Against the Season Read online

  “No,” Ida said, to agree. Safe. Safe next to the grave. Innocent. “Still it was unkind of him.”

  Agate came in to clear away the others’ coffee cups. Cole got up quickly to help her, in the look they exchanged something irritable, needful, outside the circle of mourning.

  If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,

  Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime

  Should hear my living feet…

  Let new faces play what tricks they will

  In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,

  Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,

  The living seem more shadowy than they.

  Beatrice would quote, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death.” Nothing of that freezing comfort in Amelia’s honesty. Dull, direct, loving Amelia, who had hurt them more with her goodness, her contentment, than they could hurt her with their witty discontent. Carl, unkind, dead. He had sent roses to Beatrice’s funeral. Ida had forgotten that.

  But never asked for love; should I ask that,

  I shall be old indeed….

  Ida wanted to go home, wanted to read her Yeats, play an ancient unreal Maud Gonne against her as unreal grief, who had never had a moment of beauty, had only taken comfort from the pointlessness of it in her best and beautiful friend, but she must sit and eat a while longer among the living ruins of Amelia and Maud, their faces bloated with customary sorrow, bored with death only a little less than with life.

  “Dessert, Miss Setworth?” Agate asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” It would pass the time.

  “He never could learn to count,” Maud said.

  “Did you speak about arrangements?” Amelia asked Ida.

  “He has a brother who’ll come to bury him.”

  “It should be a nice funeral,” Maud said.

  “I hope so,” Amelia said. “He always did such a nice one.”

  Like Aunt Setworth’s wine cake or old Mrs. Larson’s quilts. And Amelia would walk to the grave, even at the risk of toppling into it, not with any sense of drama, simply of what was fitting. Ida, too, only making whatever gesture was required with some moment of sharp whimsy. For Maud, every funeral since she had been a young woman was a rehearsal of Arthur’s. Perhaps Carl was wrong. It might be unkind to rob her of that.

  Rosemary, without stopping to telephone, drove directly from her office to Ida Setworth’s, and she found Ida, as she expected to, sitting on her terrace reading Yeats.

  “I didn’t hear until this afternoon,” Rosemary said.

  “Rosemary!” Ida said, looking up surprised.

  “It’s horrible for you. It’s…”

  “Don’t ever say anything to anyone, will you?” Ida asked with some urgency.

  “I…” Rosemary, seeing the distress in Ida’s face, could not admit that she had blurted out to Amelia, “But Ida was thinking of marrying him.”

  “It was never anything serious,” Ida said. “A silly notion… silly, old fools…”

  “That’s not the truth,” Rosemary said, surprised at her own rudeness.

  “It will do,” Ida said sharply. “Anything else is an embarrassment to people… to me.”

  “Oh, Ida, Ida…” Rosemary said, putting a tight arm around this old lady, her friend.

  It was criminal, this denying of Carl Hollinger, this leaving of him now as a lonely old man instead of the lively, loving person he had been. To save face. Rosemary felt the stiff, brittle shoulders, the unbending head, and knew Ida was looking out through the orchard to the graves of almost everyone she had known and loved, where day after tomorrow Carl would be buried beside his wife. Criminal, this living need of dignity against the defenseless dead. Her father, a possible suicide for some perversity of her mother’s pride. But Rosemary, in an angry pride of her own, had not buried her mother. Did it, after all, make any difference? Rosemary had thought so, but she had not loved her mother. In angry concern, she held to Ida, her sense of all these things blurred in protesting tears.

  “It’s nothing to cry about,” Ida said, taking Rosemary’s free hand. “We’re all too old to cry about. Don’t. Don’t, Rosemary.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rosemary said.

  “You can’t have had supper.”

  “I came right out.”

  “There must be something in the kitchen,” Ida said. “Come along. We’ll look and see.”

  As Rosemary took lettuce and celery from the refrigerator, opened a can for Ida, and then went to set the table, Ida didn’t really seem distressed. She might even be in some way relieved of the burden of choice. No investment. Not like Rosemary’s mother, whose had been a passionately bad investment, but important, all-important after Jimmy died. If it had been her father instead, who had had no investments either except perhaps in her, would he have been, like Ida, relieved? Or forced to suffer no more than embarrassment? Something ugly in it all, perhaps in everyone. No. Carl had grieved. Amelia, too. Why hadn’t Rosemary the decency to? She had even refused to weep for her father. If Dina cracked herself up tomorrow in that new Volvo of hers, would Rosemary be glad that no one knew about their relationship? Would she? Probably. She hadn’t even risked lively confessions. What was independence after all but a denial?

  Rosemary sat at the dinner table with Ida, appalled at them both, unable to think of the most ordinary things to say.

  “You have to learn not to bury all the dead again,” Ida said, “each time.”

  That firmness startled Rosemary. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” Ida said. “Just that.”

  “You mean, Aunt Setworth…”

  “And your brother and your father and your mother, my mother, my father…”

  “Beatrice,” Rosemary said.

  Ida nodded, “Her, too.”

