The Hearth and Eagle (61 page)

Then the back door slammed, and Walt shambled around the corner of the house toward her. He wore dirty blue jeans, an antique pea-jacket, and a blue officer’s cap with gold insignia, pushed way back on his coarse, grizzling hair. He had won the cap shooting craps with the mate on Eleanor’s steam yacht and he wore it incessantly. What with Hesper’s good cooking and his continual drinking he had put on weight since he came home, and his jowls and paunch and sardonic humor suggested a joviality that fooled strangers.

“Carla just phoned,” he said brusquely to his mother, shifting a quid of tobacco to his cheek. “Coming down on the afternoon train, wants to stay a spell. Seemed upset. Says you’ve got to help her. Reckon she’s ducking out on something.”

Hesper sighed. Peaceful enjoyment shattered as it always was. Even the prospect of seeing the beloved child could not quite atone.

“I wonder what’s the matter,” she said, rising slowly from the deck chair. “You better meet the train. And for heaven’s sake shave first.”

She walked up the back steps into the great kitchen. Walt followed her. “Carla can take the depot hack,” he said, slumping into the Windsor chair. “I’m not in the mood to get all goddam prettied up.”

Hesper turned and surveyed him. There was a bottle of rum on the floor beside the chair, but he wasn’t drunk yet, just enough to be stubborn.

“Then will you go out to look at the traps?” she asked. “It’d be nice to have lobsters for supper. Carla loves them.”

He hunched his shoulders, scowling, reached around the chair and pulling up the bottle of rum, took a long gulp. Then he spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the fireplace.

Suddenly anger spurted through Hesper. “Get that bottle out of here!” she cried. “Out of my—out of this room. Go make a swine of yourself down along at the harbor like you always do. I won’t have it here.”

He looked up startled; he had not heard her raise her voice in years. She stood tall and straight and very pale, her lips tight and her chin thrown back. His bitter inward-gazing eyes cleared and focused on her.

He gave her a dim replica of his old grin. “Why, Ma,” he said. “You think I’m polluting the house ? This old place has seen plenty of drunks before. Plenty of everything.”

She expelled her breath and the anger left her. Yes, I suppose it has. What’s the use of fussing. You can’t
make
people do anything.

“Well, try to pull yourself together while Carla’s here. I really can’t blame Eleanor....” She sighed. The scandal and near tragedy three years ago had been pretty bad for everybody. Maria had run off with the Portuguese, Sancho Perez, who had once wanted to marry her. Walt had followed and tried to shoot them both. But he had been stopped by the hotel detective before he even got to the room. The papers had been full of it for a day, and then forgotten, hushed up probably by Henry’s money. People forgot so quickly anyway. The waters of life closed overthe hole made by the stone. Unless you were the stone on the bottom, she thought, looking sadly at her son.

He shook his head, and returned her look with a rueful affection. He ran his hand over the stubble on his chin. “Sorry, Ma. I’m a bad boy. I don’t wonder you get riled. You know what?” His voice rose to a mocking singsong. “We’re an old, old family and they run to seed. That’s what I heard one of those lady artists say. She was sketching our house, and she saw me sitting on the stoop. Run to seed, she said, looking at me, Ma. She stole one of the old hand-wrought nails right out of our clapboards too, picked it out with her little pocket knife. You know what else she said?” He gave a muffled hiccup.

“Oh, Walt, get along with you. Go on out to the traps.”

“This lady artist she saw old Cap’n and Martha Manson walking by with their dog, and she said, ‘Aren’t they just precious! The town’s just full of the cutest eccentrics.’ You wouldn’t want me not to be a cute eccentric, would you, Ma ? ”

Suddenly he heaved himself up from the chair. He drained the bottle. “To hell I pitch them all!” He flung the bottle into the trash basket, wiped his mouth on his hand, and slammed out the door.

Hesper turned wearily toward the pantry. Born out of his time, as Evan said that day on the way to the Neck. Walt should be allowed to fight it out with his fists. He should have been the lusty, brawling skipper of a windjammer.

