Against the Season (8 page)

“Forty-six.”

“Do you think you’re too old to marry?”

“Of course,” Rosemary said, “and not in the least interested in the idea, I never have been.”

“Neither have I,” Ida said. “But at the age of seventy-eight, I’m considering it. Please laugh.”

Rosemary did not. She sat, widely dark-eyed, and waited.

“I may marry Carl Hollinger.”

“Carl Hollinger?”

“He’s lonely. He’s a good man. He suggested the idea as sensible. I don’t think it is. In fact, I can’t imagine it, but I find, as the days pass, that I’m trying to.”

“Do you want to, Ida? Do you love him?”

“I’m upset by the absurdity of it.”

“What’s absurd about it?” Rosemary asked.

“Beatrice could have told you.”

“Beatrice is dead,” Rosemary said. “And I never really did like her sense of humor.”

“I depended on it,” Ida said. “If you’ve had to be, all your life, a quaint little bag of bones in a graveyard, the best sort of friend is one who thinks it’s funny.”

“Oh, Ida…”

“She also knew her kind of beauty—and yours—were bad jokes.”

“Beatrice Larson was a bitter old woman,” Rosemary said.

“Yes,” Ida agreed. “But she knew how to laugh,”

“Marry him,” Rosemary said.

“I don’t know,” Ida said. “I don’t know.”

A
MELIA WAS AT HER
desk late Friday afternoon, waiting for Rosemary and Agate to arrive. Below her in the side garden Cole, in a pair of modest trunks, lay stricken in the sun for vanity rather than pleasure. If she had thought he would stay there long, she might have suggested that he move, though she doubted that the pale-bodied boy would excite any interest in the drug-peddling, angry young mother-to-be she was about to interview. Amelia was not apprehensive. She was distracted and heavy with the diaries she had been reading. Her first method, reading through sixty-three Mays, had been arbitrary and frivolous, giving her little of Sister but her hatred of roses and chronic spring envies. So Amelia had started again at the beginning. Those first years, like the first years of any life, passed quickly, but now she was in distended adolescence, and she began to realize what a long life Sister had had of roses and relatives. It depressed her, but she felt, by now, committed to the task, as she had been committed to living with Beatrice through all those years the first time. Why? She couldn’t explain it to herself except as moral perversity: love.

“Miss A?” she heard Kathy call, though she hadn’t heard the bell. “Miss A?”

“Are they here?” Amelia answered.

“Miss A?” The calling was urgent.

Amelia hoisted herself up from her desk and turned on her good leg. “What is it, Kathy?”

“Miss A?”

Amelia could not hurry. She had to move at the same pace to dinner or disaster. As she crossed the hall, she knew Kathy had stopped calling because she could hear Amelia coming toward the kitchen. There Kathy stood, leaning on the kitchen table, water streaming down her legs.

“It’s all right, child,” Amelia said. “The sac’s broken, that’s all.”

“What will I do?”

“Sit down.”

“I can’t. I…”

“Yes you can,”

“I have to clean it up. I have to clean myself up.”

“You have to sit down,” Amelia said, reaching her and steering her to a wooden chair. “There’s nothing wrong, except it’s time.”

“It’s not supposed to do that,” Kathy said.

“It’s just one of the ways, one of nature’s ways,” Amelia said. “Now you stay there, and I’ll call Cole.”

“No, no, don’t call Cole!”

“He’ll get the car,” Amelia said. “By that time you’ll be fine. We’ll just get some towels. You’ll be fine.”

“It’s not supposed to do that,” Kathy repeated, tears of fear and embarrassment beginning to brighten her eyes.

“Yes it is,” Amelia said. “The sac has to break some time. This is one of the times. Now just sit there.”

Amelia crossed the hall again and went to the study window. “Cole? Pull on some trousers and a shirt and get the car. It’s time to take Kathy to the hospital.”

The abruptness of his response belied the relaxation of his pose. He was out of the lawn chair like something released and nearly collided with Amelia as she crossed the hall again.

“What shall I do?” he asked.

“Just what I said,” Amelia said. “Quietly and calmly.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes, she’s all right. The sac’s broken, and that’s a little uncomfortable. That’s all. When you’ve got some clothes on, get a bath-mat and some towels and put them on the back seat of the car before you bring it round.”