  Rosemary wanted to shout at Ida, wanted to make her confess, for surely she had loved Beatrice, been in love with her but had never said, never done anything…

  “Ida, I’m in love with Dina Pyros.”

  Ida sighed. “Yes, I supposed you were.”

  “Is it ridiculous? Is it so ridiculous?”

  “Yes,” Ida said. “It can’t ever be anything else.”

  “I don’t really care.”

  “No, neither did Carl. Even, in some way, he found it a comfort, like his religion, I suppose. I didn’t, don’t, but I did think I just might manage it… with him.”

  “But you really loved…”

  “Nobody,” Ida said. “Or I wouldn’t have minded so much… even now.”

  “Did Beatrice ever…?”

  “Leave our graves alone,” Ida said, but gently. “Ride by.”

  XVI

  PETER FALLIDON WENT TO Harriet Jameson, aware that she would need comfort and shaken in his own sense of mortality, for, since he had known that Carl Hollinger was courting Ida Setworth, Peter no longer thought of him as one of those marked and waiting, his life already accomplished or not. He had become for Peter a man with a lively problem, in some comic measure similar to Peter’s own, full of silly, hopeful needs that might be answered. A couple of embarrassed bachelors, out of the habit of amorous persuasion, focused upon women whose graces had nothing to do with being courted. That Carl could be so intent upon a future and then simply not have one put Peter’s own in jeopardy. Allotted time: thirty years? five minutes? Any stop light.

  It’s hard to think about it,” Harriet said. “Not like the others. They let you see them dying… even Miss A now. I’ll hate it when she dies, but she begins to behave in a way to make it clear, like someone gathering up gloves and saying ‘thank you’ with a mind already in some other place. With Mr. Hollinger, it’s as shocking as if one … of us …”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “And Miss Setworth there where she’s always been, all her life, among the dead. Why didn’t she just go ahead and marry him? But maybe that would have been worse.”

  “How could it have been worse?” Peter asked, almost irritably.

&nb
sp; To be a widow, to have someone else’s name. Oh, I don’t know. Embarrassing?”

  Peter rubbed his face.

  “Would you like something? Coffee?”

  “Do you really think Miss Larson is dying?”

  “Really? Yes, I do. It may take a long time, like Miss B, but she’s begun.”

  “There’s so much she might still do,” Peter said.

  “I think she’s tired of that idea.”

  “Tired?”

  “People do just get tired.”

  “I suppose,” Peter said.

  “But not Mr. Hollinger. It seems like an accident. I hate that. To suffer some lower form of fate.”

  “It wasn’t an accident. It was a heart attack.”

  “I know that.”

  “Harriet?”

  She turned to him from her sense of insult at this death.

  “Let’s not wait,” Peter said.

  “For what?”

  “Let’s marry. There couldn’t be more harm in it than not.”

  Harriet looked at him and shook her head. “Harm.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I meant that, whatever happens, I’d rather have married… you.”

  “In retrospect,” Harriet said quietly, trying out the idea.

  “Now, too,” Peter said earnestly. “I’d rather. I’d so much rather…”

  “Than what?”

  “Than not.”

  Harriet sat without answering, her thin arms prim against her body, her eyes focusing through glasses onto her own hands.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Peter asked.

  “I don’t know. I think we should … do other things first.”

  “Other things?”

  “What other people do… go to bed.”

  “You’re not serious!”

  “What if you couldn’t bear me? What if I turned out to be one of those people who…”

  “Don’t be silly,” Peter said. “We aren’t adolescent. That sort of thing doesn’t matter. It…”

  “Doesn’t matter?”

  “Harriet, one of the reasons I love you is that you’re not the sort of woman who makes something cheap of…”

  “Nobody is a sort of anything,” Harriet said, flushing. “I don’t think you want to make love to me. I don’t think I’m attractive to you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You never touch me. In books men touch women.” Harriet’s tone was not accusing. She was earnestly trying to explain.

  “Harriet,” Peter said, taking both her hands, “we’re both of us shy people. It doesn’t do any good to behave as if we’re not. Or to behave as if we didn’t care about the things we do care about. I couldn’t try anything out. Not like that. There are lots of things that people do, in books and out of them, that aren’t for people like us.”

  “People like us?”

  “Born decent like you, or trying to be decent like me.”

  “I don’t think I’m that old-fashioned.”

  “Of course you are,” Peter said.

  “Maybe what I’m afraid of is that you’re a prude,” Harriet said, an uncertain amusement in her eyes.

  “l am.”

  “And want to marry me just now because… because you feel threatened… old…”

  “There’s that,” Peter agreed, in an honest amusement of his own.

  “And forget how little you want to worry about anyone.”

  “Or see that there are worse things than worrying.”

  “What?”

  “Not.”

  “Would you want… a church? That sort of thing?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “An old-fashioned prude would,” Harriet said. “Why does Mr. Hollinger have to be dead? Why?”

  Peter could put an arm around her then, lined up as they were together on the couch.

