She heard Billy Pope come into the kitchen and shout out cheerfully, “Well, I guess yez wondered where I was.”
Katherine Mansfield had no relatives who said yez.
Rose had finished the story. She picked up Macbeth. She had memorized some speeches from it. She memorized things from Shakespeare, and poems, other than the things they had to memorize for school. She didn’t imagine herself as an actress, playing Lady Macbeth on a stage, when she said them. She imagined herself being her, being Lady Macbeth.
“I come on foot,” Billy Pope was shouting up the stairs. “I had to take her in.” He assumed everyone would know he meant the car. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t idle her, she stalls on me. I didn’t want to go down to the city with anything running not right. Rose home?”
Billy Pope had been fond of Rose ever since she was a little girl. He used to give her a dime, and say, “Save up and buy yourself some corsets.” That was when she was flat and thin. His joke.
He came into the store.
“Well Rose, you bein a good girl?”
She barely spoke to him.
“You goin at your schoolbooks? You want to be a schoolteacher?”
“I might.” She had no intention of being a schoolteacher. But it was surprising how people would let you alone, once you admitted to that ambition.
“This is a sad day for you folks here,” said Billy Pope in a lower voice.
Rose lifted her head and looked at him coldly.
“I mean, your dad goin down to the hospital. They’ll fix him up, though. They got all the equipment down there. They got the good doctors.”
“I doubt it,” Rose said. She hated that too, the way people hinted at things and then withdrew, that slyness. Death and sex were what they did that about.
“They’ll fix him and get him back by spring.”
“Not if he has lung cancer,” Rose said firmly. She had never said that before and certainly Flo had not said it.
Billy Pope looked as miserable and ashamed for her as if she had said something very dirty.
“Now that isn’t no way for you to talk. You don’t talk that way. He’s going to be coming downstairs and he could of heard you.”
There is no denying the situation gave Rose pleasure, at times. A severe pleasure, when she was not too mixed up in it, washing the sheets or listening to a coughing fit. She dramatized her own part in it, saw herself clear-eyed and unsurprised, refusing all deceptions, young in years but old in bitter experience of life. In such spirit she had said lung cancer.
Billy Pope phoned the garage. It turned out that the car would not be fixed until suppertime. Rather than set out then, Billy Pope would stay overnight, sleeping on the kitchen couch. He and Rose’s father would go down to the hospital in the morning.
“There don’t need to be any great hurry, I’m not going to jump for him,” said Flo, meaning the doctor. She had come into the store to get a can of salmon, to make a loaf. Although she was not going anywhere and had not planned to, she had put on stockings, and a clean blouse and skirt.
She and Billy Pope kept up a loud conversation in the kitchen while she got supper. Rose sat on the high stool and recited in her head, looking out the front window at West Hanratty, the dust scudding along the street, the dry puddle holes.
Come to my woman’s breasts.
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!
A jolt it would give them, if she yelled that into the kitchen.
At six o’clock she locked the store. When she went into the kitchen she was surprised to see her father there. She hadn’t heard him. He hadn’t been either talking or coughing. He was dressed in his good suit, which was an unusual color—a dark oily sort of green. Perhaps it had been cheap.
“Look at him all dressed up,” Flo said. “He thinks he looks smart. He’s so pleased with himself he wouldn’t go back to bed.”
Rose’s father smiled unnaturally, obediently.
“How do you feel now?” Flo said.
“I feel all right.”
“You haven’t had a coughing spell, anyway.”
Her father’s face was newly shaved, smooth and delicate, like the animals they had once carved at school out of yellow laundry soap.
“Maybe I ought to get up and stay up.”
“That’s the ticket,” Billy Pope said boisterously. “No more laziness. Get up and stay up. Get back to work.”
There was a bottle of whiskey on the table. Billy Pope had brought it. The men drank it out of little glasses that had once held cream cheese. They topped it up with half an inch or so of water.
