Against the Season Read online

  “It isn’t that I don’t want to see him. I…”

  “Let’s play cards,” Amelia said, hoisting herself up. “There will be rain before morning, and we’ll all feel better.”

  Rosemary lay listening to it on the flat roof above her head, wondering if across town it had wakened Dina. Or had it wakened Ida? She would listen to it falling on the new grave, and probably there would be poems in her head. Rosemary caught a line for herself, “Though you should lean above me brokenhearted, I shall not care,” fished out of her adolescence somewhere. She never had read the hard poems willingly, only the romantic nonsense that nourished the crushes she couldn’t expose in any other way. Less good-looking, she would have been said to moon. As it was, her mother would complain that she was brooding again. Brooding. But hatching nothing. It had always been easier to be loved, to let someone else play the fool. Like her father. Like Beatrice. Like Ida. The loved ones, who never made the promises, who never admitted the needs, who could always say, when it was over, “It was never anything but nonsense anyway.” After a week, after three months, after five years, it didn’t matter how long. But finally when you could see the pattern repeating and repeating itself, the defense wore thin. If it really was never anything but nonsense from the beginning, then you couldn’t just assign humiliation at the end without taking some share in it. Not time and again. Saying to Jane’s back, “I’m sorry. I just can’t be melodramatic about it. If you need to get away, you need to get away.” And to the lack of reply. “I don’t take emotional tests. There isn’t any point.” And finally Jane had said, as tired of her own anger as Rosemary was, “I know, love: you didn’t ask to be born, you didn’t ask to be beautiful, and you certainly didn’t ask to be loved. It’s only the rest of us who are fools like that. We never quite believe what a bad joke it is, on you, too.” Beatrice’s bad joke. Not having to ask. But with Dina, Rosemary had. She had said, like the fool, “I love you. I want you like that.” What good had it done? None.

  “I want to be melodramatic about this,” Rosemary said at the tempoed roof. “I want to pass the test.”

  A fool, in such a circumstance, would then go ahead and be melodramatic, invent the test—and fail it, for what would Dina say but “A Greek, to marry well, must be a virgin” or “I don’t sleep in front of people” or not reply at all, except with the skilled sexual answers she had used from the beginning against which Rosemary wanted no defense. Why couldn’t she say to Dina, “I’m no more tired of being loved than breathing in. It’s just that I want to breathe out. Reach out, before it happens again, before I stand there uncommitted at the crisis, and let you walk away, or walk away myself. Dina, I do love you. I do want you like that.”

  Why not? Rosemary got out of bed and turned on a light. Two in the morning. She put on slacks and a shirt, combed her hair, but left her face alone. Then she looked for shoes. Why bother? Barefooted, bareheaded, barefaced fool. In the rain.

  There was a light above the shop. Dina was awake. Rosemary got out of her car and let herself in quietly with the key Dina had given her. She moved easily past the shapes of furniture into the workroom and up the dark stairs. At the door she hesitated, about to knock, but that was not the stance she had chosen. She opened the door instead and stepped into the room. There, in the bright red dressing gown sitting on the couch was a woman Rosemary had never seen before.

  “Who are you?” Rosemary asked, baffled.

  “What is it?” Dina called from the kitchen.

  “Somebody’s here,” the woman said, without moving. “Somebody’s just walked in.”

  “Rosemary!”

  She could have retreated with an ironic apology. It was in her to be able to. But she didn’t.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said easily. “I saw your light on. I thought maybe I’d have a drink…”

  “Of course,” Dina said. “Come in.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, in that case…” said the woman on the couch getting up.

  “Don’t rush off without getting dressed just on my account,” Rosemary said.

  The woman nearly lost her balance in her drunken attempt at dignified withdrawal into the bedroom.

  “Do you want your clothes?” Rosemary asked, lifting up the neat pile on the chair.

  The woman snatched them from Rosemary and slammed the door. Rosemary turned to the kitchen where Dina was fixing her drink.

