“She’s creepy,” Melissa said. “Never says anything. I distrust people who don’t take care of their appearance.”
“Wake up, Billy,” said Mary. “Eat your beans. Well, I’ll say this about her and then we’ll drop it: I hate to see people taking advantage. It seems to me, Mother, that girl knows a good thing when she stumbles on it—settled down to live off a rich old lady forever, she thinks, and you should make it plain to her that you have children of your own to rely on. Plenty of your own without—”
“Well, I like her,” Margaret said.
“What do you know about it?”
“I’ve had to share a room with her, haven’t I? She talks to me.”
Melissa said, “I don’t hear Matthew speaking up.”
“What about?” said Matthew, pretending not to know.
“Aren’t you always hanging around Elizabeth?”
She smiled at him from across the table—a cat face, sharp and bony, with that thin, painful-looking skin that some blondes have. Who could have foretold that modeling agencies would consider her a beauty? Matthew decided suddenly that he disliked her, and the thought made him blink and duck his head. “Anyway, she’s going,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to mope around, or follow after her or something?”
“Stop it,” Mrs. Emerson said.
They looked up at her, all with the same stunned, pale eyes.
“Oh, what makes you act like this?” she said. “They say it’s the parents to blame, but what did we do? I’m asking you, I really want to know. What did we do?”
No one answered. Billy slumped against Margaret, his lids glued shut, exhausted from having so much to watch out for. Peter speared beans with all his concentration, and Aunt Dorothy began examining her charm bracelet.
“Just loved you and raised you, the best we knew how,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Made mistakes, but none of them on purpose. What else did you want? I go over and over it all, in my mind. Was it something I did? Something I didn’t do? Nights when you were in bed, clean from your baths, I felt such—oh, remorse. Regret. I thought back over every cross word. Now it’s all like one long night, regret for anything I might have done but no fresh faces to start in new upon in the morning. Here I am alone, just aching for you, and still I don’t know what it was I did. Was it me, really? Was it?”
“Mother, of course not,” Mary said.
“Then sometimes I think you were all in a turmoil from birth, nothing I did could have helped. Can you deny it?”
“Mother—”
“What about Andrew? What about Timothy? I was such a gentle person. Where did they get that from?”
Her face was blurring, crumpling, dissolving. And all the movements made toward her were bluffs. Some cleared their throats and some leaned suddenly in her direction, but nobody did anything. In the end, it was Matthew who stood up and said, “I guess you’d like to rest now, Mother.”
“Rest!” she said, with her mouth pressed to a napkin. But she allowed herself to be led away. The others scraped their chairs back and stood up. Alvareen, bearing a hot apple pie, stopped short in the doorway. “We won’t be needing dessert,” Mary told her. “Now, aren’t you an optimist. Have you ever known this family to make it through to the end of a meal?”
“Your mama and Elizabeth always did,” Alvareen said.
The others were filing out of the dining room. Mary bore a sagging, boneless Billy toward a rocking chair by the fireplace. Mrs. Emerson, composed again, mounted the stairs with Matthew close behind. “I’ll just turn down the spread for you,” he told her. “You’ll feel better when you’re not so tired.”
“It’s true I haven’t slept much,” said Mrs. Emerson.
But instead of going straight to bed, she stopped at the doorway of Margaret’s room. Elizabeth was wrapping pieces of wood in tissue paper and stuffing them into a knapsack. “Elizabeth,” Mrs. Emerson said, “was death instantaneous?”
Elizabeth didn’t even look up. “Oh, yes,” she said, without surprise, and she folded down the flap of the knapsack and buckled the canvas straps.
“Then he didn’t have any, say any last—”
“No.”
“Well, thank you. All I wanted was a clear cut answer.”
“You’re welcome,” said Elizabeth.
Matthew took his mother’s arm, thinking she would go now, but she didn’t. “You’re packing,” she said. “I never thought you would actually go through with this.”
“Well, there’s a lot I need to get done. I have to reapply at the college.”
“Can’t you do that by mail?”
“I believe it’d be better just going down there,” Elizabeth said.