She moved around the old kitchen and the little new one, getting ready for Carla. Dilly came every day now and helped with the work, so there wasn’t much to do. But Dilly always went back to Clifton in the afternoon. Henry and Eleanor couldn’t see that at all. They thought her a stubborn old woman, because she wouldn’t let them provide her with a couple of maids who would sleep in. Their lives were so different that it was hard to make them understand a dread of idleness. Better wear out than rust out, and it was so good to have the house to oneself in the long, quiet evenings. She had finally given up the boarders three years ago at the time of Walt’s trouble, when he came back home. And that had been a relief. The house, without its chattering roomsful of strangers, had grown even nearer to her, an understanding third with herself and Walt. A friend.

She went into the borning room, where she slept now. Wise to move downstairs, the doctor had said, avoid all unnecessary exertion. Henry and Eleanor had been very sweet and worried. They wanted to enlarge the room, to refurnish it. She would let them do nothing except give her a fine hair mattress for the old bedstead, and an easy chair tosupplement the straight ladder-back. In this room, unchanged from the night on which she had borne Walt and her father had died, unchanged before that for all the births and deaths of the long generations, she found support with which to meet the inevitable.

On the wall beside the bed, she had hung Evan’s picture of the house. Nobody, not even Carla, had ever known the story of the picture, and few had seen it, since she jealously guarded the privacy of her room. But Eleanor had, of course, and her amazed curiosity had been hard to quench. “Why, Mother Porterman! What a lovely painting of the house! Where in the world did you get it? It looks almost like a Redlake, only softer somehow. And that looks like E. R. down in the corner!”

“Does it?” asked Hesper. “Someone gave it to me.” And she had changed the subject with a finality that Eleanor could not budge. And Eleanor soon forgot about the picture. She and Henry came seldom to Marblehead these last years. They had not opened “Braeburn” for two summers, had rented a huge villa at Newport instead. Since with the war going on in Europe they couldn’t go abroad. And though no one ever said so, Hesper knew that Marblehead had become painful to Eleanor, because of Walt’s scandal, and because of the trouble with Tony Gatchell. Poor Carla, poor baby, thought Hesper. She had acted a lot older than her scant sixteen years, and had taken the fuss with a kind of dry-eyed suffering that was frightening. It had been very hard for Hesper to side against her with Eleanor’s vehement—and Henry’s more temperate—decrees, but from any sensible angle it was the only thing to be done.

Anyway Tony had immediately ceased to be a menace, for he had gone out West, and had not been in Marblehead these two years. And Carla seemed to recover rapidly, as her elders knew she would. She finished up at Miss Prynne’s school in Boston, she danced and flirted and had beaux and apparently enjoyed the Newport summers. On her brief Thanksgiving and Easter visits to the Hearth and Eagle, she never mentioned Tony’s name.

Hesper, knowing the vagaries of the afternoon train, had timed her preparations, and when she heard the sound of wheels outside she lit the great hearth fire, opened the back door for Carla, and stood waiting. There was unusual hesitance in the girl’s approach. She came in silently, giving Hesper a subdued kiss, then dropped her little suitcase on the floor, and went to stand by the fire, greeting it and the unchanging old room with a wistful half-smile.

“Glad to see you, dear,” said Hesper, watching the little figure with loving amusement. Carla looked a trifle defiant, and altogether pretty. She wore a blue velour suit that matched her eyes, an ivory crêpe de chine blouse and the short string of magnificent pearls Henry had given her for graduation. Her dark hair was puffed out over her ears in the new fashion. The puffs of hair and the embroidered blue velvet toque might have overshadowed her small features, except for the long-lashed gentian eyes, and the rose lipstick which accented the firm little mouth, somewhat to Hesper’s disapproval. But she had kept her disapproval to herself. The girls in Carla’s world used make-up now. And Carla was not vain.

“Are you going to tell me?” asked Hesper, after a minute. “Or shall we start supper. Uncle Walt’s out. I was hoping he’d bring some lobsters, but I guess not.”

Carla made a distracted little gesture. “No, sit down, Marnie, please.” She indicated the rocker, and Hesper complied. Carla flung her hat onto the settle, pulled the three-legged stool from the hearth, and sat beside her grandmother. “I sort of ran away—” she said, staring into the fire. “Mother thinks I’ve gone to visit Betty Walton in Hingham. I had to come here to you and the house. Things are clearer here, and besides—oh, I know there’s honor and self-respect and all that, but you’ve got to understand—” she stopped.

Hesper put her hand on the girl’s soft hair. “I certainly don’t understand anything yet. What
are
you talking about?”