  “I don’t need half the bottle, darling,” she said. “Are you drunk?”

  “Yes,” Dina said.

  “Who is she?”

  Dina shrugged.

  “You don’t even know her name?”

  “Alice.”

  “Alice,” Rosemary repeated.

  “I didn’t know you’d be coming over, or I…”

  “A customer, is she? Interested in a rocking chair?”

  “She’s a friend of Sal’s and Dolly’s. We were all drinking.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s had a row with her husband and didn’t want to go home right away.”

  “Oh.”

  They stood in the kitchen and waited until they heard the bedroom door slam again and the main door open.

  “Aren’t you going to see her out?” Rosemary asked. “It’s pretty dark down there unless she’s been here often and knows her way.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Dina said.

  “Will she?”

  Dina moved out into the living room and through her bedroom to the bathroom. When she came back, she had washed her face and combed her hair. Rosemary sat on the couch still warm from Dina’s recent visitor.

  “You’re angry,” Dina said.

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “I?”

  “Yes, if you came to my house and found someone else there.”

  “Like that? I would be… embarrassed.”

  “I was lying in bed,” Rosemary said. “I was listening to the rain. I wondered if it had wakened you. I wondered if I came here how I would find you, awake or asleep. It was a silly idea. But then it was all nonsense, wasn’t it, from the beginning?”

  “Nonsense?”

  “Yes,” Rosemary said, hating her coolness, her irony, but choosing it. “A pleasant sort of nonsense.”

  “Not for me,” Dina said. “You’re my friend.”

  “I’m another one of your pieces of furniture!” Rosemary shouted, and this was out of character, something she hadn’t ever done before. “An object! Just like Alice: stripped down, oiled a bit, polished…”

  “I do what people want,” Dina answered.

  “George,” Rosemary said, her voice still strained with unfamiliar volume. “Good old George. Why haven’t I had a bill?”

  Dina put her hand out, as if to shield herself from offensively bright light. Rosemary got up and walked over to her.

  “Don’t,” Dina said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t.”

  Rosemary put her hand down on Dina’s head and felt the dampness of her hair from its fresh combing, smelled the faint odor of sex and furniture oil that clung to her clothes.

  “Take those off.”

  “What?”

  “Take those off. They smell of her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dina said. “I’ll change.”

  “There’s no need to,” Rosemary said. “I’m spending the night.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m very drunk.”

  “I know you are,” Rosemary said, as she began to unbutton Dina’s shirt without any urgency. “I’ll put you to bed. And don’t tell me you don’t sleep in front of people. There’ll be no more slogans tonight.”

  Dina did not feel in control of what was happening. She only knew that Rosemary had seemed very angry and now was not, insistent instead that Dina get out of her clothes and go to bed. Dina wanted to cooperate. She wanted to do anything Rosemary wanted her to, but she couldn’t seem to move. She tipped her head against Rosem
ary and put her hands on those familiar thighs.

  “Come on,” Rosemary was saying.

  She must get out of her clothes. Rosemary didn’t like the smell of her clothes.

  “That’s it. Oh, come on, darling. Come in here.”

  Dina was in bed now without her clothes and Rosemary was lying next to her, simply lying there. Dina closed her eyes, but the bed was falling like a stone through space. She turned, moaned, found herself in Rosemary’s arms, falling, falling, but into a ground swell now, the sickness fading, the rocking nearly pleasant because it was real, but then Rosemary turned onto her.

  “No,” Dina said.

  “Yes.”

  And Dina received before she closed against the pain of her own desire, shifted, sighed, and slept.

  The rain continued for some time to keep Rosemary awake, for whether it was falling on a new grave or a new life she had no way of knowing.

  XVII

  “SOMEONE SHOULD GIVE A party for Peter and Harriet,” Amelia said at the dining room table.

  “Why?” Cole asked.

  “It’s done,” Amelia answered simply, “and Harriet’s mother can’t really manage it.”

