Against the Season (18 page)

“Not really,” Harriet said quietly.

“They aren’t things she probably didn’t know anyway, but…”

“Not really.”

Harriet stared at the chair, now moved back from the comfortable circle, in which Miss B had always sat, and she tried to recall the presence of the elder Miss Larson, the tones in her voice. Sometimes what she said to her sister, repeated, could have sounded cutting or cruel, but the tone of her voice tempered everything with love, until last year when her speech began to go, of course.

“The way she wrote it down,” Harriet said, “it might seem to have a different tone from the one she intended.”

“So why not get rid of them?” Agate said. “Cole thought you might be able to persuade her…”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you try?”

“I’ll do what I can,” Harriet said, getting up.

She walked slowly back down the hall, picked up the books, and started up the long stairs, pausing to look out at the rose garden, the paler blooms bright in the summer evening. Why hadn’t she encouraged Miss A to burn them in the first place? “Some shy gossip two generations from now” or right now. Harriet had been curious. If all inner thoughts were not irritated or bitter, self-defeating or self-righteous, certainly enough of them would be to make the few good revelations small compensation. Miss B had been a bitter woman. The pride, the wit, the handsomeness made you think of her differently, that was all.

“Is that you, Harriet?”

“Yes,” Harriet called, hurrying then.

“I thought I heard you come in earlier,” Amelia said, as Harriet crossed the room to greet her.

“Yes. I stopped a minute to talk with Agate. I hadn’t really got to know her well enough to know what kinds of books she might like to read.”

“I’m afraid she doesn’t get much time to read. I have too much.”

“Are you still reading the diaries?” Harriet asked to that easy opening.

“Off and on,” Amelia said.

“They trouble you.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Then why go on? She wanted you to burn them.”

“I couldn’t catch her tone,” Amelia said. “There isn’t any point in thinking now about what else one might have done twenty, thirty, forty years ago.”

“No point at all.”

“She was my right arm. I was her lame leg. She always claimed she needed one, that I could have got along quite well without it. I never knew how to imagine such alternatives. I knew what she meant about herself, of course. Well…”

“What did she mean?” Harriet asked.

“That being whole and handsome can be harder. I see that. It’s probably easier to learn not to use the excuse you’ve got than to be born without one.”

“Excuse?”

“For lack of courage. For self-indulgence. I could think, from the time I was a child, every time I climbed a flight of stairs, ‘There, I haven’t indulged myself.’ My father even thought I was developing a kind of smugness. Pride for Sister was harder. She tried to be proud of loving me, but that got tangled with a failure of nerve, need. Perhaps all relationships have something of that in them.”

Harriet watched the mindless activity of Amelia’s hands as she talked. They moved lightly up and down her arms, following the routes of otherwise ignored pain.

“Do stop reading them,” Harriet said.

“No,” Amelia said simply. “By now I’ll finish them.”

There was no more Harriet could say. She could only distract Amelia with other topics for the hour of her visit.

“Did you persuade her?” Agate asked, as she let Harriet out the door.

“No,” Harriet said. “And I’m sorry. It’s something she has to do.”

Agate made no comment.

Though Agate liked the library in the evening, she had discovered the attic as a daytime retreat when Miss A was resting and there was nothing urgent to do in the kitchen. Occasionally she wandered among the furniture and boxes on the dance floor. One morning she found a trunk full of hats that must have gone back to Mrs. Larson’s youth, and she entertained herself with trying them on. She looked at old photographs, too, and from those in Miss A’s room Agate could identify some of the faces. She could also identify a man who must have been Rosemary Hopwood’s father, And there were a number of pictures of Ida Setworth as a girl and young woman, a bump of a nose and an amount of embarrassing hair, often arm-linked with Beatrice, who had been beautiful, even in those comic styles and slightly out of focus. But sometimes Agate did not explore. She sat on the turret bench, high in the morning light, and watched the society of birds. One morning, as she shifted her unaccustomed weight awkwardly to stand up, the seat gave slightly. Examining it, she saw that it opened, not up on hinges, but across on notched slides. It did not move easily, but she got it open far enough to be able to put a hand down into the storage space underneath, and there, one by one, she retrieved the six missing diaries. Here, anyway, were six years Miss A didn’t have to live through again. And the thought of being able to burn them somewhat eased the frustration of not being able to get the others away from Miss A. Agate took them down to her own room, intending to dispose of them when she next used the incinerator in the basement, but, as Miss A had done before her, Agate glanced at a few pages before she put them away in a drawer.

