The Big Rock Candy Mountain (73 page)

 

It was a curious feeling for Elsa to come down the trail and see Bo and Chet pitching horseshoes beside the inn, with Laura watching. She saw them objectively, as she would see strangers. Bo big and dark, getting a little heavier, his Panama on the back of his head and the diamond glittering in his tie when he turned sideways in the sun; Chet not as tall, but broad, very deep in the chest, his arms heavy and muscular under his rolled-up sleeves. Almost in surprise she thought, “Why, he's really a very handsome boy!” Everything about him looked clean and strong. And there was Laura along. That was getting to be quite a romance—almost too much time spent on one girl.

Laura turned and saw her, waved. The horseshoe pitchers stopped.

“Hi, Ma,” Chet said. “How you feeling?”

She kissed him, then Bo, put out her hand to Laura. “Oof, we've walked a long way,” she said, and sat down on the step to fan herself.

“You're up here for a rest,” Bo said, frowning. “You don't want to overdo it.”

“I'm having a lovely rest,” she said. “How do you two get along at home?”

“I never see this guy from one week's end to the next,” Bo said.

“Oh horse,” Chet said. “I'm home more than you are.”

“Neither one of us wears the place out living in it,” Bo said. “When you going to get well and come home, Mama?”

“I don't know. The doctor said two months, but I feel fine now, rested as can be.”

“You look better, I think,” Laura said. “I noticed it right away. Lots better.”

“Really?” Elsa said. “I'm glad I don't look worse. That would be pretty hard on my family.”

“When do they eat around this place?” Chet said.

“It ought to be pretty quick now. Did you make a reservation?”

“I'd better go do that,” Bo said, but Elsa rose. “I'll do it. I have to go tidy up anyway. You want to come with me, Laura?”

“Sure,” Laura said.

A very quiet girl, Elsa thought. Yet there was something there she vaguely disliked. As if her quiet were put on, as if it wasn't quite her own face she wore. Or maybe the hungry way she looked at Chet, or the very slight dissatisfied wrinkle between her eyes.

While she took off her walking dress Elsa could see her in the mirror. “How's Chet been pitching?” she said. “I don't see the paper very often up here.”

“He's done swell,” Laura said. “He's only lost one game.”

“Fine,” Elsa said with her mouth full of hairpins. She shook her hair down and brushed it hard.

Laura sat with her hands in her lap, nervously swinging her foot. “You've got beautiful hair,” she said.

“It's the one thing I ever had that doesn't seem to fade or wear out,” Elsa said. She looked at Laura in the mirror, saw her hungry eyes, the look almost of weeping around the mouth. “Don't you feel well?” she said, turning.

Laura wet her lips. “Oh yes, I feel all right.”

“I thought for a minute you might be ill,” Elsa said. To her dismay the girl jumped up from the bed and threw her arms around her, her face twisted.

“Oh Mrs. Mason!” she said.

“Why, what is it?”

“I wish I had a mother like you!” Laura said. She buried her face in Elsa's shoulder and clung when Elsa tried gently to break her loose.

“Let's be sensible,” she said. “You have your own mother.”

“But she isn't like you!” Laura wailed. “She's always after me for something, and suspicious of me, and she isn't pretty at all. She's
fat!”

“Well,” Elsa said. “I'm sure she's ...”

“You don't know,” Laura said. She turned and sat on the bed again, dabbing at her averted eyes. She said without looking up, “You just don't know how it is to have a family that's vulgar and bullying. I see how pleasant everything is in your family, and how kind you are, and how they all love you and you love them, and how nice Mr. Mason is, and I can't help it. I wish I had a family like yours.”

“Why you poor child,” Elsa said. The thought of anyone's envy- ing their family life was so wild that she wanted to laugh. “We have to be satisfied with what we have,” she said. “Maybe your mother is tired, or overworked.” She watched Laura's bent head. “Maybe you're poor,” she said. “I know all about that. It's hard to keep pleasant when things go wrong all the time.”

