"I hope he never comes back, I hope I never see him --"
"Oh, my dear, you mustn't use that word."
"Why not?"
"Because never is a long, long time. Longer than we may know. Come, let's sit a minute."
Taking my hand, she brought me to a pile of timber and we sat side by side on the sawed logs, our fingers entwined together in her lap. I could not possibly reconstruct the words she used in this troubled moment, but whatever hurts I had suffered -- the disappointment in Blue, and the contempt I felt for his having been caught doing dirty things with Mrs. Pierson -- were salved, and the thoughts that were causing me turmoil lay where they could be examined and, possibly, understood.
She talked about the incalculable differences between men and women, not only the physical, but those others that are harder to analyze. She talked of love between them, and of how there was a vast difference between what Blue had been doing in the back room with Mrs. Pierson, and the love a man may have for the woman he sets his heart on, and she for him. It was not at all like that -- firehouse smut and beer-hall jokes. And the River House girls -- she knew a thing or two about that. It was not necessary to mate as animals, but as human beings, one to the other. Never did she employ such pat tritenesses as "One day, when you are old enough . . . you will understand." I was old enough on that day, at that hour and minute, and if I chose, she told me, I could understand it at that precise moment, not waiting until I "grew up" or "came of age." And though she spoke of serious matters, of things I had never talked or scarcely thought about before, she did so with such a light touch, with such color and emphasis, yet with such warmth and humor, that I realized that the circumstances of the Ferguson-Pierson intrigue were no more than the joining of two forms for immediate release and profit.
Lady looked down at my hand lying in her palm, enclosed it with her other one, and pressed it warmly. "This you must believe," she said, holding my gaze with an intent and profound expression, her eyes searching mine, "this you must absolutely believe if you will ever believe anything I shall ever tell you. It is not the coming together or the parting of two people that counts, or where or when, but those two people themselves, and in what manner they are joined. And if it is not with hate but with love, not with impatience but with understanding, and never with boredom but with interest, then nothing can be wrong with their being together, no matter how wrong it may seem to others. But those others, they do not count, they must not be permitted to count, for it is only between the two persons themselves that it must have meaning. It is not so difficult for people to arrange their lives sensibly if they behave sensibly, but to arrange their lives happily, that is a far, far different thing. Can you understand this?"
It was a lot to understand, but I tried, and she saw that I tried, that I knew somehow it was in that moment most important that I should understand.
"You cannot hope to do it all at once." She lifted her top hand again and traced the lines in my palm with her fingernail. "It can only come with time. But if you will try to start believing this now, when you are just so old, it will be easier and more profitable to you when you are ready."
"What will I be ready for?"
"You will be ready to love someone in the way that you can hope to love someone, with all of yourself."
She plucked a leaf from my sleeve, and absently ran her fingertips up and down. "You see, life is hardly ever one thing or another, and things don't ever stay the same. Perhaps that's one of life's tragedies. But who knows, perhaps it's one of life's blessings as well. And blessings, as we know, always come mixed. But meanwhile -- isn't it a beautiful world? Look at that sky, doesn't it make you feel good? It's not such a bad place, is it?"
"What isn't?"
"The world. It's not our enemy, you know, but we treat it so badly. And the same with people. And you will have your share of mixed blessings, l'il Ignatz."
Later, we walked back up Talcott Hill together, and standing at the crest we looked back upon the scene, the pond and pasture, the Paulus farm, others more faintly distant, the woods where we had walked, where winter had become spring, where the whole sense of change was apparent to the eye. And I sensed, even if I was not completely aware, that in the farmhouse and the barn, in the field and the meadow, there were pain and joy and hurt and love, all the good things and the bad, too, all those mixed blessings of life; but that where the sky could look so blue, the grass so freshly green, there lay hope as well, that the human heart was lifted and that God was inclined toward it.
"It could all be so beautiful," she said as we turned to go, "if people were just kind." I said I thought she was very wise. She laughed and tugged my ear. "Ah," she said, taking my hand again, "what is more wise than to be kind? And what is more kind than to understand?"