Back in the kitchen, Amelia found Kathy trying to clean up the floor.

“Kathy, I told you to sit down. Now don’t be silly.”

Amelia went to the phone and called the hospital. Then she tried to reach Rosemary at the unwed mothers’ home, but she and Agate had already left; so Amelia took a piece of kitchen note-paper and wrote a message to be left on the front door. Kathy sat, a fist in her mouth to keep herself quiet.

“Can I put on another skirt?”

“Of course.”

Cole brought the car right to the bottom of the front steps and opened both the back and front doors. Then he stopped to tie his tennis shoes, his hands shaking, the tic in his cheek leaping. He was surprised to see Kathy coming through the front door the shape he’d grown accustomed to. He had half imagined that there in the kitchen she was slowly going down like a balloon while he tore on clothes and floundered downstairs in danger of his flying laces. He could see that she had been crying, and he suddenly felt sorry for her in a way that hadn’t occurred to him before in her gentle, slow-moving dullness. She must be frightened much more importantly than he was, who was only concerned about his own clumsiness. Without deciding to, he went up the stairs, put an arm around her waist, the other under her arm, helped her down the stairs and into the back seat, strewn with ill-matching towels. Amelia was tacking a note to Rosemary on the door. Cole returned for her, waiting two steps down for her hand on his shoulder. As soon as he felt that weight, he took a slow step down, then another, teetering a little as he always did when he couldn’t move at the pace his own balance dictated, but behind him Amelia was as steady as she was unbalancing. Once at the car, she helped herself in.

“All right now?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Yes, it’s stopped, I think,” Kathy said.

“Now, once you’re there and they admit you, I’ll go on up to the waiting room, and, as soon as you’re settled, I’ll be right there.”

“Oh, Miss A, you don’t have to …”

“I’ll be right there.”

“But you’re expecting Miss Hopwood and the new girl. You’re…”

“I’ve left them a note. They can come any day.”

“But who’s going to cook supper?”

“There probably won’t be anyone home to eat it,” Amelia said.

“I can cook,” Cole offered. “I make great scrambled eggs.”

He was a careful, sometimes even slightly nervous driver for all that he loved the stock car races, and now that his intense moment of pity for Kathy had passed, he was aware of the pulsing nausea in his guts. He braked too hard at the edge of the street, and then the car stuttered slightly into the turn.

“We’re not in any desperate hurry, Cole,” Amelia said, to reassure him. “There’s plenty of time.”

“Is the baby all right in there without the water?” Kathy asked.

“Oh yes,” Amelia said. “Just beginning to learn to live on dry land.”

Dry land: but Cole saw it like something trapped in a collapsed balloon, a fish flipping, snapping itself in two, dashing itself against the rocky bone of pelvis. His own stomach lurched, and he remembered reading in anthropology about a tribe in which the men lay in bed, writhing in sympathetic labor, while the women delivered their babies squatting in the fields. And he felt stupidly frightened, ignorant of all the simple facts of life. Was Cousin A telling the truth? Was it all right? Or was it like a fish, dying in there, as he drove, on the fleshy shores of her womb? The images had the quality of hallucination: he was running down the pink and blood-pooled shore toward a baby, flipping and twisting itself, and he must get to it quickly, pick it up, and hurl it back into the sea. Or he was pulling to get the creature out, out of the cavern of her flesh, and how could it come, wedged there, without the tearing of limbs, the crushing of head?

“Take F Street,” Amelia suggested unnecessarily.

“It feels sort of funny, Miss A.”

“I know. It will now, but it’s all right. Look, there’s Dina, putting Harriet’s chest on the trunk. Give her a honk, Cole.”

Dina looked up, saw the Larson car, saw Kathy in the back, and waved. She stood on the deck of the truck and watched the car out of sight, her hand moving from her hip to her belly, where she could feel the gathering of her own wasted blood. Then she turned back to the rope in her hand and tied the chest down. Harriet Jameson had said she could be home at five thirty to receive it. When Dina looked up again, Rosemary Hopwood was driving by with a remarkably good-looking girl sitting beside her. Neither of them looked up, but Rosemary must have seen Dina, who wanted to call out some greeting or at least make some gesture, though she was in the habit of making no first move. It had been a very long week since she had poured those glasses of ouzo, Grace Hill only making it longer. Answering a need in women had for years seemed to Dina simply a way of answering a minor need of her own, a quieting of the guilt she felt about a mother and sisters who worked the fields their men had died in through serial wars with the Andartes. She did not remember any of them, nor had she ever learned the language they spoke. It would have done no good to write to them anyway, since they could not read. She gave money to Nick, who mailed a check every month to the Greek head of the family, their shared grandmother.