May 16, 1913
: I have told Papa today that I want to go to the Seminary. He is pleased, though the decision comes two years late by his calendar. I don’t know how I can leave. I know I must.

October 12, 1913
: There is no pleasure in this martyrdom of self-exile. There is no good reason for it, either. I paint flowers on paper, on canvas, on china. I have no gifts, except social malice, which is more useful to me here than at home. This morning, walking under the medicinal eucalyptus, I saw a girl with a withered arm and further along, by the bridge, I wept.

December 2, 1913:
I will go home for Christmas. Papa has sent the boat ticket. It is easy to lie in letters. Perhaps I will not find it difficult even when I see them all. I am learning a kind of indifference in any particular moment. There is, among these unimportant strangers, at least an absence of guilt and shame.

December 24, 1913:
Ida and I walked along the seawall today, the first time I have been away from Sister for more than a few minutes. A cruel choice, I think. Ida admires my independence, knowing nothing about it. Why have I all the opportunities other people envy and might use? When we got back, Bill Hopwood had come to call. He’s in a restless depression. Like me, who enjoys pain, he invents it to endure it.

“Sick,” Agate said, pushing aside some underwear and dropping the books into the drawer.

But, as she was fixing lunch, she thought about Beatrice Larson and wondered why she was so archly self-pitying and self-lacerating. The entries, specifically silly, confessional only in generalities, would never reveal what she felt shamed and guilty about. Probably there was nothing. Did Miss A know, or did she wonder? Was she reading to find clues? There was nothing. Born that way. It was hard to imagine a masochistic baby. A bad subject.

“You know, you’ve got two fortunes in hats up there in the attic,” Agate said as she gave Miss A her lunch tray.

“You’ve found the attic, have you?”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“One day soon all that has to be cleared out,” Amelia said.

“Have you looked at them recently?”

“No,” Amelia said.

“Wait a minute.”

Agate left the room. When she returned, she was wearing a huge hat, crowned with large bunches of violets, the color of the shift she had on, but she carried herself with such dignified theatricality that she might have been about to christen a ship or welcome royalty.

“That’s my mother’s,” Amelia said, smiling; however, Mrs. Larson had never worn it that way, being, though not unnaturally balanced, as dependent on solid ground as Amelia was.

“But there’s a really wild one,” Agate said, and she stepped back into the hall out of Amelia’s sight for a moment. “How do you like this?”

Her head was alive with parrot feathers.

“Good heavens!” Amelia said, laughing.

“Oh, you chicken reel,” Agate sang, “how you make me feel. Say, it’s really so entrancing who could ever keep from dancin’.” And she certainly couldn’t, inventing between Charleston and cakewalk. “Put all the other fine selections right away. That am the only tune I want to hear you play. Keep on playin’ chicken reel all day!”

Amelia was wiping the tears from her eyes.

“But you haven’t seen anything yet,” Agate promised.

The show of hats continued, Agate pacing carefully so that her performance would not really tire Miss A.

“I could swear that was Aunt Setworth’s,” Amelia said. “But what would it be doing in our attic?”

“Did Aunt Setworth have a real nose?”

“No more than Ida.”

“Then it can’t be her hat.”

“There, now that’s Sister’s. How can it be so funny now? She was beautiful in it.”

“She,”
Agate said, with great haughtiness, “was beautiful in anything,” dropped out of sight and turned up again in crushed tulle and smashed velvet, tying a shredded bow under her chin, “even bottom-of-the-trunk.”

“Oh dear,” Amelia said, struggling to catch her breath. “You really should be on stage, Agate.”

“I am,” Agate said, taking the hat off. “Most of the time.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I like it. It’s where everybody ought to stay. This one really ought to be burned.”

“Yes,” Amelia agreed.

“And while I’m at it, why don’t I start getting rid of Miss B’s life work here.”