  “So you think you should,” Agate said.

  “I can have it catered.”

  Agate did not protest as she might have done a month earlier. She was heavily uncomfortable, and her temper, even with Amelia, was often short. There were too many chores for the strength she had and not enough distractions from the anxiety she increasingly felt for herself, and the baby she was about to have. Sometimes she wanted to talk with Amelia, confront her with the knotted angers and doubts that Agate couldn’t untangle for herself, never before having bothered. But Amelia was too old and too tired, and it was unlikely that she had any of the answers herself. She was really no more interested in analyzing and judging than Agate was. Which was all right on the way to the grave, but on the way to giving birth maybe some things should be understood. Just the other day Agate had been tempted to talk a little with Rosemary Hopwood, but they had established a bantering habit that was hard to break through. Also Agate sensed in Rosemary some trouble or preoccupation of her own, as if somewhere under that easy control she had been badly shaken. And exactly what was there to sort out? The question she really wanted to ask was why she had to go through with it, and who knew why? Maybe it wasn’t a question at all but just a protest. Her life in these last months had been full of alternatives, all of them lousy. So much for free will.

  “I wonder if we should hire chairs,” Amelia was saying. “Our own haven’t been out of the shed in five years.”

  “Let people stand up,” Agate said. “They won’t stay as long.”

  “Too many won’t be able to stand up at all,” Cole answered glumly.

  “What are you going to do if it rains? Getting all of you old crocks up the stairs is no joke,” Agate said.

  “It won’t rain,” Amelia said. “If it does, the front room is large enough for forty.”

  “Forty!” Cole repeated.

  “You’re too young to be getting as antisocial as you are, Cole. Besides, I simply need your help.”

  “Oh, I’ll help,” Cole said hastily. “I didn’t mean that.”

  Didn’t he? he read in Agate’s mocking eyebrows. Well, he knew he had to face Peter sooner or later, and a crowd of forty people was preferable to an hour across from him at the dinner table. With plenty of time to think about it, to plan what he would and what he wouldn’t say, he could deal with the brief confrontations of greeting and saving good-bye. Peter himself had instructed Cole in just such formalities. The trick would be not to stammer into phony apologies, for the guiltier Cole felt about avoiding Peter the less he wanted to apologize. If anyone needed to be forgiven… but Cole turned away from that idea. The vision of Peter apologizing to him for anything whatever gave Cole hot flashes.

  “We’re all reluctant,” Amelia said. “Peter and Harriet may be, too, but it needs to be done.”

  “Does it really?” Agate asked.

  “Being engaged isn’t a private matter,” Amelia said, smiling.

  “Something like having a baby.”

  “Something.”

  “Do you always do what’s expected?” Agate asked irritably.

  “If I can,” Amelia said.

  “You don’t have to be so superior about it,” Cole said crossly to Agate. “You work just as hard to do what’s unexpected.”

  “Children, children,” Amelia said, knowing it was better for them to bicker through these last hard weeks of Cole’s job and Agate’s pregnancy than to sulk, but sulking would have been easier on her.

  It turned out to be an unusually hot day, but in the large, old garden there was shade for twice again the number of people who had been invited. Agate and Cole were stationed at the side path to direct people around the house, through the rose garden, and out onto the lawn, the deepest shade brilliant with begonias.

  Ida Setworth and Maud Montgomery were among the first to arrive, never having been able to break themselves of the old-fashioned courtesy of being on time. Peter, Harriet, and Harriet’s mother were right behind them, and the cluster of people made it easier than he had anticipated for Cole to greet Peter, but the tic still jumped frantically in his cheek.

  “Congratulations,” was all he needed to say, and he managed that.

  Agate, knowing her size and presence were a scandal to Mrs. Montgomery, went out of her way to be helpful about the uncertain footing for the trifocaled old lady.

  “But someone should be looking after you,” Maud protested.

