Even the letters Harry wrote before his visit made me self-conscious. I had my own room where I could be alone, just off the porch, but it wasn’t easy to read with Orv sitting on the other side of the door waiting for me to come and talk. I felt guilty to be doing something I couldn’t tell him about—but Harry’s love letters were worth having some perturbation of spirit over! It took some doing to hold up my end of the correspondence. The big table in the living-and-dining room was the only place where I could write with any comfort, and I could write to Harry in peace only when Orv was busy somewhere else. Once I managed to do it with Orv playing solitaire right at the same table. Can you beat that?
I had worried that Harry would find our life on the island dull and primitive compared to the life he was used to, but he came to love it as much as Orv and I did. The bay grows on people that way. We had spent all our summers there since the end of the war and looked forward to it more and more every year. The two of us always had lots of fun in the simplest sort of ways. We went around in our old clothes and enjoyed not having to get dressed up for anything. The days were never long enough for all the idling we had to do. I warned Harry that he was in for a few surprises when he saw me in action—or inaction. About the most energetic thing I ever did was picking wild blueberries. They were ripe by the time Harry came in July, and we had delicious blueberry pies, if I do say so myself.
I’ll never forget how comfortable Harry was at the bay. I could never get him to admit he was uncomfortable, despite the primitive accommodations. The two weeks he was with us passed like an enchanted dream. All the things I had wanted to discuss sort of faded into nothing when we had a chance to talk by ourselves. I was as tongue-tied as a schoolgirl. So many thoughts I had—so much I wanted to say, and so much I couldn’t say a word about! Nothing of all Harry said to me seems dearer now than that he was “home” at last: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.” I dived down and hid my head on his shoulder when I couldn’t say how I loved him but was just overwhelmed with it. I knew then that we were both home and safe with each other.
It was a blessed, perfect time. I knew Harry was special, of course, but I had no idea he was so nice to have around—let alone some of the other things we got up to as we poked around the island foraging for berries and lounged in the big chair on the porch! He seemed to be a kind of tempter. I grew to love the characteristically crisp way he has of saying words, and his movements—and everything about him. One rainy, blowy night, Orv went to bed early and left us to our own devices. It was so lovely to be with Harry all alone. That was the only evening we had—and then only an hour, and that only five minutes long! I was getting to be a regular lotus eater—no cares or responsibilities. And the less my conscience troubled me, the more I liked to think about all the dear things that made up the bond between us.
You see, I looked upon Harry’s visit to the island as a kind of test, for him as well as me. I had a notion that I could tell whether I loved him or not by having him very near me—that if I felt the least repulsion I could be sure I must stop short, even if I hurt him mortally. It was such a serious thing to me—more than that, a life-and-death matter—for I had two people to think of, and I couldn’t see how to live either way. If I didn’t love Harry, it would be a tragedy for him. If I did love him, I had an unmanageable situation for myself and Orv. It made me almost stop breathing to think of it!
Well, I hardly know what happened, but I realized right away that Harry was dearer to me than I had thought. I didn’t feel any repulsion at all. I loved to have him hold me as close as could be. He was so gentle and tender, and it was natural enough for me to be tender with him. I had felt that way ever since he had been so troubled, and especially after he went off to Europe alone. I loved him sitting on our porch at the bay and not seeing how to “get started.” We just sat silently together and loved each other. When I couldn’t get a word out, I’d scrunch up my shoulders and snuggle as close to him as I could. And he would just shake his head at me when words failed him. He frightened me when he showed so much feeling. That is the side of him that I didn’t know existed at all, and it almost hurt me.
Funny—with Stef it had been exactly the other way around. At first I thought he was much more responsive than he actually was. It took me a long time to realize that it was just a superficial closeness, or rather a closeness that existed mostly in my mind and not in reality. Stef has an outer layer of extraordinary friendliness and interest in people, but inside of that is a place where no one is admitted in a really intimate way. There is nothing wrong with Stef—he is just being himself. But having once started on the wrong track, I had to have a lot of collisions and smashups before I got it into my head what was the matter between us. I was ridiculously sensitive and full of absurd ideas and awfully hard to get along with. I just wobbled around, ashamed of thinking so much of him one minute, and ashamed of being ashamed the next minute.
The two experiences were so similar, and yet so completely different. With Stef I never dared to trust my feelings for fear that he would find them a burden and shut down without reciprocating. With Harry—well, let’s just say I was afraid I had got hold of something that was too much for me. Even now I sometimes wonder if I am not still living a dream. I am so old to have such a beautiful thing come to me. Harry loves me as if I were a girl. No one could ask for anything more! Because he loves me as if I were a woman too, and that makes it perfect. These thoughts and feelings come to me over and over and are lovelier all the time. I have such absolutely perfect confidence in his character. I love him so surely—and so irrevocably.
