Wisteria Cottage, page 7
“Mean what, my dear?”
“Well, I mean . . .” He looked almost piteously at Mrs. Hackett. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know what she was getting at—that I’m just nothing, Florence? That I’m somebody without a dime, I’ve got no business being here, even? While she . . . she . . . And then boasting about being a Southerner!” He was going farther than he should, and he knew it. But he couldn’t help it. “As if being a Southerner meant anything!” He saw Mrs. Hackett’s eyes grow a little colder. “Florence, can’t you see?” he demanded.
But she couldn’t see, that was the truth of it. “My dear Richard,” she said, and he could tell that she had decided to be crisp. She’ll be being grande dame with me next, he was thinking.) She was at least being matter-of-fact and, in her own way, motherly. “Louisa didn’t mean anything of the sort, and you know it. She was bad-tempered, a little, and impolite, and I shall spank her very soundly for it when I catch her. But she’s not the sort of person who’d say anything so rudely vulgar as the things you impute to her, and why you read such meanings into it as you do is quite beyond me. All she meant—” and here she let her voice go out in a little sigh, as if she were tired of so much explaining—“all she meant was that she was tired of piling up rocks and was going for a swim. Really, Richard, it was as simple as that. And I must say, I’m tempted to do the same thing myself. We don’t have to get this all done today, you know. Or do we?”
Richard watched her. She was quitting, there was no doubt of that; she was joining Louisa, she was siding against him. And the trouble was that he was helpless; there was nothing at all that he could do about it. But he couldn’t resist one last gibe.
“Lazy Florence!” he said, and though he tried to say it jokingly it came out in such a way that for once Mrs. Hackett glanced at him almost angrily. “Manners, Richard. Manners,” she said. “But you know, I am going in for a swim.”
He watched her rise, rather stiffly, for she had been sitting for some time. He watched her brush the sand from her seat and her legs.
She was wearing a bathing suit that was almost as skimpy as Louisa’s, which was saying a good deal, according to Richard’s way of thinking. All it was—all that any of the women wore, for that matter—was a sort of brassière over the breasts and a pair of trunks, with a good deal of flesh showing in between, but on her the flesh seemed more noticeable.
And the trunks were part elastic, so that they clung fairly close to her hips. . . . Richard watched her standing there, her back turned partly toward him; watched the crimson-nailed, bony, wrinkled hands going absent-mindedly, indiscriminately over the flesh and the cloth, over the slightly sagging, aging buttocks encased in the stretched, water-wearied cloth, and the bare thighs where the tan she had already acquired didn’t quite conceal the little veinings and puckerings of the tired, unresilient flesh; and a feeling of disgust at the sheer unashamedness of it came over him. She might pretend to be a grande dame, he thought, but she wasn’t one; she wasn’t even a decent mother. Underneath all her pretensions she was as rotten within as Louisa was.
But he said nothing of that. He said nothing at all, and the silence would have become embarrassing if Elinor hadn’t broken it.
“We’ll be along too in a moment,” she said. She had been scraping the sand away with a piece of board, trying to level off a spot for the fireplace. She had been sitting with her head bowed, as if she hadn’t noticed anything, and when she spoke it was as if nothing had happened. But when Florence had gone she bent her head still closer to Richard’s.
“Richard. Don’t mind Louisa,” she said. “Or Mother, either,” she added. Her hair was darker than her sister’s; she was shorter, and her whole body was at the same time frailer and more feminine. She was plumper and prettier and somehow more vulnerable, and when she spoke, kneeling there in the sand beside him, offering him her companionship and sympathy when both the others had denied it to him, it so fitted her very nature, her air of docile, nineteenth-century femininity, that Richard, for a moment—and out of happiness, mostly—almost wanted to cry.
Even the slight air of furtiveness she had about her fitted, too. She was a woman, and like all women, to Richard’s mind, catlike a little, indirect, concealing. “Louisa . . . Well, you know Louisa,” she said. She was kneeling beside him, and Mrs. Hackett was halfway across the beach by now, but suddenly she felt it necessary to raise her voice a little.
“Have you still got that big flat stone?” she said. “Wouldn’t this be a good place for it, maybe?”
And then, when he had brought it, she bent her head closer to his again. “I think she’s having boy-friend trouble, or something, and that makes her sort of picky. Anyway, she’s worried. And now, of course, Mother’s worried too, about her.” For an instant, without his quite meeting her gaze, he felt her eyes, pale and lamp-blue against the tan, look directly at him.
“Don’t you worry, though, and go getting all picky too,” she said. Then she got up briskly. “Let’s go swimming.”
It was balm, it was calm, it was peace, it was benediction. But it wasn’t quite enough, all the same; underneath, Richard felt a little ferment of anger still working, and when the time came—on the beach, when he ran into Louisa a few minutes later—he had to let it go.
He hadn’t stayed in the water long. He wasn’t much of a swimmer, for one thing. He thrashed his arms about with great earnestness, when the mood was upon him, but he hadn’t learned the proper strokes, and both Louisa and Elinor could beat him. And today he was still hot with the sense of his own humiliation. So he had just paddled around for a while and then come out, and there, coming out too, was Louisa. Mrs. Hackett was farther up the beach a little way and Elinor was still in the water; Louisa was alone, and he walked straight up to her.