“We aren't poor,” Laura said sullenly. “We have enough. But we're just not kind like you, we don't get along. I don't know why it is.”

“Love is a thing that works both ways,” Elsa said quietly. “We have to give other people a chance to love us before we find them lovable, sometimes.”

Laura stood up and tried to laugh. “I'm silly. I don't know what got the matter with me all of a sudden.”

Elsa went back to putting up her hair, watching the girl in the mirror. She was a rather helpless, pretty thing, and obviously unhappy. But her unhappiness was obscurely annoying too. There was the edge of spite in it, the eagerness to blame someone else for her misery, that would have made one want to shake her if she had been one's own. She turned and faced the girl squarely. “Is it because you're in love with Chet?” she said. “Don't your family like him?”

“Oh, they like him all right.”

“But you
are
in love with him,” Elsa said.

Laura nodded, keeping her head down.

“How does Chet feel about it?”

Laura nodded again, unwilling to meet Elsa's eyes.

Elsa sighed. “There's no reason you shouldn't go together, as long as you aren't foolish about it. When you're both old enough to get married you probably won't even like each other any more, but if you do nobody will try to stop you from marrying in a few years.”

Laura lifted tragic eyes, but said nothing, and Elsa frowned. “You children aren't serious, now?”

Her eyes full of utterly disproportionate terror, Laura pushed herself back on the bed. “I ... that is ... I don't know ...”

Elsa took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Good heavens, don't be afraid of me! I didn't mean to scare you. I just wanted to be sure you and Chet weren't going to be foolish about waiting. Waiting isn't too hard, when you can see each other all the time. Nobody's trying to keep you apart, child.”

“Oh Mrs. Mason!” Laura said, and began to cry. “I'm so unhappy!”

Elsa stood waiting, but the girl said no more, so Elsa said it herself, the words heavy and sodden and hard to lift. “You and Chet haven't got in trouble, have you?”

“No,” Laura said. “Oh no, nothing like that.”

“Well then, everything will turn out all right. You've got your whole lives ahead of you. You shouldn't be unhappy, at your age.”

But she was thinking as they went downstairs that Laura had been playing some kind of double game, had been trying to say something she was afraid to say, and at the same time had been angling for sympathy, trying to ingratiate herself by appearing miserable and picked on, as if to justify that other thing that she hadn't dared to say.

Poor child, she thought automatically. Kids in love gave themselves endless troubles for nothing. But she didn't like the idea of Chet's being involved with this girl as deeply as he apparently was. He was too young, he didn't know enough. She had hardly phrased her automatic pity for Laura before the phrase had twisted itself in her mind into something else: Poor Chet.

 

She watched Chet at dinner, kept glancing up to intercept looks between him and Laura. They did not act like kids out for a good time. They were sober, their eyes and their occasionally-touching hands eloquent of secrets. The thing was obviously serious, but how serious it was hard to tell. But two children like that! she thought. Chet was only seventeen. Still, he was in deep. He wasn't full of horseplay the way he ordinarily was, he hardly laughed at all except with his sly, sidelong look at Laura. There was something brooding and almost deadly in the way the two looked at each other.

Oh Lord! she said, why are they so intent on ruining their own lives?

After dinner Bo was playing the slot machines while Laura and Bruce watched, and she crooked her finger at Chet. As they walked away she felt Laura's eyes on her back. Everything that happened, the slightest incident, was significant to those two, pertinent to some guarded secret of their own.

“Let's sit down,” she said. The mezzanine was empty. The other guests were all out on the porch, their voices a dim buzzing through the doors. Finding it hard to begin, not knowing exactly what she had brought him up here to say to him, Elsa took his hand.

“You've got paws just like your father‘s,” she said. “It doesn't seem any time at all since they were making mud pies.”

Chet said nothing. He waited.

“Chet,” she said. “What about Laura?”