PART THREE
Sad Songs
1
It seemed a new beginning, but perhaps it was only an old ending, the end of innocence merely, not a beginning at all. I had thought I had learned something, had advanced a stride or two in the painful process of maturing, had responded in measure to Lady's summons to my awareness of that greater and more enigmatic life at work around me, but in this I was to be proved wrong. Understanding does not necessarily come with the accumulation of years, but with a willingness to understand, and when my chance came I was unwilling, and thus incapable; and through this stubborn unwillingness a breach opened between us that was to alter our relationship forever.
But, for the moment, her reappearance in our lives was a sort of epiphany, for like the spring itself, she in her full-flowering way had shone forth again, once more to establish herself as the center of our lives, and for a time all proceeded in what appeared to be our normal fashion. Yet there were signs indicating that though things might seem the same, in truth they were not. Changes in people, external changes, do not immediately make themselves apparent to children, yet children, with those sensitized antennae they develop for their own protection, are often aware of things no one gives them credit for. They perceive things unnoticed, they are privy to small, unspoken bits of knowledge which they hoard like misers, fitting one bit to another and forming a picture which suits, or sometimes fails to suit, their needs. And so, though I was not even into my teens, I saw, or thought I did, changes in Lady which troubled me. She had often seemed vague, preoccupied, even melancholy, but now, although she was much in evidence around the house, around the Green and the town, the symptoms appeared aggravated by who knew what causes. Whenever I went over after the day of our spring walk, as I had come to think of it, I noticed that she was particularly nice to Jesse, as if in apology for her harsh words and bad behavior; was especially nice to everyone. But there were other things. She developed a habit of unconsciously rubbing one palm against the other in a light, circular motion, then spreading both palms in her lap and idly staring at them. Her hands were always one of her greatest beauties, and Aggie said that a woman's age often shows itself first in the extremities. Perhaps it was only that; but I didn't think so.
One day, in the summerhouse, she lifted her hand, inspecting its back closely, and I thought she was distressed by the liverish-colored spots that had begun appearing there. Then I saw it was a small insect that had captured her attention.
"Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home," she softly recited, "your house is on fire, your children will burn. . . ." She flicked the insect with her nail; it parted its spotted carapace as it sailed upward, spreading little transparent wings which bore it away into the blue of the sky. When it had disappeared, she turned her hands over and studied her palms.
"Are you reading your future?" I kidded.
"Read the future?" She looked at me blankly, then folded her hands and brightened her tone. "Palmistry is an inexact science, darling. Better you should look there and play gypsy." She pointed to the gazing-globe, which stood in the center of the brick circle at the opposite end of the walk from where we were sitting. The gazing-globe had appeared shortly after the hair-cutting
episode, and seemed to have some special, if undisclosed, significance for Lady. Bought from Mr. Marini, it was a handsome ornament: the large silver ball crowned a curved stone pedestal cast in the ornate Italian fashion, and gleamed brightly amid the green foliage and white flowers behind it. Lady's immense fondness for the globe was manifested by the extended periods she would spend looking at its curved reflection, and, as now, her glance was often directed to it while we sat in the summerhouse and conversed quietly and the dusk came on and the bats flittered in the pine boughs and the fireflies started.
Still, she appeared so jumpy and nervous that people other than myself or Jesse and Elthea began noticing it. Ruthie Sparrow took it upon herself to bestow a few ill-chosen words, and for her pains got what she might have expected: the hack of Lady's hand -- figuratively speaking. Capturing her briefly while Lady was out with Honey for a stroll, Mrs. Sparrow had advised her "sensibly," as she later put it to Ma, that what Lady wanted was a change, that she ought to go away ("for her health, poor dear") and take a nice trip. (Paris France or Venice It'ly immediately suggested themselves.) These humble profferings Lady had accepted with her usual grace and good humor, but then Mrs. Sparrow went a step too far, saying that in her opinion Lady was dwelling too much on the long-ago past; what she really ought to do was lock up all of Edward's pictures and the war medal, and his clothing in the chifforobe should be got rid of, and she should accept one of Colonel Blatchley's oft-repeated proposals and make a December-December marriage.