One thing followed another, and by the time we saw him off on the train in Penetang, Harry and I were engaged to be married—at least, I considered us engaged. If it comes to that, Harry didn’t make a formal proposal until several weeks later—and then only after I had written demanding to know if I was ever going to get one! Of course, I knew that we were a good deal better than engaged, but Harry had made some frivolous remark about suing me for breach of promise if I didn’t agree to marry him, and I couldn’t resist pointing out that he had never actually asked me to marry him. What’s more, I said, if he could find anything actionable in my foolish talk, it wouldn’t impress any court of law very much!
If it makes Harry feel like a regular caveman the way he rushed in and grabbed the woman of his choice, all right. My impression is that he had to have a good deal of help. Either way, the die was cast. We had gotten past the explosion stage and “plighted our troths.” The only thing now standing between us and the altar was Orv.
Harry
That first trip to the bay convinced me once and for all that Katharine and I were made for each other. Being together on the island seemed to light a special spark, like two pieces of kindling that blaze up together. Everything Katharine said and did—and everything she didn’t say—told me in no uncertain terms that she felt the same way toward me as I did toward her. By the end of my stay I thought we had come to a mutual understanding about getting married. But she was still playing hard to get. It wasn’t until I joked about suing her for breach of promise that she finally consented to an engagement. Even then, she insisted that I make her a proposal in writing!
Popping the question to my college sweetheart was a snap compared to the hoops Katharine made me jump through. Isabel and I were so young and innocent. My brother Ed had offered his fraternal advice about the rituals of courting and marriage, but to me the prospect of “going with” any girl seemed far off. Sometimes I actually dreaded it, for fear that the girl I fell in love with wouldn’t care a jot for me. And what should I expect, I asked myself, when there were so many other boys who took class parties in stride, always knew the right way to act, and could talk with girls by the hour and never stop to take a breath? Upon surveying the field, I made an inventory of myself and concluded that I was lacking in most of those desirable qualities.
So I could hardly believe my luck when Isabel
told me she loved me. We were both such kids when we got engaged at the beginning of my senior year—Ferdinand and Isabella, my sister used to call us. Mind you, Katharine has a point: we were all children in those days. And yet one is only as old as one feels. To hear Katharine tell it, anyone would think she had at least four or five years on me. In fact, we are closer in age than Isabel and I were—less than six months apart. In some ways we have more in common than Isabel and I did too. Our backgrounds, experiences, and interests are remarkably compatible. If only I had had the wit to propose to her when we were at Oberlin. But I didn’t, and it’s no use crying over spilled milk.
Isabel and I were engaged four years before we got married. Katharine and I were in a hurry to make up for lost time and waited only one. But no year ever passed so agonizingly slowly. Katharine insisted on keeping our plans under wraps until she worked up the courage to talk to Orville. That was completely unrealistic, of course. It wasn’t long before a number of our mutual friends saw through our charade. One day in the fall of 1925, after I got back from the island, Katharine had Anne McCormick to lunch at Hawthorn Hill. Anne surprised her by asking if she thought I would ever remarry. Before Katharine could think of a suitably diplomatic reply, Anne said, “I suppose you would really be sorry if he did.” To which all Katharine could think to say was “Um”!
In short, the cat had one paw out of the bag already, and the longer Katharine dillydallied about bringing Orville into the picture, the shorter the odds were that he would learn about our engagement from somebody else. Either way there was no telling how he would react. Katharine swore up and down that she would find an opportunity to talk to him in her own way and her own time. All I could do was to be patient.
Orville
After Harry departed that summer, the Deeds had us up to their camp near Hudson’s Bay. Kate wasn’t especially keen on the idea. She joked that the Deeds were so formal that they had to outfit on Fifth Avenue just to go up into the woods. But there was no way of wiggling out of the invitation gracefully. Besides, the Canbys were going to be at the camp too, and we always enjoyed Frank and Bertha’s company. In the end, it turned out to be less of an ordeal than Kate feared. One morning she and I escaped, just the two of us, and paddled around Marshallito Island and up the creek to Muskrat Lake. There was nary a sound but the note of a bird, rarely, and the dip of the paddles. It was a beautiful day, clear and crisp and warm in the sun. That excursion alone made the trip worthwhile.
The Deeds were such gracious hosts that we felt almost ashamed to be so eager to get back to our humble abode on Lambert Island. From their camp to the nearest railroad depot was a journey of two days by canoe. The first part passed without incident, but as we were leaving the last portage, I hurt my back while trying to pull up a small fir tree to bring home with us. The pain was so intense that the Canbys had to practically carry me back to the cabin. All night I lay flat on my back, unable to move, and next morning I could hardly dress myself without help. Fortunately, Frank had brought a small pneumatic mattress that made the train ride bearable. By the time we got to Toronto, I was able to walk the couple of blocks to the Queen’s Hotel for breakfast, using Kate as a crutch.
