The Wintering (3 page)

“Roy,” she said. “I thought if we had a little talk, we could—” but Roy was backing out of the screen door he had never made a step beyond. He stepped aside to avoid colliding with Almoner.

Roy said, “We pressed your wife a little about her bill, but forget it! She can have all the time in the world to pay.” His words floated back on the departing car's exhaust, while Jessie was still coming to answer the doorbell's summons.

Wide-eyed, she said, “Miss Inga, honey, you come lie down. I'll fix you some nice eye pads and your head won't hurt.”

Amelia was a sliver of face at her own door. “I've never been so embarrassed,” she said, shutting it again.

Jessie waited and then followed the sad drooping hem over its owner's doorsill and shut that door. Almoner made no sound laughing; again, dappled by leaf and shadow and sun as he crossed the porch, he felt confused. Though he was full of sorrow, he could not stop laughing. Moving from the muscadine's shelter and retracing his way across the yard, he retrieved the axe and re-entered the pine copse, where the shade had deepened. Mosquitoes thrust themselves against his ears. Pine needles, except on the bottommost layer of their mat, were dried and warm. What had she been going to do? he wondered, laughing. His mood changed when he thought that she could not have carried anything off and that was sad. And now added to the weight of his afternoon's work and to the weight of his life was knowledge of this new bill. How many times had he come up and gone down those porch steps, he wondered. Leaning on the axe handle, he went back again in memory to the morning when he had come home at the urging of the woman, Sugar, and found his parents dead. Gone: he hesitated over that word even now.

It had been a summer of drought. The pine copse had been scorched and browned. Having been told as little as possible, he had gone to see for himself the thin tire tracks crisscrossing, as if made by an erratic plow, the crumbly dry furrows of cotton land. An old Negro sharecropper living on the edge of the field had told him about the little car coming along travelling too fast. He had said that inside there had been a white man and a white lady, settin' forward like she could make the car go faster, and time they passed a cotton wagon, the car swang out of control and went off acrost a field. Sont ahead two tires, the old man had said, turnt over and burned. He had shaken his head sadly saying, “Another nigger got the tires.”

He had gone back across the field at a walk, not running as he had come, like a boy. The sounds in his brain now as he worked his axe were the old echoes, Ma! Poppa! Jessie had explained how they had covered the countryside, once they discovered he was missing, and had found the farmer who had left him at the highway. They had been on their way to Delton when the accident happened, at that moment of dawn when he had been staring out over the river, solitary and lonesome.

To care for him and for Amelia there had been Jessie, who moved into the house, and old relatives. One by one, the latter had been buried from the house. The grey pall had seemed never to be lifted from the front windows. In despair, he had one summer gone to Europe on a walking trip and stayed long beyond his intended time. Then when he had come back there had been in the house only the three of them, he and Jessie and Amelia, but not the same two he had left. For Amelia had seemed a child then, as frail and crushable as a kitten. But she emerged from puberty an old maid. Male callers, after rising to greet her, were asked to fluff out the pillows again. Continually his comings and goings had been questioned, until he had thought of marriage as an escape, though wide-eyed Southern girls had seemed as empty as Kewpie dolls.

Switzerland had touched him deeply, and there he had spent his longest time at a small pension where cows had been bedded behind the thin walls of his room, their sounds and smells reminiscent of home. (Companionably at sunset, he and Poppa had always driven in their own cows for milking; he had heard again the sounds of Poppa urging them on and of the dull clanking of their bells.) He had seen in the Swiss mountains far-reaching sunsets similar to his own countryside's, and tiny wild flowers, like fallen stars in stubby pasture grass. Soft evenings there had been full of the same enormous country stillness; his past at home had fused with his present there. His time had been spent with the household's youngest daughter, who had chosen his souvenirs, and on whom he had lavished chocolates and lavender sachets. He had written her from home. Yes, she had written back, she remembered him good. He had felt endeared to her not only because she remembered him but because of her misspelled and scrabbled English. Returning to visit, he had brought her back his bride. Now, she was calling at the front window: “Jessie! The shade won't come down!”