  Agate kept herself from responding by concentrating on the variety of replies that were impossible, the wickedest one of which would have been “How’s Arthur?”

  What began to look like a pensioners’ tea gradually became something more of a community as Harriet’s sister and brother arrived with their families, along with several neatly middle-aged women with accustomed husbands, who had probably gone to school with Harriet. Cole, who seemed to know most of them, did the greeting and directing, leaving Agate to observe and occasionally gesture.

  Cole, so occupied, did not see Feller and Grace Hill get out of their car, but Grace saw him and stopped in mid-stride.

  “I can’t,” she said to Feller. “I can’t go through with it.”

  “Yes you can,” Feller said quietly. “We don’t have to stay more than a few minutes.”

  “I can’t.”

  Agate watched them, not knowing who they were, only seeing the hard distress in a woman who should have been—but somehow was not—attractive, the uncertain concern in her very tired husband. “Cole?” she called quietly. “Cole?”

  Cole turned, saw the Hills, and felt both kneecaps dissolve. He wanted to say to Agate just what Grace was saying to Feller, but he couldn’t. He had not known they were coming. Unlike his encounter with Peter, which he had had time to plan, he had simply not thought about Grace Hill. But there she was, not fifteen yards away, head sideways like a shying horse. Could he have hit such a woman?

  “I’ll wait in the car,” Grace said. “I’m sorry. I’ll just wait in the car.”

  “All right,” Feller said, and he turned back with her.

  “What’s the matter?” Agate asked Cole.

  “Mrs. Hill hasn’t been well,” he said. “Maybe she…”

  “Shouldn’t you offer to help?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go on. Don’t stand there out to lunch. Maybe she needs a drink of water with her tranquilizer or something.”

  He didn’t want to move. If Grace Hill couldn’t face it, why should he? But it must look odd to Agate to have him Just standing there doing nothing. Grace Hill was a sick woman. Dina had explained that.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said and walked over to the Hills’ car quickly before he could change his mind. “Is there something I can do?”

  “My wife doesn’t feel very well,” Feller said. “She thought she�
��d better just stay in the car.”

  “Could I get you something to drink, Mrs. Hill?” Cole asked, forcing himself to look directly at her. “Or would you like to come into the house? It’s awfully hot here in the drive.”

  “No,” she said abruptly and turned away.

  “There are lots of chairs in the shade,” Cole persisted, not knowing why he did.

  Grace looked at her husband.

  “Don’t you want to just try it?”

  “Oh, all right! There’s no point in making all this fuss.”

  She got out of the car again, dropping her purse. Cole picked it up and handed it to her. She looked at him for an ironic moment and then said, without rancor, “Thank you.”

  “It’s just around the house here. I’ll show you,” Cole said, leading the way.

  “I haven’t been in this garden since I was a kid,” Feller said to his wife, partly to distract her but also to ease a bitter nervousness of his own.

  As they rounded the house, Grace stopped again but this time simply to admire. “What roses! Look at those trees.”

  “This garden and the Montgomerys’ are about the only ones left,” Feller said.

  “Cousin A’s right over here,” Cole said, still directing them.

  “Here are Mr. and Mrs. Hill.”

  Amelia, sitting in one of the old covered swings at the edge of the shade, looked up and smiled. “How good of you both to come. Mrs. Hill, sit here with me and let’s get acquainted.”

  At the front of the house, Agate was greeting Rosemary Hopwood.

  “I’m badly late.”

  “The last of the wheel chairs has been rented,” Agate said. “You’ll have to get there on your own two feet.”

  “Shouldn’t you be getting off yours?”

  “Probably. Cole will be back in a minute, and he can deal with any stragglers. He just had to drag one woman from her car and take her to the garden by force.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cole appeared from around the house.

  “Who was that woman, Cole?” Agate asked.

  “Mrs. Hill.”

  “Oh,” Rosemary said.

  “Hello, Miss Hopwood.”

  “Hello, Cole. Just about everyone here?”