Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (45 page)

‘D’you suppose they’ll revive?’ she asked, holding up the ferns; but Ann Eliza, rising at her approach, said stiffly: ‘We’d better be getting home, Evelina.’

‘Mercy me! Ain’t you going to take your coffee first?’ Mrs Hochmuller protested; and Ann Eliza found to her dismay that another long gastronomic ceremony must intervene before politeness permitted them to leave. At length, however, they found themselves again on the ferry-boat. Water and sky were grey, with a dividing gleam of sunset that sent sleek opal waves in the boat’s wake. The wind had a cool tarry breath, as though it had travelled over miles of shipping, and the hiss of the water about the paddles was as delicious as though it had been splashed into their tired faces.

Ann Eliza sat apart, looking away from the others. She had made up her mind that Mr Ramy had proposed to Evelina in the wood, and she was silently preparing herself to receive her sister’s confidence that evening.

But Evelina was apparently in no mood for confidences. When they reached home she put her faded ferns in water, and after supper, when she had laid aside her silk dress and the forget-me-not bonnet, she remained silently seated in her rocking-chair near the open window. It was long since Ann Eliza had seen her in so uncommunicative a mood.

The following Saturday Ann Eliza was sitting alone in the shop when the door opened and Mr Ramy entered. He had never before called at that hour, and she wondered a little anxiously what had brought him.

‘Has anything happened?’ she asked, pushing aside the basketful of buttons she had been sorting.

‘Not’s I know of,’ said Mr Ramy tranquilly. ‘But I always close up the store at two o’clock Saturdays at this season, so I thought I might as well call round and see you.’

‘I’m real glad, I’m sure,’ said Ann Eliza; ‘but Evelina’s out.’

‘I know dat,’ Mr Ramy answered. ‘I met her round de corner. She told me she got to go to dat new dyer’s up in Forty-eighth Street. She won’t be back for a couple of hours, har’ly, will she?’

Ann Eliza looked at him with rising bewilderment. ‘No, I guess not,’ she answered; her instinctive hospitality prompting her to add: ‘Won’t you set down jest the same?’

Mr Ramy sat down on the stool beside the counter, and Ann Eliza returned to her place behind it.

‘I can’t leave the store,’ she explained.

‘Well, I guess we’re very well here.’ Ann Eliza had become suddenly aware that Mr Ramy was looking at her with unusual intentness. Involuntarily her hand strayed to the thin streaks of hair on her temples, and thence descended to straighten the brooch beneath her collar.

‘You’re looking very well today, Miss Bunner,’ said Mr Ramy, following her gesture with a smile.

‘Oh,’ said Ann Eliza nervously. ‘I’m always well in health,’ she added.

‘I guess you’re healthier than your sister, even if you are less sizeable.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Evelina’s a mite nervous sometimes, but she ain’t a bit sickly.’

‘She eats heartier than you do; but that don’t mean nothing,’ said Mr Ramy.

Ann Eliza was silent. She could not follow the trend of his thought, and she did not care to commit herself farther about Evelina before she had ascertained if Mr Ramy considered nervousness interesting or the reverse.

But Mr Ramy spared her all farther indecision.

‘Well, Miss Bunner,’ he said, drawing his stool closer to the counter, ‘I guess I might as well tell you fust as last what I come here for today. I want to get married.’

Ann Eliza, in many a prayerful midnight hour, had sought to strengthen herself for the hearing of this avowal, but now that it had come she felt pitifully frightened and unprepared. Mr Ramy was leaning with both elbows on the counter, and she noticed that his nails were clean and that he had brushed his hat; yet even these signs had not prepared her!

At last she heard herself say, with a dry throat in which her heart was hammering: ‘Mercy me, Mr Ramy!’

‘I want to get married,’ he repeated. ‘I’m too lonesome. It ain’t good for a man to live all alone, and eat noding but cold meat every day.’

‘No,’ said Ann Eliza softly.

‘And the dust fairly beats me.

‘Oh, the dust – I know!’

Mr Ramy stretched one of his blunt-fingered hands toward her. ‘I wisht you’d take me.’

Still Ann Eliza did not understand. She rose hesitatingly from her seat, pushing aside the basket of buttons which lay between them; then she perceived that Mr Ramy was trying to take her hand, and as their fingers met a flood of joy swept over her. Never afterward, though every other word of their interview was stamped on her memory beyond all possible forgetting, could she recall what he said while their hands touched; she only knew that she seemed to be floating on a summer sea, and that all its waves were in her ears.