Brian, Rose’s half brother, had come in from playing somewhere; noisy, muddy, with the cold smell of outdoors around him.
Just as he came in Rose said, “Can I have some?” nodding at the whiskey bottle.
“Girls don’t drink that,” Billy Pope said.
“Give you some and we’d have Brian whining after some,” said Flo.
“Can I have some?” said Brian, whining, and Flo laughed uproariously, sliding her own glass behind the bread box. “See there?”
“There used to be people around in the old days that did cures,” said Billy Pope at the supper table. “But you don’t hear about none of them no more.”
“Too bad we can’t get hold of one of them right now,” said Rose’s father, getting hold of and conquering a coughing fit.
“There was the one faith healer I used to hear my dad talk about,” said Billy Pope. “He had a way of talkin, he talked like the Bible. So this deaf fellow went to him and he seen him and he cured him of his deafness. Then he says to him, ‘Durst hear?’ ”
“Dost hear?” Rose suggested. She had drained Flo’s glass while getting out the bread for supper, and felt more kindly disposed toward all her relatives.
“That’s it. Dost hear? And the fellow said yes, he did. So the faith healer says then, Dost believe? Now maybe the fellow didn’t understand what he meant. And he says, What in? So the faith healer he got mad, and he took away the fellow’s hearing like that, and he went home deaf as he come.”
Flo said that out where she lived when she was little, there was a woman who had second sight. Buggies, and later on, cars, would be parked to the end of her lane on Sundays. That was the day people came from a distance to consult with her. Mostly they came to consult her about things that were lost.
“Didn’t they want to get in touch with their relations?” Rose’s father said, egging Flo on as he liked to when she was telling a story. “I thought she could put you in touch with the dead.”
“Well, most of them seen enough of their relations when they was alive.”
It was rings and wills and livestock they wanted to know about; where had things disappeared to?
“One fellow I knew went to her and he had lost his wallet. He was a man that worked on the railway line. And she says to him, well, do you remember it was about a week ago you were working along the tracks and you come along near an orchard and you thought you would like an apple? So you hopped over the fence and it was right then you dropped your wallet, right then and there in the long grass. But a dog came along, she says, a dog picked it up and dropped it a ways further along the fence, and that’s where you’ll find it. Well, he’d forgot all about the orchard and climbing that fence and he was so amazed at her, he gave her a dollar. And he went and found his wallet in the very place she described. This is true, I knew him. But the money was all chewed up, it was all chewed up in shreds, and when he found that he was so mad he said he wished he never give her so much!”
“Now, you never went to her,” said Rose’s father. “You wouldn’t put your faith in the like of that?” When he talked to Flo he often spoke in country phrases, and adopted the country habit of teasing, saying the opposite of what’s true, or believed to be true.
“No, I never went actually to ask her anything,” Flo said. “But one time I went. I had to go over there and get some green onions. My mother was sick and
suffering with her nerves and this woman sent word over, that she had some green onions was good for nerves. It wasn’t nerves at all it was cancer, so what good they did I don’t know.”
Flo’s voice climbed and hurried on, embarrassed that she had let that out.
“I had to go and get them. She had them pulled and washed and tied up for me, and she says, don’t go yet, come on in the kitchen and see what I got for you. Well, I didn’t know what, but I dasn’t not do it. I thought she was a witch. We all did. We all did, at school. So I sat down in the kitchen and she went into the pantry and brought out a big chocolate cake and she cut a piece and give it to me. I had to sit and eat it. She sat there and watched me eat. All I can remember about her is her hands. They were great big red hands with big veins sticking up on them, and she’d be flopping and twisting them all the time in her lap. I often thought since, she ought to eat the green onions herself, she didn’t have so good nerves either.