She still hadn’t looked up. She had started folding shirts into squares and laying them in a suitcase. For once, there was nothing that could sidetrack or delay her. His mother must have seen that too. “Why, Elizabeth?” she said. “Do you blame me?”
“Blame you for what?”
“Oh, well—could you really just leave me like this? Are you going to let me live through these next few months all alone? The last time you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs. Emerson raised a hand and let it fall, giving up. She allowed herself to be led across the hall to her bedroom.
“I never did wholly trust that girl,” she said.
Then she lay down, and shielded her eyes with her forearm. Matthew drew the curtains and left her there.
When he crossed the hall again, Elizabeth’s door was closed. It was a message; it seemed meant for him alone. He stood there for a minute, slouched and empty-handed. When she didn’t come out he went on downstairs.
Melissa and Peter were playing poker. “He’s very successful,” Melissa was saying. “He owns his own company. But he nags at me, we fight a lot. You know? Sometimes when he invites me out he makes me change what I’m wearing, just to suit him. He goes charging into my closet and pushes all my dresses down the rod, figuring what he’d like better. What can you do with a person like that?” Peter frowned at his cards. He wasn’t even pretending to listen.
Margaret was talking about a man too, but in her own toneless way. She lay on a couch with her feet up, twining a limp lock of hair around her finger and telling Mary about someone named Brady. “I was planning to bring him home, before this happened,” she said.
“Oh, don’t,” said Mary, rocking Billy serenely. “Everything goes wrong in this house.”
“But he keeps asking me to marry him. Mother would have a fit if she didn’t meet him first.”
“Well, coming from someone who eloped—”
“Mother met him first.”
“Only if you count when he brought in the groceries,” Mary said. “She’s not much for heart-to-heart talks with stray delivery boys.”
“You don’t have to be so snide about it.”
“I’m not. Can’t we have a normal conversation? I don’t know why you want to get married anyway—you’re not the type.” She arranged Billy more comfortably, checking his sleep with her mouth tucked in and competent-looking. “Too disorganized. Any man would be climbing the walls. You must still think marriage is floating around in a white dress. Well, it isn’t.”
“I know that, I read the ladies’ magazines.”
“They expect you to take care of them, it’s not the other way around. Always asking you to pick up, put away, find things for them. Look at Morris—every morning I tell him the butter’s kept in the butter bin. He never listens. He opens the refrigerator and panics. ‘The butter, where’s the butter, we’ve run out of butter again.’ ‘It’s in the butter bin, dear.’ Oh, you’d never last through that. I often think of chucking it all myself.”
The telephone rang. Matthew crossed to the armchair and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said.
“Oh, Matthew,” said Andrew.
“Hello, Andrew.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. W
hy?”
“You aren’t glad to hear from me.”
“Of course I am,” said Matthew.
“I can tell from your voice.”
“Don’t be silly,” Matthew said. “Were you calling about anything in particular?”
There was a chipping sound at the other end of the line—Andrew doing something nervous with the phone. His hands were always busy, twisting or fidgeting or kneading his thumbs, while the rest of him was limp and motionless. Like a rag doll, he tended to remain where he was left—New York, in this case, after a try at college there. It took vast amounts of other people’s energy to change his life in any way, and lately no one had felt up to it. What was the use? In New York he lived in a pattern as unvarying as the tracks of a toy train—from rooming house to library to rooming house, lunch every Wednesday with Melissa in the only restaurant he approved of (the only one he had been in; someone had once taken him there) and home three or four times a year, shattered and white over the change in his schedule. He distrusted planes (a family trait) and panicked at the swaying of trains, and had never learned to drive. All he had left were buses. Buses, Matthew thought, and started. “Holy Moses,” he said. “You’re in Baltimore.”
“You forgot,” said Andrew.
“Oh no, I just—”
“You forgot I was coming. Would you rather I just went back again?”
“No, Andrew.”
“There are plenty of buses out of here.”
“I knew you were coming. I just never heard what time,” Matthew said. “I’ll be right down.”
“Oh, well—” “Wait there.”
“Well, if you’re sure you’re expecting me,” said Andrew.