‘Me – me?’ she gasped.

‘I guess so,’ said her suitor placidly. ‘You suit me right down to the ground, Miss Bunner. Dat’s the truth.’

A woman passing along the street paused to look at the shop window, and Ann Eliza half hoped she would come in; but after a desultory inspection she went on.

‘Maybe you don’t fancy me?’ Mr Ramy suggested, discountenanced by Ann Eliza’s silence.

A word of assent was on her tongue, but her lips refused it. She must find some other way of telling him.

‘I don’t say that.’

‘Well, I always kinder thought we was suited to one another,
’Mr Ramy continued, eased of his momentary doubt. ‘I always liked de quiet style – no fuss and airs, and not afraid of work.’ He spoke as though dispassionately cataloguing her charms.

Ann Eliza felt that she must make an end. ‘But, Mr Ramy, you don’t understand. I’ve never thought of marrying.’

Mr Ramy looked at her in surprise. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, I don’t know, har’ly.’ She moistened her twitching lips. ‘The fact is, I ain’t as active as I look. Maybe I couldn’t stand the care. I ain’t as spry as Evelina – nor as young,’ she added, with a last great effort.

‘But you do most of de work here, anyways,’ said her suitor doubtfully.

‘Oh, well, that’s because Evelina’s busy outside; and where there’s only two women the work don’t amount to much. Besides, I’m the oldest; I have to look after things,’ she hastened on, half pained that her simple ruse should so readily deceive him.

‘Well, I guess you’re active enough for me,’ he persisted. His calm determination began to frighten her; she trembled lest her own should be less staunch.

‘No, no,’ she repeated, feeling the tears on her lashes. ‘I couldn’t, Mr Ramy, I couldn’t marry. I’m so surprised. I always thought it was Evelina – always. And so did everybody else. She’s so bright and pretty – it seemed so natural.’

‘Well, you was all mistaken,’ said Mr Ramy obstinately.

‘I’m so sorry.’

He rose, pushing back his chair.

‘You’d better think it over,’ he said, in the large tone of a man who feels he may safely wait.

‘Oh, no, no. It ain’t any sorter use, Mr Ramy. I don’t never mean to marry. I get tired so easily – I’d be afraid of the work. And I have such awful headaches.’ She paused, racking her brain for more convincing infirmities.

‘Headaches, do you?’ said Mr Ramy, turning back.

‘My, yes, awful ones, that I have to give right up to. Evelina has to do everything when I have one of them headaches. She has to bring me my tea in the mornings.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Mr Ramy.

‘Thank you kindly all the same,’ Ann Eliza murmured. ‘And please don’t – don’t –’ She stopped suddenly, looking at him through her tears.

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he answered. ‘Don’t you fret, Miss Bunner. Folks have got to suit themselves.’ She thought his tone had grown more resigned since she had spoken of her headaches.

For some moments he stood looking at her with a hesitating eye, as though uncertain how to end their conversation; and at length she found courage to say (in the words of a novel she had once read): ‘I don’t want this should make any difference between us.’

‘Oh, my, no,’ said Mr Ramy, absently picking up his hat.

‘You’ll come in just the same?’ she continued, nerving herself to the effort. ‘We’d miss you awfully if you didn’t. Evelina, she –’ She paused, torn between her desire to turn his thoughts to Evelina, and the dread of prematurely disclosing her sister’s secret.

‘Don’t Miss Evelina have no headaches?’ Mr Ramy suddenly asked.

‘My, no, never – well, not to speak of, anyway. She ain’t had one for ages, and when Evelina
is
sick she won’t never give in to it,’ Ann Eliza declared, making some hurried adjustments with her conscience.

‘I wouldn’t have thought that,’ said Mr Ramy.

‘I guess you don’t know us as well as you thought you did.’

‘Well, no, that’s so; maybe I don’t. I’ll wish you good day, Miss Bunner’; and Mr Ramy moved toward the door.

‘Good day, Mr Ramy,’ Ann Eliza answered.

She felt unutterably thankful to be alone. She knew the crucial moment of her life had passed, and she was glad that she had not fallen below her own ideals. It had been a wonderful experience; and in spite of the tears on her cheeks she was not sorry to have known it. Two facts, however, took the edge from its perfection: that it had happened in the shop, and that she had not had on her black silk.