“Then I tasted a funny taste. In the cake. It was peculiar. I dasn’t stop eating though. I ate and ate and when I finished it all up I said thank you and I tell you I got out of there. I walked all the way down the lane because I figured she was watching me, and when I got to the road I started to run. But I was still scared she was following after me, invisible or something, and she might read what was in my mind and pick me up and pound my brains out on the gravel. When I got home I just flung open the door and hollered, Poison! That’s what I was thinking. I thought she made me eat a poisoned cake.
“All it was was moldy. That’s what my mother said. The damp in her house and she would go for days without no visitors to eat it, in spite of the crowds she collected other times. She could have a cake sitting around too long a while.
“But I didn’t think so. No. I thought I had ate poison and I was doomed. I went and sat in this sort of place I had in a corner of the granary. Nobody knew I had it. I kept all kinds of junk in there. I kept some chips of broken china and some velvet flowers. I remember them, they were off a hat that had got rained on. So I just sat there, and I waited.”
Billy Pope was laughing at her. “Did they come and haul you out?”
“I forget. I don’t think so. They would’ve had a hard time finding me. I was in behind all the feed bags. No. I don’t know. I guess what happened in the end was I got tired out waiting and come out by myself.”
“And lived to tell the tale,” said Rose’s father, swallowing the last word as he was overcome by a prolonged coughing fit. Flo said he shouldn’t stay up any longer but he said he would just lie down on the kitchen couch, which he did. Flo and Rose cleared the table and washed the dishes, then for something to do they all—Flo and Billy Pope and Brian and Rose—sat around the table and played euchre. Her father dozed. Rose thought of Flo sitting in a corner of the granary with the bits of china and the wilted velvet flowers and whatever else was precious to her, waiting, in a gradually reduced state of terror, it must have been, and exaltation, and desire, to see how death would slice the day.
Her father was waiting. His shed was locked, his books would not be opened again, by him, and tomorrow was the last day he would wear shoes. They were all used to this idea, and in some ways they would be more disturbed if his death did not take place, than if it did. No one could ask what he thought about it. He would have treated such an inquiry as an impertinence, a piece of dramatizing, an indulgence. Rose believed he would have. She believed he was prepared for Westminster Hospital, the old soldiers’ hospital, prepared for its masculine gloom, its yellowing curtains pulled around the bed, its spotty basins. And for what followed. She understood that he would never be with her more than at the present moment. The surprise to come was that he wouldn’t be with her less.
Drinking coffee, wandering around the blind green halls of the new high school, at the Centennial Year Reunion—she hadn’t come for that, had bumped into it accidentally, so to speak, when she came home to see what was to be done about Flo—Rose met people who said, “Did you know Ruby Carruthers was dead? They took off the one breast and then the other but it was all through her, she died.”
And people who said, “I saw your picture in a magazine, what was the name of that magazine, I have it at home.”
The new high school had an auto mechanics’ shop for training auto mechanics and a beauty parlor for training beauty parlor operators; a library; an auditorium; a gymnasium; a whirling fountain arrangement for washing your hands in the Ladies’ Room. Also a functioning dispenser of Kotex.
Del Fairbridge had become an undertaker.
Runt Chesterton had become an accountant.
Horse Nicholson had made a lot of money as a contractor and had left that to go into politics. He had made a speech saying that what they needed was a lot more God in the classroom and a lot less French.
Applause, Applause
Jean Thompson
Poor Bernie, Ted thought, as rain thudded against the car like rotten fruit. Watching it stream and bubble on the windshield, he promised himself not to complain about it lest Bernie’s feelings be hurt. He was anxious to impress this on his wife. Poor Bernie, he said aloud. Things never work out the way he plans.
His wife nodded. Ted could see from her unsmiling, preoccupied face that it would be difficult to coax her into a conspiracy. In fact, she was probably blaming him for it: his friend, his weekend, therefore, his rain. Look, Ted said. He went to so much trouble setting this up. I’d hate to have him think we weren’t enjoying it, whatever happens.