It was thanks to her we had another little adventure on the way home from the bay in September. George France had ferried us to Penetang in his dory. We arrived ten minutes before the train was due to depart, but for reasons best known to herself, Swes insisted on collecting the mail. She appealed to the stationmaster, who promised not to let the train leave without us. He hailed the express man with a horse and wagon, Kate hopped in, and they went galloping up the street to the PO. I watched in amazement as she jumped out over the wheel, rushed in to get her armful of mail, jumped in over the wheel, and back down the street they came dashing again—in the nick of time to catch the train. It was a most ridiculous performance, a sort of wild John Gilpin ride, but everyone had a good deal of fun out of it, Kate most of all.
The house felt mighty good to come home to that time, with a nice, warm bed to sleep in, a needle shower to soothe my aching back, and my special reading chair to relax in. The first night Kate and I sat up in the library, catching up on the news and talking over some items that had come in my mail. Kate had a thick pile of her own correspondence to deal with. As a rule she preferred to type her letters on the Hammond machine I gave her for Christmas a few years back. But lately she had taken to staying up after I switched off the light, writing letters in longhand at the desk in her room. One evening that fall I found her studying some drawings of Harry’s house that the postman had brought. A few days after that an album of photographs came from Kansas City.
She and Harry were as thick as thieves, and I—I was as thick as a plank!
Katharine
Our wedding day may have been put off indefinitely, but that didn’t keep me from fantasizing about living in Harry’s house and imagining how it would be when I was its mistress. After Orv and I got back from the bay that summer, I asked Harry to draw me a rough sketch of the layout of the two main floors, so I could start to plan a little. Later he sent some snapshots of the inside that young Henry had taken. I needed to refresh my memory because it had been some time since Orv and I had seen the house when we went out to Kansas City for Isabel’s funeral. I had forgotten about the dry stone wall that encircles the property, like a pretty New England homestead. In my mind’s eye I was already laying out a little flower garden in the backyard, beneath the library window. Cut flowers for the table are one of my extravagances!
Some way flowers always put me in mind of Mother. Pop and I used to plant flowers at her grave in Woodland Cemetery, and I made a pressed-flower album in her memory. Come to think of it, I must have been working on that very album the first time I visited Kansas City, when I went out to help Reuch and Lulu make ready for their first baby. I was still a child myself. Ever since I can remember I have been playing nursemaid to somebody. If it wasn’t Lou, it was one of the children, or Mother and Father, or Will and Orv. It seems to be my calling in life! Everyone expected me to drop everything and rush home from Oberlin when Little Brother had his typhoid attack, same as they expected me to quit my teaching job and run off to Europe with the boys. And what thanks have I ever gotten for my pains? The more you do for a family, the more they take as a matter of course.
If only Orv didn’t hate so to be read aloud to—it would have made it ever so much easier for me to work up a proper bedside manner. That’s one thing Harry and I never tire of, reading to each other. Luckily, our tastes in literature run pretty much along the same lines—always excepting that insufferable smarty-pants Mr. H. L. Mencken. I can’t fathom why Harry considers him such hot stuff. If you want my honest opinion, he’s the worst go-getter imaginable. It’s a queer thing—Orv and I see eye to eye on practically everything under the sun, but when it comes to books and reading and such, we might as well live on different planets. Sometimes I think Little Brother’s idea of romance comes straight out of the pages of Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen—and mine, I daresay, comes from Middle Aged Love Stories by Miss Josephine Bacon!
Dear, sweet Orv—he was utterly oblivious to my feelings for Harry. How blind he was, so unsuspicious of us both. Surely it must have been obvious. Are all men so unobservant? Perhaps they are. After all, it was easy enough to keep my college romance with Arthur Cunningham a secret from the family. And no one was the wiser the time Pop’s friend, the elderly temperance preacher, made a pass at me in our parlor on Hawthorn Street. I was so innocent about being friendly, and he was terribly bright and interesting. The first thing I knew he was altogether too interested in me. I ought to have kept him from coming out, but I let things drift on until I finally came to my senses and sent him back to his hotel. I swore that was the last time I would ever let myself get wound up with a married man!
Will always said how glad he was that I was on hand to keep an eye on the young ladies who fluttered around Orv like butterflies wherever he went. Bubbo would have been
quite a catch in his salad days. Now that I’m safely out of the way, I can easily imagine that some older woman has had ideas about him. But I guess he can look after himself well enough if it comes to that. Little Brother has a positive phobia where most members of my sect are concerned. He can be perfectly charming and talk a mile a minute in mixed company—but put him alone in a room with a woman and he clams up as tight as Silent Cal!
Orville
Barring Kate’s sudden addiction to secretiveness, our lives that fall went on much as before. In October I was called to Washington to testify before the president’s Aircraft Board, and Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge invited us to luncheon at the White House. At the appointed hour, we and four other guests were ushered into their private dining room. True to form, the president said very little at lunch, though he was sociable enough. He asked me a few questions, Kate made two or three innocuous remarks, and that was that. After the meal we retired upstairs, the men to the library and the women to the drawing room. Almost as soon as we sat down, Mr. Coolidge jumped up, announced that he was going to the baseball game, and excused himself. The rest of us took the hint and called for our coats.
Maiden Flight Page 11