“We are. Stay there, now. Bye.”
He hung up and started out of the room immediately. “I have to get Andrew,” he said.
“Oh, Lord,” said Melissa. “This is too much at once.”
“I’ll be back in a while.”
“Tell him in the car, Matthew. Get it over with.”
“Are you crazy?” Mary asked. “Why did we keep it from him, if we’re just going to dump it on him now? Don’t you say a word, Matthew. Bring him on home. Maybe we’ll wait till tomorrow.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Melissa said. “I have a nervous stomach.”
Matthew left. In the hallway he met Elizabeth, who was just coming down the stairs with her suitcase and knapsack. Her burdens made her look lopsided. She still wore her church dress, with pieces of damp bark down the front. When she saw him, she stopped on the bottom step. He had an urge to trap her there, under glass, complete with her baggage and her peeling handbag and her falling-down hairdo, until life was sorted out again and he could collect what he wanted to say to her. “Can’t you wait?” he asked. “Don’t go yet. Won’t you just wait till I get back from the bus station?”
“Oh, the bus station,” Elizabeth said. “That’s where I’m going.”
“What for?”
“Well, I’m catching a bus. You could give me a lift.”
“Oh, I thought—I had pictured you getting a ride.”
“Not at such short notice,” Elizabeth said.
She handed him the suitcase. Of all the sad things going on today, it seemed to him that the saddest was that single motion—Elizabeth flashing the luminous inner side of her wrist, with its bulky leather watchstrap, as she passed him her suitcase. Where were her bulletin board drivers, those laughable old cars full of Hopkins students that used to draw up at the door? Where were her blue jeans, and her moccasins with the chewed-looking tassels, and her impatient, brushing-away motion when he tried to help her with loads that looked too heavy?
“Are you waiting for something?” Elizabeth said.
“No.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“But—so fast? You haven’t said goodbye yet. Mother’s still in her room.”
“I’ll write her a bread-and-butter letter.”
“Well, if that’s the way you want to do it,” Matthew said.
They hurried down the sidewalk, with Elizabeth’s turned-up pumps making clopping sounds and her knapsack swinging over one shoulder. “Hop in,” Matthew said. “We have to get to Andrew before he takes the next bus out again.”
“Oh, Andrew,” said Elizabeth, but her voice was dull and tired. It sounded as if she had had enough of Emersons.
All the way downtown, Matthew kept choosing words and then discarding them, choosing more, trying to make some contact with Elizabeth’s cold, still profile. He drove absentmindedly, and had to be honked into motion at several traffic lights. “You won’t get to see how those new shrubs make out,” he told her once. Then, later, “Will August be a good time for me to visit you?” She didn’t answer. “I get my vacation then,” he said. Elizabeth only drew a billfold from her handbag and started counting money. “Do you have enough?” he asked her.
“Sure.”
“Did Mother ever pay you for this past week?”
“Pay me?”
When Elizabeth answered questions with questions, it was no use trying to talk to her.
They passed dark narrow buildings that had suddenly brightened in the spring sunlight, old ladies sitting on crumbling front stoops taking the air, children roller-skating. In the heart of the city, in a tangle of taverns and pawnshops and cut-rate jewelers, black-jacketed men stood on the sidewalks selling paper cones of daffodils. Matthew drew up in front of the bus station, where he parked illegally because he was afraid of losing both of them, Andrew and Elizabeth, if he took more time. “Don’t get away from me,” he told Elizabeth. “Wait till I find Andrew. Don’t leave.”
“How could I? You’re carrying my suitcase.”
“Oh.”
They went through the doors and toward the ticket counter. Only two people were waiting in line there, and the first was Andrew. “Andrew!” Matthew called. He ran, but he had sense enough to keep hold of Elizabeth’s suitcase. Andrew turned, still offering a sheaf of bills to the man behind the counter. He was nearly as tall as Matthew, but blond and pale and fragile-looking. His suit hung from him in loose folds. His face was long and pinched. “I’m arranging to go back,” he said.
“You can’t do that.”
“I can if I want to.”