Lee, his wife, turned her chin toward him. He used to call her the Siennese Madonna because of that narrow face, long cheeks and haughty blue eyes. Easy to see her reduced to two-dimensional paint. She had never heard of Sienna. Now she said, All right, I won’t sulk. But I’ll save the vivaciousness till later, OK?
He was a little hurt that she saw no need to be charming for him, but he said nothing. After all, she hadn’t complained. He burrowed his hands in his pockets for warmth and looked out the smeared window.
The car was parked in a clearing of pebbled yellow clay. On all sides were dark sopping pine trees, impenetrable, suffocating. It made him a little dizzy to think of how limitless those trees were, how many square miles they covered. The clearing contained two gas pumps and a trading post that sold moccasins, orange pop, and insect repellent. If you turned your back on the building it was easy to believe the world contained only the pines and the implacable rain.
Poor Bernie. He wondered at what point the friends of one’s youth acquire epithets. When do we begin to measure their achievements against their ambitions?
Ten years ago he and Bernie Doyle were in college. Ten years ago they sat in bars, Bernie’s pipe smoke looped around their heads. Or perhaps on the broken-spined, cat-perfumed sofa that was always reincarnated in their succession of apartments. How they had talked: God, he had never talked that seriously, that openly, to a woman. Perhaps it was something one outgrew. Like the daydreams of the dusky, moody photographs that would appear on one’s book jackets. The experimentation with names. Theodore Valentine? T. R. Valentine? T. Robert Valentine? The imaginary interviews. (“Valentine is a disarmingly candid, intensely personal man whose lean, somber features belie his formidable humor. The day I met him he wore an old black turtleneck, Levi’s and sandals, a singularly unpretentious yet becoming costume…”)
Yes, he had admitted all these fantasies to Bernie, and Bernie admitted he shared them. How vulnerable they had been to each other, still were, he supposed. Behind the naive vanities, the daydreams, they had very badly wanted to be writers. Had wanted it without knowing at all what it was they wanted, their fervor making up for their ignorance. His older self was cooler, more noncommittal, for he had learned that to publicize your goals means running the risk of falling short of them.
Ten years of letters, of extravagant alcoholic phone calls. The continual measure they took of each other. Their vanished precocity, reluctantly cast aside at age twenty-five or so. Ten years which established T
ed’s increasingly self-conscious, increasingly offhand reports of publications, recognitions. Bernie had kept up for a few years, had even talked about getting a book together. After that he responded to Ted’s letters with the same grave formula: he wasn’t getting a lot done but he hoped to have more time soon. Ted was sure he’d given it up entirely. He knew how easy it was to let your discipline go slack. You had to drive yourself continually, not just to get the work done but to keep faith. Faith that what you were doing was worth the hideous effort you put into it. Easier, much easier, to let it go. The whole process of writing was a road as quirky and blind as the one they had driven this morning to the heart of the Adirondacks, this weekend, and the epithet, Poor Bernie.
Was he himself a success? He wasn’t able to say that, not yet at least. Three years ago a national magazine printed a story. The smaller quarterlies published him with some regularity, paid him less frequently. His was one of the names an extremely well-read person might frown at and say, Yes, I think I’ve heard of him. It was like being one of those Presidents no one can ever remember, Polk or Millard Fillmore. Of course you wanted more than that.
But he’d made progress. He hadn’t given up. These were the important things. And he dreaded the inevitable discussions with Bernie when their younger incarnations would stand in judgment of them. How could he manage to be both tactful and truthful, feeling as he did that uncomfortable mixture of protectiveness and contempt. Yes, he admitted it, the slightest touch of contempt…
Is this them? Lee asked as an orange VW station wagon, its rainslick paint lurid against the pines, slowed at the clearing. Ted squinted. Maybe…The car stopping. Yeah, I think so. The window on the passenger’s side was rolled down and a woman’s face bobbed and smiled at him. He had an impression of freckles, skin pink as soap. Paula? Ted grinned and pantomimed comprehension.