  “And tomorrow, at the funeral, we’ll have to pretend we don’t know about Miss Setworth, her secret kept by probably half the people in town so that she won’t know that we know. Love: the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they’re married. Then one always suspects they don’t. People must talk about us now. Are we guilty or not? Are we? If I died today, if you died today…”

  “Don’t, darling,” Peter said.

  “I’m worrying you.”

  “We can stop being secretive. We can marry.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  The kiss she offered him tasted of salt.

  “The only decent thing for us to do is get married,” Cole said, loading up the garbage to take out while Agate washed the dishes. “I’ve thought about it.”

  Agate yawned.

  “Agate?”

  “The thing about kid’s books and songs that’s always bored me rigid is the repetition.”

  “I’m prepared to marry you.”

  “Circumcised, anointed, and the lot?”

  “Can’t you ever be serious, not even for a minute?”

  “Sure. I can hold my breath that long, too, if you like.”

  “Great!”

  “Or my nose.”

  “Why don’t you want to marry me?” Cole demanded.

  “Why should I want to?”

  “Well, you can’t just keep…” Cole began, but trailed off.

  “Whoring around? Why not?”

  “What if you keep the baby?”

  “Who said I was going to keep it?”

  “You did, sort of. I mean, that night, you said you might if…”

  “Well, that’s none of your business,” Agate said, and turned her energy to a pan.

  Cole stood by the kitchen door and watched her, seeing the full, closed beauty of her face.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “it feels to me as if the baby were mine.”

  Agate plunged the pan to the bottom of the sink and threw her head back, opening golden eyes to a sympathetic, cynical audience on the ceiling. “The only thing of yours I might give birth to is an Adam’s apple, and it wouldn’t come out of my navel, either.”

  “That isn’t what I mean. I mean, when I lie beside you sometimes, when I feel it move, it’s as if…” but he didn’t finish.

  “Go dump all the garbage.”

  “It’s wrong to give it away,” Cole said fiercely. “Even an animal doesn’t do that. Even an animal…”

  “You don’t want to live in an animal world,” Agate said, tight but aloof from his challenge. “It makes you sick to your stomach.”

  “It is an animal world,” Cole said bitterly. “This house is like a human farm, bloody with birth or slaughter, nothing in between.”

  “Say, that’s not bad, only human husbandry and human husbands aren’t exactly the same thing.”

  “You think I’m not man enough. You think…”

  “You still want me to make up a sad story about Agate and the skinny faggot? You still want to be hung up about that? Saved by a bad woman from a fate worse than death. Stow it.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “You don’t know what you mean.”

  “Neither do you,” Cole said, “You’re always pretending. You’re no better than I am. You don’t know any more than I do.”

  “You’re a backward pupil,” Agate said, grinning.

  “You’re a cow!”

  They heard Amelia’s heavy footfall beyond the kitchen door and froze.

  “Enough bad temper here for me to think there’s going to be a thunder storm,” Amelia said. “Are we going to have a game of hearts tonight or not?”

  “Hearts,” Cole said, “yes. I’m just dumping the garbage.”

  “Is he ever!” Agate agreed.

  “We’re all tired,” Amelia said, swinging herself over to a kitchen chair.

  “Cole said you went to the grave.”

  “Yes,” Amelia said. “It’s what one does.”

  “Like walking to your own. It’s no wonder you’re tired.”

  “I wanted to say something to Ida. I couldn�
�t think of anything. Sister would have sensed it. She would have told me or anyway stopped me from saying such awful things in the first place.”

  “What awful things?” Agate asked, drying her hands now.

  “I said on the night he died it was an easier solution to his loneliness than marrying again. I hadn’t any idea he and Ida were thinking of it. It never crossed my mind until Rosemary told me the next day.”

  “So? You re right.”

  “No, child, I’m not. I’m wrong.”

  “You might have married him. You might have gotten away with it. But Miss Setworth? Not in a million years.”

  “I?” Amelia asked. “What an extraordinary idea!”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t have the sense of what it is to be as old as I am.”

  “It’s only that you don’t think in formalities, and you never did, did you? You just go ahead and love people.”

  “Ida’s loved people,” Amelia said. “She loved Sister.”

  “I wish I could have met your sister, just once.”

  “I always could walk to the grave,” Amelia said. “Walking away from it is what I can’t do. I haven’t got anything to say except ‘accept it’”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s no comfort to anyone, and it’s not good advice since no one can accept it.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No,” Amelia said. “I haven’t accepted anyone’s death ever. I think I should, that’s all.”

  Cole came back in with the empty garbage cans.

  “Maybe you’d rather go to a movie,” Amelia said.

  “No, cards is fine,” Cole said.

  “Or down to Nick’s.”

  “I’ve had enough of Nick’s,” Cole said.

  “Peter told me the other day that you were an excellent dancer,” Amelia said.

  “Not really. I learned a couple of the steps is all.”

  “He said he was hoping he and Harriet would see you next week.”

  “I hope so. I might…”

  “That’s what I told him,” Amelia said. “I told him you were working overtime quite a bit lately.”

  “It’s not…”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Cole!” Agate burst out. “What’s so polite about all the lies? You don’t want to see him, so you don’t want to see him. Why not say so?”