Against the Season (17 page)

“Yes,” Peter said, looking… Harriet was about to say the only interesting thing she had to say about Dina, but she remembered, in time, why she shouldn’t.

“I wish there were more people in this town like Dina,” Peter said.

“Oh?”

“She has real business sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if, before she’s through, she could buy and sell some of the people who treat her as if she were just one step up from the junkman.”

“Does anyone treat Dina like that?”

“Sometimes I think all of us do, but she’s too proud to care.”

A hard judgment, unless you agreed that everyone treated everyone else with some indifference.

“Is this a good place to stop?” Peter asked.

“Yes, lovely.”

She helped him spread the towels and anchor them with rocks. Then she opened the picnic basket and set out sandwiches and fruit, poured the iced tea from the thermos. They sat. Peter picked up the plastic bag from his place and opened it. Harriet watched him look at the sandwich and then bite into it. He chewed carefully and then swallowed.

“I like your tuna fish sandwiches,” he said.

“Why don’t you love me, Peter?”

For once the expression of his mouth and eyes coincided, tense with surprise. Then he said, “You don’t love me, do you?”

That she should, whether he did or not, had never occurred to her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve never let me try. I mean, you haven’t wanted me to. I’ve tried not to. I don’t know. I want to, but not if…”

“Not if what?”

“No,” Harriet said. “That would be as bad a bargain as the one we’ve already made, Isn’t it funny? I never heard that before.”

“What would be as bad a bargain?”

“Loving you only if you loved me.”

“I don’t see why. Loving someone who can’t love you is simply painful.”

“It’s not a bargain.”

“Harriet, I do care about you … more than I’ve let you know, perhaps, more than I realized myself until the night you didn’t turn up at the concert. I was terribly worried about you. I found it very painful. That’s all.”

“What do you mean, that’s all?”

“I wasn’t relieved when you were all right. I was angry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to worry, not about anyone.”

“Well, no, of course not.”

“I can’t stand it,” Peter said.

“I think what I want to say,” Harriet continued carefully, feeling oddly calm, “is a warning. I know you don’t want to love me. I do want to love you, and I’m going to try. I don’t mean I’m going to try to seduce you. I’d be too embarrassingly bad at it. I’m simply going to go ahead and worry about you when I feel like it. If you can’t stand that…”

“I can’t stand worrying about you.”

“Ill try not to worry you then.”

“You are worrying me right now.”

“I’m surprising myself,” Harriet said. “I love your face when it goes together like that, even in a frown.”

“Harriet…”

“I might even kiss you before this day is out. I won’t compete with the tuna fish. I won’t chase you down the beach. I’m a prim, shy woman. But even prim, shy women sometimes kiss people.”

“You’re a very pretty, appealing woman, but I…”

She put a hand over his mouth. “Stop there. That’s all I want to hear. Just go ahead and eat your sandwich.”

He held her hand and kissed her palm gently. Then he gave her the first smile she had ever seen in his eyes also, rueful, guarded. And he gave it to the sandwich as well, as if it might easily be poison, whether he liked it or not.

“Is something the matter, Dina?” Rosemary asked, pulling a footstool nearer the chair Dina was sitting in.

“I couldn’t say.”

“Why not?”

“If you have a real friend,” Dina said, “you begin to see that all the things you just don’t say to other people you can’t say anyway. You don’t know how.”

“Try.”

Dina shook her head.

“Are you afraid I wouldn’t understand?”

“You have degrees in understanding,” Dina said, smiling.

“What is it?”

“Do you ever try to help someone and make it worse instead? Because you find out you really can’t like, don’t care, are even a little afraid?”

“Yes,” Rosemary said.

“What do you do?”

“Call in someone else, usually.”

Dina gave a short laugh. Then she looked at Rosemary seriously. “If you got a little afraid of me, who would you call?”

“I don’t think I could be afraid of you like that. I was talking about my job.”

“Who would I call then?” Dina asked.

“If you felt like that, you wouldn’t have to call anyone. You’d just go away, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m talking about Grace Hill,” Dina said flatly. “To begin with, it was like the kids: better at my place than on the streets. I don’t have to like every one of them. I don’t even have to pay much attention. Furniture’s my job. So a woman needs sometimes, occasionally… a place. She comes occasionally.”