She passed the next hour in a state of dreamy ecstasy. Something had entered into her life of which no subsequent impoverishment could rob it: she glowed with the same rich sense of possessorship that once, as a little girl, she had felt when her mother had given her a gold locket and she had sat up in bed in the dark to draw it from its hiding place beneath her nightgown.

At length a dread of Evelina’s return began to mingle with these musings. How could she meet her younger sister’s eye without betraying what had happened? She felt as though a visible glory lay on her, and she was glad that dusk had fallen when Evelina entered. But her fears were superfluous. Evelina, always self-absorbed, had of late lost all interest in the simple happenings of the shop, and Ann Eliza, with mingled mortification and relief, perceived that she was in no danger of being cross-questioned as to the events of the afternoon. She was glad of this; yet there was a touch of humiliation in finding that the portentous secret in her bosom did not visibly shine forth. It struck her as dull, and even slightly absurd, of Evelina not to know at last that they were equals.

M
r Ramy, after a decent interval, returned to the shop; and Ann Eliza, when they met, was unable to detect whether the emotions which seethed under her black alpaca found an echo in his bosom. Outwardly he made no sign. He lit his pipe as placidly as ever and seemed to relapse without effort into the unruffled intimacy of old. Yet to Ann Eliza’s initiated eye a change became gradually perceptible. She saw that he was beginning to look at her sister as he had looked at her on that momentous afternoon: she even discerned a secret significance in the turn of his talk with Evelina. Once he asked her abruptly if she should like to travel, and Ann Eliza saw that the flush on Evelina’s cheek was reflected from the same fire which had scorched her own.

So they drifted on through the sultry weeks of July. At that season the business of the little shop almost ceased, and one Saturday morning Mr Ramy proposed that the sisters should lock up early and go with him for a sail down the bay in one of the Coney Island boats.

Ann Eliza saw the light in Evelina’s eye and her resolve was instantly taken.

‘I guess I won’t go, thank you kindly; but I’m sure my sister will be happy to.’

She was pained by the perfunctory phrase with which Evelina urged her to accompany them; and still more by Mr Ramy’s silence.

‘No, I guess I won’t go,’ she repeated, rather in answer to herself than to them. ‘It’s dreadfully hot and I’ve got a kinder headache.’

‘Oh, well, I wouldn’t then,’ said her sister hurriedly. ‘You’d better jest set here quietly and rest.’

‘Yes, I’ll rest,’ Ann Eliza assented.

At two o’clock Mr Ramy returned, and a moment later he and Evelina left the shop. Evelina had made herself another new bonnet for the occasion, a bonnet, Ann Eliza thought, almost too youthful in shape and colour. It was the first time it had ever occurred to her to criticize Evelina’s taste, and she was frightened at the insidious change in her attitude toward her sister.

When Ann Eliza, in later days, looked back on that afternoon she felt that there had been something prophetic in the quality of its solitude; it seemed to distill the triple essence of loneliness in which all her after-life was to be lived. No purchasers came; not a hand fell on the door-latch; and the tick of the clock in the back room ironically emphasized the passing of the empty hours.

Evelina returned late and alone. Ann Eliza felt the coming crisis in the sound of her footstep, which wavered along as if not knowing on what it trod. The elder sister’s affection had so passionately projected itself into her junior’s fate that at such moments she seemed to be living two lives, her own and Evelina’s; and her private longings shrank into silence at the sight of the other’s hungry bliss. But it was evident that Evelina, never acutely alive to the emotional atmosphere about her, had no idea that her secret was suspected; and with an assumption of unconcern that would have made Ann Eliza smile if the pang had been less piercing, the younger sister prepared to confess herself.

‘What are you so busy about?’ she said impatiently, as Ann Eliza, beneath the gas-jet, fumbled for the matches. ‘Ain’t you even got time to ask me if I’d had a pleasant day?’

Ann Eliza turned with a quiet smile. ‘I guess I don’t have to. Seems to me it’s pretty plain you have.’

‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t know
how
I feel – it’s all so queer. I almost think I’d like to scream.’

‘I guess you’re tired.’

‘No, I ain’t. It’s not that. But it all happened so suddenly, and the boat was so crowded I thought everybody’d hear what
he was saying. – Ann Eliza,’ she broke out, ‘why on earth don’t you ask me what I’m talking about?’

Ann Eliza, with a last effort of heroism, feigned a fond incomprehension.