Hidden from the road, he watched the descent of the tasselled shade as Jessie darkened the front room. The loneliness of the countryside was all around him and near only grazing cattle. A mourning dove called but another did not answer. He resumed hacking at the vines, his mind wandering, still drowsy and not himself. But would he ever be again? he wondered. This present sensation of order would be temporary: the axe, his upraised hand, the tangled vine at his feet. Soon he was thinking of the drugged man in the hammock and of the young bridegroom with aspirations. “Not,” he had cried repeatedly, “to be a
Bürgermeister
!” But Inga always had had deaf ears. Almoner thought of himself, at the axe's next descent, as a monk locked up to copy laboriously for years, who at last had finished the work, but himself had been broken and done in. But even to his own satisfaction, the work was done; that was worth a lifetime, wasn't it? Envisioning manuscript stacked up behind him, he heard imaginary applause, and from the house he heard Amelia and Inga shouting to one another, irritably.

By God! This time the car was yellow. He stopped, his hatchet midair, as much surprised as before, knowing this one could not be wiped away along with perspiration, either. He stood motionless, like a wild animal trying to hide. The cattle gap had caught the driver unaware, and he had stopped the car, straddling it. Almoner knew they had to be strangers, for any car as long as a city block, in this town, would be familiar. It was being driven backward between the forsythias. He swore at the eyesight of the young. The boy, driving, had glimpsed him and was getting out, his head seeming on fire, his bright orange hair singed by evening sunlight. He kept still, though the situation was hopeless, while the boy came on, smiling fearfully. Even before hearing his rather high voice, Almoner knew it was the one who had telephoned. What had he said: that he knew his mother? If so, the name was lost. But he had fobbed him off, obviously enough, with a lie, and that he had come anyway was too blatant, like his hair. With a quick mental image of himself trapped there, Almoner thought, there was no way out. But, thrusting aside pines, the boy offered him one.

Her room was cast in summer darkness, which could only mean rain. And, not opening her eyes, she felt an imagined sense of the ocean's bottom; though, unintentionally, she was thinking of the ultra-green underwater of chlorine-filled swimming pools with which she was familiar. The wallpaper in her bedroom was blue and green and in an adjoining bathroom the paper had a pattern of shells. Truant ivy across her windows cut light, its shadows flickering in independent spots on the ceiling. She imagined with her eyes still closed that flickering to be exotic and wildly patterned fish. The roof of tiles was slanting and there a pale pigeon had managed to secure itself and was cooing. Any coolness in summer was a relief. She drew up a sheet which had a feel of dampness like fog and rubbed her feet against towels now rough and dried. The night before her mother had laid them across the bed wet for the attic fan to blow over them. Remembering that coolness now, and suddenly that it was the morning she was going, Amy opened her eyes. Her mother came that moment on silent bare feet across the hall to stand in the doorway, looking older. Her voice dryly held sleep as if not to relinquish night, with nothing ahead in her day. “What time are you going?” Edith said.

“At nine,” Amy said. She shut her mind abruptly against criticism from her mother, and wished she had lied. For Edith immediately was breathless. “Why didn't you get up earlier then? You won't be ready! You'll go out again looking like a tack,” she said. Sighing and assuming the burden unasked, Edith went to the kitchen and began slamming about pots and pans, the noise meaning if Amy did not have sense enough to hurry, she did.

Listening as water rushed into the sink to grow hot, for the coffee to make sooner, Amy removed her pajamas and left them in a dispirited heap on the floor, where they had slipped from a hook. She stared into the disordered closet where there was almost nothing to choose from and nothing appropriate to wear. Her father's frequent and disgruntled appraisal came to mind: “With all the money she can spend on her clothes!” At breakfast, her mother would say the same. Amy picked out a dress at random, feeling all of them were wrong. As consciously as putting stoppers in her ears, she told herself not to mind what her mother said; and she would not mind really being told what was wrong, if only someone would tell her what was right! Her white slip looked grey. Feeling inert and withdrawn, she came into the kitchen where her mother stood cooking. And, turning her head, Edith's look said plainly, Why couldn't Amy ever look as nice as the other girls?