So what did it matter whether Rosemary Hopwood came back or not? If she needed to, she would. If not, there was no point. But, surely, if a woman needed that once, she needed it more than once.

“You take her, Dina,” Sal had said only an hour after Dina had taken her, “and you’ll get more than you bargained for. A woman like that.”

Less, Dina would have said now if she did say anything about it. Rosemary had not even telephoned. But Dina did not really talk with anyone. It was not her way. Less.

She got down off the truck and went back into the shop.

“I’m closing up,” she said. “I have to make a delivery.”

Three of the kids got up at once, and, seeing that the fourth was not going to move without encouragement, they pulled him to his feet and led him away, floating vaguely after them like an uncertain kite. Dina shook her head after them. A little grass never hurt anyone, but that kid was on other things. Too bad. Pain around here—what grew and broke in a kid—could be deadly dull.

Harriet Jameson lived in one of the old houses that had been converted into apartments. Her partitioned-off drawing room was as close as she could get to the serene security the Larson house had always represented for her. And gradually she was furnishing it with pieces Dina found for her. Now for the first time she would have something that had actually come from the Larson house. Dina knew how much that meant to Harriet, and she had taken pains with her mending and refinishing.

“It’s nice of you to have done it so quickly,” Harriet said as she let Dina in.

The wall she had chosen for it made no comfortable sense, forcing a line-up of couch and chairs, but it was the only honoring wall where the chest could be displayed.

“Do you think that’s right, Dina? Do you think that’s where it should go?”

“Looks fine,” Dina said, stepping back.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“A nice piece,” Dina agreed.

“Will you have a drink with me?” Harriet asked. “I feel as if I should celebrate in some way.”

“Thanks,” Dina said.

“Maybe I should phone Miss A first, just to tell her it’s here.”

“She’s not home,” Dina said. “She and Cole have taken Kathy to the hospital.”

“So soon? Is Kathy all right?”

“I don’t know. I just saw them driving past as I was loading the truck.”

“I wonder if I should phone the hospital.”

Dina made no suggestion.

“Well, let’s have a drink first.”

There was always something a little nervous about Harriet in her own apartment, as if, though she had actually lived there for some five years, it was all new to her: the space, the furniture, the hospitable rituals. It was remarkable to Dina that Peter Fallidon would come here, sit in this old maid’s parlor as she sat, and not only endure but apparently enjoy Harriet’s slightly ungainly fluttering. Dina liked Harriet, approved of her genuine and ordinary kindness, the pleasures she took in what other people might hardly notice, her earnest cheerfulness. But there was also a sexless prissiness about her which made it hard for Dina to enjoy her company for long or to imagine any man in it at all, particularly a man like Peter Fallidon, who, though carefully formal, gave the impression of being firmly in check rather than cold. He couldn’t relax here surely. But Dina often did not understand the pairing of people, as she did not understand her own singleness going on so long, while she waited for a mythical Greek to come and claim her and her dowry. Out of a land of widows and children, she expected still that at least one had not been slain in those fields, would come down out of the mountains, perhaps, to cross the sea, and he would not be unlike Peter Fallidon in arrogance and formality, in dark good looks. But he would be Greek. No Greek would choose a bony butterfly like Harriet Jameson.

“I’m sorry, there’s only gin,” Harriet said.

“That’s fine,” Dina said, though for her it was like drinking perfume. It would not do to refuse. “Thank you.”

“I wonder if that is the right wall for it,” Harriet said, standing away and then going over to the chest. “You’ve done beautiful work on it, Dina. Whatever made you decide to get into your kind of business?”

“I took shop in school,” Dina said.

“Shop?”

“I already knew how to cook, as much as I wanted to. I didn’t want to sew. So I asked to take shop.”