She could feel the stiffness of his body through his hand. His eyes were veiled as if she were an enemy. “What about her?”

“She talked to me a little before dinner, up in my room.”

Instantly there was life in the veiled eyes. “What did she say?”

“What could she have said?”

The eyes went dull again. “I don't know,” he said, and shrugged slightly.

“She said she was in love with you,” Elsa said.

Chet tried to laugh. “Good,” he said. “She never told me that.”

“Oh Chet!” his mother said, and stood up impatiently. “You needn't try to duck and hide from me. I just want to talk to you openly and see if I can't give you some good advice.”

“People are always awful free with advice,” Chet said.

“Have I been?”

“You're always worrying about what time I come in, and stuff like that. You can't get over thinking of me as a kid.”

“I was thinking more about your health than anything else.”

“Oh, my health! I'm healthy as a horse. No guy wants to be mothered and babied around. I've got to grow up sometime.”

“Not too soon,” she said softly. “Not so soon you spoil your whole life by it. I'm not trying to hold you back, Chet. You're old for your age, in some ways. But you're still only seventeen, and you can ruin your life by getting too serious with a girl too soon. I'm just asking you to remember that you aren't really a man till you're twenty-one. Lots of boys aren't till later than that.”

His ears were pink, his brows pulled down in a black frown. At least she had got the mask off him, she thought wearily. But it didn't do any good.

“I can look after myself,” he said. “I know enough to come in out of the rain.” He said it angrily, but he did not quite meet her eyes, and she read him as if he were an eight-year-old trying to bluster his way out of trouble. Underneath that anger he was uncertain and scared. He knew he was in deep.

“We're getting altogether too serious,” she said lightly. “I didn't bring you up here to croak at you. I just wanted to remind you to keep yourself free and clean. If you want to be a ball player you'll have to be free for a few years, Chet.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don't know what got you thinking I wasn't going to be.”

“Laura.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked past her, the dull and sullen look on his mouth. “Shall we go on down again?” he said.

For a moment Elsa looked at him feeling that she wanted to cry. He was just like Bo, as stubborn and immovable as a wall, as unwilling to admit a mistake. What he did was right. It had to be. Out of her anger and irritation came a curious desire to reach out and hug him, but that would have been as embarrassing and bothersome to him as her attempt to give advice. She turned and went downstairs. She did not want to be an interfering mother, but she was determined that if there was anything she could do to prevent his making a fool of himself she would do it, short of actual compulsion.

 

“What about speaking to Bill Talbot about Chet?” she asked Bo out on the porch later. “Couldn't you get him a chance to try out with the Bees? He's been doing so well out in the Copper League.”

“He isn't ready for any Double-A league,” Bo said. “When's he's ready, they'll be after him themselves. Besides, you don't try out in the middle of the summer. They look over the young guys in the spring, in training camp.”

“But ...”

“What do you want him pushed so fast for?” Bo said, irritated. “Let him grow up a little. He'd just blow his chance.”

“Bo,” she said, “I wish you'd talk to Bill, just the same.”

His brows drew down, and he turned to stare. “What's on your mind?”

With her eyes she indicated Chet and Laura leaning over the balcony rail. Chet was pointing at something, and Laura was bent close to him, trying to see. “I think it would do Chet a lot of good to get away from Salt Lake for a while,” Elsa said. “Bill's a good friend of yours. He'd do it for you as a favor. Even if we had to pay Chet's expenses ...”

Bo jerked his head at the oblivious two. “You think ... ?”

“I don't know. I'm afraid they're both pretty far gone.”

“At seventeen!” he said, and snorted through his nose.

“It doesn't do any good to talk to him,” Elsa said. “I've tried. If you tried you'd just make him bull-headed. But if you could get Bill to let him go along with the team, maybe pitch for batting practice or something ...”

“Yeah,” Bo said. “Well, I'll see. But I wouldn't expect too much. Bill's the best judge of when he wants to look anybody over.”