front of a store with a sign in red neon over the front window: Teach Your Dollars More Cents. He had ten dollars he had borrowed from his father, and he went in and bought from Anna, the old Polish woman, a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. This left him five dollars and sixty cents—to last until he asked for more money from his mother or his father. Anna, sleepy and squat, with her blond-gray hair mussed up, didn’t recognize him. She grudgingly gave him a bottle opener.
He drove toward Northlee until he remembered that Bruce lay unconscious there, then turned to take the wooden bridge across the river into Vermont. He opened a bottle of beer with one hand, pressing the bottle against the seat of the car for leverage and steering with the other. He followed an old asphalt road through the low hills, going slowly through the banked turns as he climbed, sipping his beer and watching the road in front of his headlights.
Now at home his mother would be doing the dishes, her face composed, almost frozen. His father would probably have come back downstairs, and would be sitting in the living room. The house, standing still and brittle over this mess, would be the same. Home.
And yet the word home did not mean, at least did not mean completely, the place of tension his own home had always been to him. He seemed to have another home, another family, God knew where. Perhaps the idea came from every legend about such a place—a place where love could be taken for granted and affection could be expressed without shame, where pride was not always afraid of wounds.
Bruce could not win in an exchange of sarcasm, and yet like a compulsive gambler played at it until John, forgetting, said the stupid, unanswerable words, “Don’t get your water hot, Brucie.” Bruce—“DON’T GET YOUR WATER HOT!” The mother trembled. The shrinking father, wary of stray shots, doused his coffee with bourbon.
“Now, you boys,” Gladys Cotter would say.
“SHUT UP!”—one of the boys. And William Cotter rarely dared to chide.
He threw his empty bottle out of the window of the car, heard it bounce on the shoulder of the road and whick into the underbrush. In Vermont the fine for doing this was fifty dollars, but all along the road the bright bottoms of beer bottles and cans winked at him, like the eyes of animals.
He knew of real families who were not like his. The Paquettes, for instance, were not continually in crisis. They had their moments, and he had seen some quarrels among the Paquettes, but beneath the quarreling, even the violence, there seemed to run a calm stream of family. It did not matter. It was not deadly.
He thought of Peter Pan, or The Wind in the Willows, of A Child’s Garden of Verses, or even of such things as Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh. Did his vision of love arise from such stuff? In his language group at the Sorbonne he had known an English girl, Muriel, who seemed to be the final product of softness and wonder. She was seventeen, a large girl, and called her mother “Mummy.” She was very sweet, very talky, and had lost her left hand when a very small child in the blitz. Her brother was killed by the same bomb. But in most ways it was as if this horror had never happened, as if she had just come fresh from the nursery, with her Teddy bear somewhere nearby, her rocking horse waiting with her dolls in that cozy place. She wanted to live; to go to the dark cave of his room with him and find out about things, and he took her there. One night on his bed that was always damp with the moisture of the stone walls he took off most of her clothes and found that her underpants were white knit cotton with a little blue ribbon woven around each leg and finished in a bow. Christopher Robin’s wide blue eyes watched, Mary Poppins glared, Mummy wouldn’t like it—though Muriel would—and that was that. He took her home to her respectable pension feeling quite noble and defeated; Muriel, he was sure, quite surprised.
The road led northward, up the river between hills, and after he had climbed the low mountains above Wentworth Junction, he turned around and started back. He nearly threw his cigarette out the window, then remembered in time the tindery brush. He put the butt in his empty bottle, held it to his ear to hear the hiss, then threw bottle and all out.
Then there was the Russian who always came to the Bar Vert—at least he was there whenever John went there—a well dressed, dark man with a thin face. He always smiled, joked, and eventually got the guitar player to play Russian songs. Then he sang. His voice was deep, resonant but out of control, and he sang with a painful, weepy smile on his face. His eyes filled and he cried as he sang, and his homesickness was so great even the French stopped talking and listened to him. John would find his own eyes burning for this stranger’s grief, even though homesickness was one disease he thought he never had. Not for his own home; but didn’t he have a Russian counterpart to his legend? Natasha’s family, the Rostovs, in War and Peace; and he remembered, as if he had been there, one Christmas when they went visiting in sleighs over brittle, noisy snow, everybody warm and snug under fur robes, the horses farting sweet steam into the icy night, everybody loving each other and sleighing over the long plains toward other people they loved. The Russian’s strange syllables, his breaking voice, meant this scene to John.
But he was no exile, like the Russian. Strange, that the memory of Leah contained so little nostalgia! If he remembered any period of his life with nostalgia it was not Leah, where he was always the little boy who dirtied either the playground slide or his own conscience, but the time when he first got away, when he was a young soldier.
And after the war there was the pleasant business of being a veteran, that easy crutch of the times, and the G.I. bill, another one: hippity hop from one university to another—Vermont, Chicago, Iowa, Paris—all of them far enough from Leah. He did catch certain enthusiasms in those years; became voluble and sometimes violent. He joined the American Veterans’ Committee, stood frightened and aggressive before large groups of people. The Communists had wooed him for a time, until his inaccessibility enraged them and drove them to acts of complete alienation. He still believed in the importance of the issues that had so excited him, but somehow the energy of his beliefs had seeped away.
He drove back across the covered bridge into New Hampshire, avoided the Town Square and took the back road toward Cascom; a narrow, curving asphalt road similar to the one he’d taken in Vermont. As soon as he left Leah town proper, he opened another bottle of beer.
He knew the back road to Cascom well, having taken it often in the past to visit the Randolfs—Howard, Phoebe and their rather exotic daughter, Minetta. When, in high school, the romantic ideas of Miss Colchester began to lose their power—when Shelley and Byron no longer meant to him glorious freedom and rebellion, the Randolfs’ more contemporary oddness fascinated him. They had migrated farther north than most of the returning exiles of the twenties, and somehow stuck. He suspected that the Randolfs stuck more because of lack of money than for the depth of their philosophy of old houses and the virtues of the soil. Howard Randolf had
written two best-sellers in the early thirties, but it had been a long time since the early thirties. He had written many novels since, and John made it a point to read them. “Howard Randolf,” one critic wrote, “is one bloodshot-eye boy who keeps up with the times. His heroes used to be either unbuttoning their flies or buttoning them up, but now they are either unzipping them or zipping them up.”
The Randolfs owed Cotter & Son quite a sum of money for coal and roofing—or at least they had two years ago. Bruce had been fond of mentioning this. Though they had lived in Leah for twenty-five years or so, they were still “summer people”—but they did owe a lot of money here and there, and to many of the townspeople this fact seemed to entwine them sufficiently within the fortunes and history of Leah. A few more debts and they might be natives.
Suddenly the Randolfs’ mailbox flew by, white with the lettering washed out, but he knew it well enough because of the huge maple stump it sat on. He let the car slow down, not putting on the brake but letting the motor slow it, his foot off the accelerator. No, he didn’t want to see anybody. He wanted to drive around slowly and drink beer by himself. But the Randolfs would sure like it if he brought them a case of beer—what was left, anyway. He felt around in the case and decided he’d only had four. That left twenty, which was enough. Enough for what? His ambition had always been to get Randolf and the old lady drunk enough so that they would go to bed and leave him alone with Minetta, but the trouble was that nobody ever came to see them except Minetta’s admirers and the Randolfs were starved for talk. They might go to bed and leave Bob Paquette, all right, but when John came they always wanted to talk. He’d gone nearly a mile when he decided to turn around and see the Randolfs anyway.
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