“This is all a misunderstanding,” Matthew said. He took hold of Andrew’s sleeve, and the ticket agent folded his arms on the counter and settled down to watch. “They’re waiting for you at home,” Matthew said. “They expect you any time now.” Then, to the ticket agent, “He won’t be going.” He pulled Andrew out of the line, and the fat lady behind him moved up to the counter with a huffy twitch of her shoulders.
“Now you’ve lost my place,” Andrew said.
“You know yourself you’re acting like a fool.”
“Oh, am I?” Andrew said. “Why didn’t she think to tell you, then? Did she forget I was coming? Or did she remember and you forgot. Did you decide just not to bother?”
His eyes seemed deeper in their sockets than usual, and closer together. His arm, still in Matthew’s grasp, was struggling away, and he was moving by fractions of inches back to the counter. Yet if he had really wanted to, he could have shaken Matthew off entirely. Returning to New York was another of his passing impulses, already deserting him, leaving him to fumble on in his course out of sheer inability to back down. All he needed now was some dignified alternative. “Look,” Matthew said, but Andrew’s arm, which was bare and skinny beneath his coat sleeve, seemed to infect him with some of Andrew’s shaky tension. He couldn’t get his words out. “You could, could—”
And to make it worse, the fat lady at the counter moved away and the person behind her stepped up: Elizabeth. Composed and distant, she unsnapped the clasp of her billfold. “Ellington, North Carolina,” she said.
“Elizabeth!”
But she wasn’t so easily pulled from the line. She went on counting out bills, and the ticket agent gave Matthew a peculiar look from under his eye
brows.
“Elizabeth, too much is going on right now,” Matthew said. “Will you wait? Will you come back with me, and take a later bus? There are things I want to get settled with you.”
“May I have my ticket, please?” Elizabeth said. The agent shrugged his shoulders and moved off to the ticket rack. Elizabeth spread her money in a fan on the counter. “I’m in luck, there’s a bus leaving right away,” she said. “I want to get on it.”
“I know you do. I don’t blame you at all, but I can’t let you go yet. I haven’t said anything to you.”
“There’s nothing to say,” Elizabeth said.
There was, but it was difficult with Andrew there. He was standing between them, teetering on his heels and looking curiously from one to the other. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” he said.
“Elizabeth,” Matthew said, “I love you. I think we should get married.”
“Married?” said Andrew.
“I’m not interested,” Elizabeth said.
“Why not?”
“I just want to get out of here. I’m sick of Emersons. Thank you,” she told the agent, and stuffed the ticket into her bag.
Andrew said, “How do you know the Emersons aren’t sick of you too, whoever you are?”
“Andrew, keep out of this,” Matthew told him.
Andrew turned on his heel and went up to the counter.
“Andrew!” Matthew said. “Will you come back here?”
“See what I mean?” said Elizabeth.
“Look, you can’t refuse to marry me just because I’ve got a crazy brother. Andrew! Elizabeth, listen to me.”
“It isn’t only Andrew that’s crazy,” Elizabeth said. “It’s all of you. Oh, I knew I should have left before. How could I make so many mistakes? Give me my suitcase, please.”
“No,” said Matthew. He held onto it. “Elizabeth—”
She turned and left, walking fast and swinging her knapsack. She was heading out toward the buses, but he couldn’t believe she would really go. He still had the suitcase, after all. He was holding it tightly. When Andrew reappeared, waving a ticket, Matthew said, “Here, take this suitcase. Don’t let it go. I’ll be back in a minute.” Then he pushed through a crowd of ladies in hats, past a girl with a French horn case and a tiny old black woman with a caged parakeet. He thought he saw Elizabeth, but he was mistaken; the beige he had his eyes fixed on was a soldier’s uniform. He pushed through the doors and outside, where rows of buses were revving their motors and men were rushing by with baggage carts. One bus, already backing out, had stopped to unfold its doors to Elizabeth. “Wait!” he called. “I have your suitcase!” If she heard, she didn’t care. She scrambled up the bus steps, hoisting her knapsack higher on her shoulder. The last he saw of her was one upturned shoe sole with a wad of pink bubble gum stuck to the toe. Then the doors folded shut again.