Carla threw back her shoulders and turning her head looked up into her grandmother’s smiling eyes. “I’m talking about Tony.”

Hesper stiffened, and her smile faded. Beyond the unwelcome surprise there was dismay at the tone in which Carla had spoken. A tone of hardness, almost implacability.

“What about Tony? He’s out West at college.”

“No—” said Carla. “He’s back here.”

“Then you’ve been hearing from him! He broke his promise.”

“Promises!” said Carla bitterly. “He didn’t need any promises, he never wanted to see me again, after that night. The shame. The awful things Mother and Father said. Telling him he was after my damn money. Thinking he was—Marnie, you sided with them later. It hurt me terribly. We weren’t doing anything that night, by Castle Rock, when Mother found us. We weren’t even kissing. Tony wouldn’t. He loved me. And they acted as though he...”

“Oh, my dear child!” cried Hesper with shocked pity, for they had all thought Carla too young to understand. “Nobody thought there was anything wrong, at least—You must be fair, dear. You were a little girl not yet sixteen, and Tony was twenty-one. Your parents had to protect you. And when they found you’d been seeing him secretly too.”

“But I had to. Tony didn’t know the way they felt about him. Though he learned all right. They made it ugly. Horrible. And I was so frightened and bewildered that night, I couldn’t speak. I know Tony thought I agreed with them. When I tried to find him next day, he was gone.”

“You didn’t see him again?”

Carla shook her head. “I wrote him one letter. I tried to tell him how I loved him, and if he’d only wait till I got older. Oh, it was terrible to be so
young.
You wouldn’t any of you believe how I felt. Tony didn’t believe. He never answered the letter. I waited and prayed and waited for weeks.”

She got up off the stool and walked back to the fireplace. She took the iron poker and adjusted the logs which had burned through. And there was maturity about this withdrawal.

“How do you know he’s back now?” asked Hesper gently.

“Because I ran into Sam Gerry at the Yale game Saturday, and I asked him if he’d heard of Tony, and he said he’d just come back after finishing up at California Tech. That he was going to M.I.T. this fall.” Yes, thought Hesper. She had heard that Tony had been putting himself through a Western college, training to be an engineer. Though he had been earning good money helping his father in the Burgess Airplane plant, in the years after he finished high school. That trouble with Carla probably did him good, she reflected, spurred him into making something of himself. But she scarcely knew the boy, though she had always liked him, and she dreaded hearing the answer she now saw Carla would give to her next question.

“And what is it you want, Carla?”

The girl leaned the poker on the bricks inside the hearth; she turned with dignity and only her hand clenched in a fold of her skirt betrayed her. “I want to see him again. Oh, I know he may not give two straws about me any more. But I want to see him and then I’ll know. I want you to ask him here, Marnie. Don’t tell him why. I have some pride. If we meet here and there’s nothing—it can be sort of casual.”

“But my dear—are you
sure
you want to see him again? You’ve done very well without him—it seems so foolish.”

Carla’s restraint broke. Her face twisted and the blue eyes upturned to Hesper filled with hot tears. “I haven’t got on without him! Oh, I’ve been to lots of parties, I’ve had fun with other boys, but never one I didn’t wish was Tony. There’s never been a night or a day go by these two years, that I haven’t thought of him.”

Lord, thought Hesper shutting her eyes. This is
real.
Somewhere long ago in this very room, she had had that sudden blinding certainty after a period of disbelief. Over there by the broom closet that led to the pirates’ hidey-hole, the night they rescued the slave girl. She had been forced out of her reluctance—made to recognize fear and danger, and take action about them. Ah, but she was old now and tired of answering other people’s emotional needs. Too tired to stand by and see Carla hurt as she might well be. Heartbreak. I’ve lived through my own, why must I be forced to share in this child’s too?

“Marnie—” whispered the girl. “I’m sorry. Don’t look like that. I can take it, you know. I have guts.”

Hesper started, staring into the small face that had drawn near hers. Not a child’s face but that of an understanding woman.

Hesper’s mouth pulled into a rueful smile. She got up from the rocker and walked to the telephone in the pantry. May God forgive me for a meddlesome old fool, she thought, as she twirled the handle and asked Central to connect her with the Gatchells. God and Eleanor, she added grimly.