Dina gave Rosemary a clear, uncommitted look.

“And you … don’t even necessarily have to like every one of them,” Rosemary said quietly.

“They come in. They…”

“The way I did,” Rosemary said.

“Yes… like that.”

“And you say, ‘up to you.’”

“Mostly.”

One of many. Like the kids. Well, what else could be true?

“What does Grace want now?” Rosemary asked.

“What she’s always wanted and got: some repairs and refinishing,” Dina said. “One day her husband’s going to get impatient. One day…”

“Can’t you stop her? Can’t you tell her you don’t want…”

“She knows that. Nobody wants Grace Hill. There are people like that.”

“You feel sorry for her,” Rosemary said.

“I don’t really care.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“I’m only sorry she’s the way she is. She’s a mistake.”

“Will she come whether you tell her she can or not?”

“I never tell her she can.”

Rosemary had been kneading Dina’s palm with her thumb, and now she felt Dina shift slightly in the chair. Rosemary moved her hand so that it rested lightly on Dina’s arm. She did not want Dina to move away.

“Sal and Dolly are always saying to me, “You’ll get more than you bargained for with that one.’”

“Have they said that about me?” Rosemary asked.

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought ‘less.’”

“Who was right?”

“No one.” Dina said. “Do you understand me? Do you understand what I say?”

“Partly,” Rosemary said. “It’s always harder to understand something important when it has to do with me, too, with how I feel and what I want.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“I wish you wouldn’t see her at all. I wish you’d stay here to avoid her.”

Dina shook her head. “I can stop her. I feel guilty about it. And worried. She doesn’t like Peter Fallidon. He wouldn’t lend her money. Now she wants to start some kind of scandal. I can’t stop her at more than one thing at a time.”

“What kind of scandal could she start about Peter?”

“He likes boys,” Dina said. “It’s ridiculous. Men do like boys.”

“You don’t mean he’s homosexual.”

“She would put it that way.”

“But Harriet Jameson…”

“Do you think he’s interested in Harriet?” Dina asked.

“Well, they’re together a lot,” Rosemary said. “No one would pay any attention to a rumor like that, Dina. They’d be crazy to.” As she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. “And, anyway, you can’t ruin your own life to protect someone else from a rumor.”

“It’s not a matter of ruining my life really. I just don’t like her much.”

“Would she try to hurt you?”

“Me? How? There’s nothing to hurt. I don’t owe anyone any money. I’m my own boss.”

“You think Feller might…”

“He might hurt her. He might throw her out finally. She wouldn’t know what to do.”

“He’s got the children to think of.”

“Yes,” Dina said. “She’s not as bad a mother to them as she claims, but she’s not good.”

“Peter could simply say he’d refused to lend her money.”

“Well …” Dina said, and then she reached out and took Rosemary’s chin in her hand. “If you ever don’t much like me, you’ll tell me. Yes? Then I’ll go.”

“That’s not my problem, darling, and I can’t imagine that it ever would be. Am I supposed to say the same thing to you?”

“You’re my friend.”

Rosemary understood now what Dina meant by that. She was singular for Dina that way, not simply another of the women, another of the kids, who left themselves like pieces of furniture to be repaired and renewed at George’s. Rosemary was, at the same time, reassured and inhibited by that knowledge, for what set her apart from the others for Dina also seemed to require that she accept Dina’s sexual isolation. That was impossible, for the more familiar Dina became with Rosemary’s needs and desires, the more obsessed Rosemary was with Dina’s aloof body.

“Why don’t you spend the night?” Rosemary asked.

“I don’t sleep in front of anyone,” Dina said.

Rosemary laughed. “You have such a funny, exact way of saying things sometimes.”

“Because English is my second language and I don’t have a first,”

“That’s the way you think about women, too, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think about women much,” Dina said, turning an amused look at Rosemary.

“It’s dangerous to be so arrogant, Dina Pyros.”

It was such a clear, clearly defined face, like a landscape in the high, bright light of day. Rosemary took Dina’s head in her hands with desires she was not allowed.

“It’s dangerous to be anything else,” Dina said.

“There is something faintly ridiculous about any relationship that’s a matter of choice,” Ida said.