Lady was not inclined. She did not fancy being referred to as a winter bride, nor was she receptive to the remarks about Edward's things.
"The chifforobe will remain as it is," she had declared coldly, her face turning white, her eyes tossing sparks. As on the occasion with Mr. Sprague and the dog, her anger could be awe-inspiring, and so it proved this day. Stay the chifforobe did, contents and all, though the shrine on the gate-leg table, having been put away, did not reappear, and in its place Lady set out framed pictures of each of us, "her family."
The actual reason for what may have been troubling Lady during these weeks seemed to me, possessed of private knowledge, quite clear. Since the flood, the Green had dried up again, and all had resumed its natural appearance, except for one curious instance which occurred early that summer. Water began continually seeping up through the turf close to the roadway just opposite her front door. This soggy phenomenon became the cause of conjecture, and when the WPA engineers arrived to survey the situation it was thought that something was amiss with the new sewer line. They decided to dig up the spot and discover the trouble, and as the re-excavation commenced, and we stopped over to observe its progress, we could see Lady in her window, watching with concern.
It was the corpus delicti, of course, that was causing her alarm. I felt more certain than ever that Mr. Ott had not left the house on that fatal night, but that Jesse had somehow managed to sequester the body in the open sewer excavation, and had shoveled in enough earth to bury it before the job had been completed. But by the end of the week, when fifteen feet of the line had been dug up, nothing untoward was found, other than that the pipes had been laid on an upgrade, a fact Porter Sprague and his clique of Roosevelt-haters made capital of: the WPA couldn't even lay a sewer properly. The mistake rectified, the excavation was refilled, the turf tamped down in squares, and the workmen retired from the scene. Lady evinced visible relief at this, while I, ever the detective, racked my brain. If the corpus delicti was not in the coal bin, not in an attic trunk, and to all appearances not in the sewer line, what had become of it?
Some weeks later, Ruthie Sparrow was pleased to discover that her helpful hints had not been totally wasted, for Lady announced that she was going away. An elderly German couple named Hoffman, friends of her father's, who lived in Garden City, Long Island, were traveling to Europe, and Lady was driving down to New York to see them off on the Queen Mary. She would also visit her old friend Mrs. Hooper, the woman who had given us Patsy, and afterward she planned to go on to Virginia Beach for a short stay. Elthea and Jesse would accompany her. On a Friday afternoon the house was closed, the keys and Honey given into our safekeeping, and off they went in the new Packard Lady had bought that spring.
Alas for the Minerva landaulet; it seemed to us the end of an era.
Before leaving, Lady had loaned Ag her newly purchased copy of Gone With the Wind, and our romantic sister holed up in her room with the book, playing Tchaikovsky on the record player. We hardly saw her for the better part of four days. I, for one, couldn't understand all the fuss about this "O'Hara" person and someone called "Red" Butler, but when Ag turned the last page she emerged in delirium, declaring tearfully that Scarlett just had to get Rhett back. Next day she went out and fell in love with the third-oldest son of the vegetable man.
Unhappily, the romance did not proceed well. It was first stormy, then flaccid, then it petered away to nothing. The vegetable man's son did not want our sister, so poor Ag, drippy, dreamy, and all forlorn, shut herself up again and reread Gone With the Wind, for another four days while the house echoed with the Pathetique.
Soon after, we made an excursion with Nancy, one that was to have far-reaching consequences. A small fair was to be held at Meadowland, and Ma gave Nancy the Saturday off so she might visit her friends at the correctional school in Middlehaven. Between them they coaxed Ag to go along, and though I didn't want to, I ended up on the trip as well. Since both Lew and Harry had been invited to watch the National Guard drill team practice at the armory, and I was unable to tag along, Nancy included me in her junket, a prospect which did little to cheer me.
Miss Beale, the social worker who made trimonthly visits to the houses around town where the various hired girls were employed, came in a jitney with a driver to pick up the girls, and Ag and I were loaded aboard. I was feeling plain mean, my mood aggravated by my being the only male, but there was so much joking and laughter among the riders that my cloud of discontent gradually dispersed, and Ag, in spite of herself, was soon laughing along with the rest.