“I haven’t finished with those,” Amelia said.

“Some of them you have.”

“You know, they aren’t all here. You haven’t, looking around up there, found any more?” Amelia asked.

“If I had, I wouldn’t tell you,” Agate said, taking the lunch tray.

“Why not?”

“Just an excuse to stay in bed another week. I’m getting you up on Friday.”

“I hope so,” Amelia said, doubtful.

“By the way, who was so hung up on Dickens?”

“My mother,” Amelia said.

“All the pages are cut. I couldn’t believe it. The only thing anyone read in my grandmother’s library was
Godey’s Lady’s Book.”

“And where did you learn ‘Chicken Reel,’ for heaven’s sake?”

“On a crank-up Victrola in our attic. His Master’s Voice.”

A funny mixture of things, that child. If Sister had still been alive, Agate would have killed her, up there in the attic among all the old hats and private papers, down in the study, leafing through Mama’s Dickens. If she found the diaries, she might very well not tell Amelia. Would she read them? She’d discover nothing but the terrible, ordinary pain of a homesick girl or the uncertain bitter sanity of a middle-aged spinster in menopause. Which Amelia already knew.

“Agate?” Amelia called after the girl.

“Yes’m?”

“It’s a good idea. Why don’t you and Cole start burning them?”

“Tonight,” Agate called back, and then Amelia heard her singing, “I got life! life! life!”

“How did you get her to agree?” Cole asked, as they had supper in the kitchen.

“I gave her a hat show,” Agate said.

“A hat show?”

“That’s right.”

“The ones she hasn’t read as well?” Cole asked, giving up, as he so often did with Agate, any attempt to understand her explanations.

“Well, some of them. We haven’t negotiated the whole lot, but I don’t think there will be any problem once we get going. We’re going to burn up old Sister Bitch, what do you think of that?”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep calling her that,” Cole said, but resignedly.

“Admit it. You didn’t like her, did you?”

“I really did. She was funny… in a dry sort of way.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Well, sarcastic, the way you are.”

“And I don’t crack you up all that often. Why should she?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cole said. “Do you know that Greek ship went out last night? One of the sailors wasn’t on it.”

“Jumped ship?” Agate asked, interested.

“I guess so.”

“Did you know him?”

“Not really. He was down at Nick’s a lot, is all.”

“Would Nick help him?” Agate asked. Cole had told her enough about Nick’s to make her curious and also determined to go there once Miss A was well enough to be left alone for an evening.

“I don’t think so. Nick’s a pretty tough guy. And he wouldn’t want to get mixed up with the law.”

“So where would he go?”

“I don’t know. He’s just a kid. I mean, he’s a couple of years younger than we are. He doesn’t even really speak English.”

“That makes it kind of rough.”

“Yeah,” Cole said. “I wondered if he’d go to Dina.”

“She’s the one who has the furniture place?”

“Yeah. She’s Nick’s cousin, but she doesn’t speak Greek either. Still, there’s always a bunch of kids around her place, and she’s not all that particular about things… grass and that sort of thing; so maybe she’d help him. But I don’t see what he thought he could do.”

“Can’t even score very well without English,” Agate said.

“I suppose he’ll get picked up in a couple of days.”

“Poor kid.”

“Yeah,” Cole said.

Increasingly, they had moments of this kind of simple agreement, basic loyalties they shared, no matter how at war their styles. They went upstairs when they had finished cleaning up in a harmony of purpose to begin the task of burning the diaries.

“Not those,” Amelia said, on Cole’s second trip. “Those are the later ones I haven’t read, aren’t they?”

“This one,” Cole said, fishing a diary out of the box, “is 1926.”

“Oh. Then you must have taken the other box down already.”

“Shall I get it?” Cole asked. “Agate’s just starting the fire.” Amelia smiled, shaking her head. “She shifted the boxes. She will have her way, won’t she?”

“I can stop her,” Cole said, turning quickly.

“Don’t. She’s right.”

Down in the basement, Agate was working fast to make a fire of those last years. By the time Cole arrived with the final box, she had got rid of most of them.

“You weren’t supposed to burn those,” Cole said.