She and Carl were sitting out on Ida’s front terrace, watching the late sun on the sea.

“Essentially ridiculous,” Carl said. “And what relationship isn’t a matter of choice?”

“Blood relationships.”

“Do you think so? Amelia and Beatrice didn’t have to live together.”

“No, but they didn’t have to decide to in any public sort of way either. Why
essentially
ridiculous?”

“Because what we need of each other is, I suppose,” Carl said.

“What I need is to look proud rather than foolish.”

“And surely that’s ridiculous.”

“I suppose so, but there it is.”

“Do you mean that you’d marry me if it didn’t make you look foolish?”

“I mean I can’t get past that difficulty to consider any of the real and serious problems. There may be a good many.”

“Getting married is really a very temporary embarrassment. We could do it somewhere else.”

“Yes, there’s that.”

“Ida?”

“Yes?” She turned to him.

“I would make you proud.”

“I know you would. That’s what makes me feel so foolish. What would that make of the pride I’ve pretended all these years? I’m sorry to behave like a schoolgirl. Give me a month, Carl. I will think, and then we’ll discuss it seriously.”

“All right.”

“Essentially ridiculous,” Ida repeated, as she might have a line of poetry for the pleasure of hearing it again.

A
GATE, IN AN ANKLE-LENGTH
orange shift and barefooted, opened the door to Harriet Jameson in day-old seersucker with an armload of books.

“What a glorious color!”

“The house needs cheering up,” Agate said. “Could you talk to me for a couple of minutes before you go up?”

“Certainly.”

Harriet put the books on the stairs and then followed Agate down the corridor, expecting to be led into the kitchen. Did Peter think Agate’s refusal to wear uniforms vulgar? Harriet wasn’t easy with the term, applied to Agate. Flamboyant, certainly, and native to some other climate, but Agate wasn’t ample in the way of
National Geographic
islanders or peasants. Her frame was large, as were her gestures, as if she might be used to living on the stage, an opera singer, and the material that fell from her shoulders was expensively bright. Even her bare feet, long and high-arched, had style.

“Let’s sit in here,” Agate said, turning into the library.

Harriet was surprised at the ease with which Agate took Miss A’s chair. The jars of cream, nail scissors, and book on the table by it obviously belonged to Agate.

“It’s about the diaries,” Agate said. “We’ve got to stop her reading them.”

“Why?”

“They’re making her sick.”

“She has phlebitis,” Harriet said.

“She has an enlarged and heavy heart.”

“Why do you think it’s the diaries?”

“They make her relive a lot of things no one should have to go through more than once. They make her think about things she can’t do anything about.”

“How do you know that, Agate? Does she talk about them?”

“Some,” Agate said. “She doesn’t have to. I just have to look at her after she’s spent a couple of hours with them.”

“Surely, if she wanted to stop reading them, she could.”

“She’s hung up about them. She thinks she’s got to. I want to burn them.”

“They may be very important records,” Harriet said.

“For some timid gossip two generations from now who wants to be known as a local historian? Who cares? They’re killing the old lady.”

“Surely that’s an exaggeration. It’s…”

“She loved that bitch of a woman, Harriet.”

Harriet started at the use of her Christian name. “Who?”

“Beatrice. God knows why. But she did.”

“Beatrice Larson was a witty, handsome, great lady,” Harriet said.

“She was a bitch.”

“Why are you saying that, Agate, when you didn’t even know her? Of course Miss A loved her. She’s still grieving. Miss B hasn’t been dead for more than seven or eight months.”

“All right. Let her grieve—without visual aids.”

“Why would you get that impression of Miss B? Whoever has talked about her like that? I can’t imagine.”

“No one. Couldn’t you take a look at one of the diaries? Maybe if you saw one, you’d see what I mean.”

“You haven’t been reading them, have you?” Harriet asked, amazed.

“You and Cole! What difference does it make?”

“A great deal.”

“All right. I’ve read a page or two while I’ve been putting them away. That’s all it takes. Do you want to know the kinds of things I think make Miss A unhappy? Beatrice says things like, ‘Sister is so simply grotesque,’ and ‘Some of us have to be grateful there are cripples who need us,’ and…”