It wasn't much of a fair, the merest of makeshift booths set up on the grounds, displaying handicrafts and hobby trifles made by the women. Though I looked for bars at the windows of the various buildings, I saw none. Meadowland was nothing like my idea of a reformatory, but more like a college campus,.with its white-trimmed brick dormitories, its broad lawns and neat landscaping where visitors casually strolled among the flowered borders.
Nancy led us from booth to booth, renewing old acquaintances with girls she had known when she'd stayed there, and telling them how things were in Pequot, pridefully producing us from behind her skirts as specimens of her new status. Ag, shy as always, was not very talkative, and presently she drifted off and sat under a tree by herself; but I, having shaken off my earlier sullenness, found myself the center of considerable attention, and boldly engaged the girls in talk, dragging out my repertory of schoolboy jokes, accepting a piece of bubble gum from one, a taffy apple from another, popcorn from a third.
I saw a car pull up the drive, and Mrs. Sheffield, the supervisor, and Miss Beale went to meet it. Mrs. Sheffield was an imposing woman whose geniality belied the importance of her position. She was all smiles as she greeted the new arrivals: Porter and Mrs. de Sales-Sprague. We had heard that, as one of Pequot's selectmen, Mr. Sprague was representing the town at the proceedings. He fell quickly to striding about in his cocky way, inspecting the girls as if they were army privates and he a general on parade, while Mrs. Sprague scanned the scene and plied Mrs. Sheffield with questions regarding the "welfare of the inmates." Terminating her interview, she mingled with the girls, and put on her dreadful smile as she fingered braided place mats and poked at crocheted doilies with fanatical interest.
Nancy said we'd be eating soon, and not to go far. I sat down on some steps, where the American flag hung limply on a flagpole, watching Ag, who was still under the tree, poring over a book of poems Lady had given her. I felt sorry for her, she was so
unhappy. There she sat in her freshly ironed dress, a dreamy schoolgirl mooning over the vegetable man's son, but I thought how pretty she was, how she was losing that gangly, all-legs-and-arms look. She'd put some curl in her hair and tied it back with a pale blue ribbon, and it shone from the nightly brushings she'd been giving it under Lady's instruction. Her chest was getting bumps, her complexion had cleared up, and her cheeks, which had always been red, were a new, peachy kind of color. She was like a summer flower about to bloom.
Then, in the background, Rabbit and Dora Hornaday appeared. Nancy had said they'd be there to visit with their mother, but just now they were alone, and each stayed separate from the other as if they were embarrassed by one another's company, Rabbit staring up at some birds on a wire, while Dora looked both blank and disconsolate, and tugged at the end of the bow her aunt had stuck in her hair.
A bell sounded, and Mrs. Sheffield came along with the Spragues, calling for everyone to go to the dining hall for lunch. Spying Dora, Spouse tittered to her hostess and hurried across the grass, arms outstretched.
"Why, here's little Dora Homaday. Now, now, now, Dora, mustn't pull our pretty bow." She made an elaborate to-do of relying the ribbon, while P.J. stopped with Mrs. Sheffield on the walk. I could tell it was all for her benefit, one of Spouse's I-love-kiddies acts. "Isn't it a lovely fair, Dora? What have we been doing today?" Dora's thumb swooped into her mouth, sparing her the necessity of talk, but Mrs. Sprague was having none of that. Unsticking the thumb, she reiterated her question. "Dora, tell Mrs. Sprague what you've been doing today. At the fair?" Bending, she made a large lap, and drew the protesting Dora onto it. I hoped that maybe Dora had a rock handy, but she submitted with her usual scowl, ignoring the fuss being made over her.
Mrs. Sprague dug in her pocketbook and produced a Reed's paloop and wafted it under Dora's nose. When Dora grabbed at it, she held it beyond arm's reach. "No, dear, you may have the lollipop when you have spoken nicely to Mrs. Sprague. Now what have we done today?"