Made to feel self-conscious, she swung her legs, childlike, beneath the table but then saw her sandals had muddy heels. Why hadn't she noticed when she put them on, as other girls would have? She had seen only, dressing, that her skirt had a spot, and she had tried to press a pleat carefully over it. Before, her mother had said that the sandals might be right for walking about a muddy campus, but they were wrong for Delton where people dressed when they went out. As Edith poured coffee now, her eyes roamed. “Are you going out with something all over the front of your dress?” she said.

“It's not all over, it's only a spot,” Amy said. However, since she had come downstairs, it seemed to have grown larger. She longed to put down her head and cry about its being there at all.

“Why can't you look better with the money you can spend on your clothes?” Edith asked in exasperation. She wondered whether Amy was ever going to grow up. She wondered the next moment whether she ever wanted her to; bringing Energine, she scrubbed at the spot.

To Amy, her mother's head seemed so vulnerable bent solicitously at her knee, and her scalp was so babyishly clean, that she wanted to care about the things her mother did. Smelling her mother's perfume from the day before, Amy remembered her dressed beautifully to go out, bending over the crib to say goodnight and tickling with her hair. People ought to have some visible connection to kin, to make explainable why you felt bound to them: because you were all bald, for instance. Her stockings were not the same shade, and Amy was grateful her mother had not noticed. Having congratulated herself on putting on stockings at all, to discover they were not mates only reconfirmed that almost everything she did went wrong. But she had had on one stocking, and so she had put on another.

Edith had opened the back door and stood staring out with some private thought. But turning, she said only, “It might clear,” and birds fluttered away on wet wings at her voice.

Amy said, “Quill will have his top down whether it rains or not.” She hoped to share with her mother amusement, at least. But Edith was not to be won over and remained across the room slightly frowning. “It'll serve you right for going,” she said. “It's ridiculous to miss that luncheon.” With aimless anger focused at last, Edith twisted her mouth. Amy looked away thinking that when she left, her mother would say, “Have a good time.”

When she bent over her breakfast, mud inside the sandals slid uncomfortably toward her toes. Leaning against the wall and admitting that she did look tacky, Amy wondered what to do with the rest of her life. Her head felt toppled, as if it needed to be braced. Supporting her chin with her hand, she hoped her life would pass quickly.

Edith, wondering whether Amy would ever learn to sit up straight, said, “Where'd you get that dress?”

“Near school. Why, don't you like it?” Amy said, knowing of course her mother did not, or she would not have asked in that tone. Edith's shrug implied Amy might know what girls wore at that school but it was not what they wore in Delton. But that was her dilemma, Amy thought, that she belonged neither here nor there. She wiped perspiration that sprang out along her hairline. The rain had dwindled and birds drank in the house's gutter. Edith had been looking out; staring back at Amy, she spoke as if she were dying. “All my life,” she said, “I've wanted to get out of the South in the summertime.”

Amy thought how annoying for people to spend their lives doing what they did not want to; she would not. When Edith bent over her coffee cup her face sagged—either in age or in disappointment. Amy felt sorry for her mother; she met her mother's eyes over her cup's rim.

“Did you hear a car?” Edith said.

But Amy had already taken from her pocketbook a small mirror and was putting on lipstick. She hurried to the living room where the French doors were closed against blown rain. There, through small wet panes, she saw Quill stopping to put on his seersucker jacket. Behind him, windshield wipers had been left running on his car, giving her the feeling he had little time to spare here, and feeling protective toward home, Amy wondered if she would ever be able to leave her mother. The cathedral ceiling in its far reaches held gloom settled like tufts of fog. She tried to remain hidden as Quill came up the steps in his duck-footed way. But seeing her, and doubling up his fist, he made a great show of pretending to knock on the glass wildly. He tried so earnestly to make people laugh, it seemed rude not to. Amy opened the door and smiled broadly. Politely, he kept his eyes from flickering over her clothes. He was dressed meticulously and his clothes became him, as her father's seemed always to belong to him. He even had his shirts custom-made with tiny monograms. As she tugged open the French doors, her father came out on the porte-cochere overhead and leaned over the railing and smiled down in his flushed way. “Hey, boy, how's the squash?” he called.