“Look, Louisa,” he said. And as if nothing had happened at all she turned and smiled at him.
“What’s it now, honey-chile?” she said. “Isn’t that water wonderful?”
He had had some idea of making friends with her, of tiding the thing over; it would have been more politic, he knew. But somehow the very sight of her was itself too much for him—the half-naked brown body, and the skin still glistening with the water, the breasts half exposed, and the breasts and the shoulders so close to him that he could see the tiny hairinesses, the little bristlings of gooseflesh that seemed at the moment to be the ultimate in careless obscenity—and before he could control himself his voice changed a little. He could feel his breath coming thicker.
“Oh, yes, wonderful—as you were the first to find out,” he said sarcastically. The way she showed herself around him, he was thinking, you might think he wasn’t a man at all. “I’m afraid my poor little fireplace won’t be so wonderful, though, now that you’ve wrecked it.”
She still smiled at him. “Oh, that! Well . . . Well, I’m sorry about that, Richard. But it really isn’t wrecked, you know. I’ll help you with it right now, if you’re so set on making it.”
But he was past wanting that kind of compensation. “I’m afraid it’s a little bit late now,” he told her. “And anyway, it’s not your help or your lack of it that bothers me. It’s what you said.”
“What I said?”
“Yes, said.” And then he let her have it. “Because if you don’t think I know what you were getting at back there, darling . . . Well, anyway, just don’t think it. Because I did. I knew everything. You may fool Florence, and you may fool Elinor. But, darling, darling”—he threw in the extra “darling,” acidly
—“don’t ever get the idea you can fool me. I just know too much, don’t you know that? Don’t you know it? I know so much. I may be just a Kansas boy.” He was getting excited now, and he knew it, but now he was enjoying it. “I may not have a dime, the tenth part of a dollar—only I have, I have. But I do get around, and—oh, well, darling, you know. . . . Shall we swim?”
He said the last words ironically, in the manner of one saying, “Shall we dance?” But if she had been willing to go into the water with him he might well have tried to drown her. All she did, though, was to look at him puzzledly for a moment.
Then she leaned forward and, dripping as she was—so chillskinned that when she touched him he felt the cold of each finger separately—she gave his cheek a little tolerant, noncommittal pat. He knew her breasts would have felt as cold if he had touched them.
“Richard, why do you take things so hard?” she said. (And the smile! The smile!) And then she said something that he was to ponder over occasionally, later. “I know you’ve been around, all right,” she said. “Haven’t we all? But that’s no reason for you to go off the handle so badly all the time, Richard, and for so little reason, really. It sounds funny, Richard.” (And already he was asking himself: is she hinting at something, has she been finding out things? About the hospital at Danville, for instance?) “It sounds crazy.”
But that was only an incident, and it floated away and sank from sight in the stream of sunny days that followed—sank or, like some waterlogged piece of timber, was at last submerged, and only bobbed up in Richard’s consciousness occasionally, when he would find himself wondering: “Does she know? Does she know?”
Ordinarily, though, they all got on very well. Richard had his own little shocks from time to time, but at first they were pleasant ones, and in any case he said little about them. He was unused to women, and except for his mother and sister—and that had been in childhood—he had never lived with one; and the life at the cottage, where suddenly he was thrown into intimate contact with three of them, was a little unsettling.
And it was summer—and in summer, vacation time, everyone grows careless; in the heat, morals melt, everyone goes a little native. Richard lived in the studio, as he had come to call the shed where he made his quarters, and that helped a little. But in spite of that, in the cottage, since he was there increasingly as the summer went on, he had to grow used to things—well, to things that he never had been used to before. To the girls, either one of them, passing from bedroom to bathroom, or back again, in the flimsiest of costumes. Or to Florence, in a bathrobe over a nightgown, and still redolent of sleep, un-made-up, undisguised, unprotected as it were, sitting down to breakfast. To stockings hung over the towel racks, and girdles; shorts and jerseys just dumped anywhere, as their wearers had changed into bathing suits, or the wet bathing suits, as the same owners had changed back again. To all the other little privacies, intimacies of the toilette—jars and boxes of hand creams and face powders and ointments—all spread out before him on the wash basin’s rim, in the medicine cabinet, often spilling their contents, as if to say, “Here we are. Now you know us. Now you know all our secrets.”
But it was family, he kept telling himself. It was family, and if this was one of the embarrassments it was also one of the prides of it. For his own part, Richard did his best to live up to his side of the bargain. He was brother to Louisa, or he tried to be; he was son to Florence—and when he wanted to be, he could be wildly entertaining, with a touch of real madness about his fantasy that went perfectly with moonlight, and sunlight, and, well, with summer.
“Oh, Louisa, the sneezer,
Got a cold in her beezer—
By which I imply, her nose.
So she turned out a wheezer
And nothing could please her
Except a new outfit of clothes.
“Florence, too, caught a whiff of it,
Started to sniff of it.
Soon she too caught a cold.
But she hadn’t the—”
“No!” he said suddenly. They were all sitting on the screened porch at the time, in the evening, and once he had begun on that kind of doggerel Richard could usually go on indefinitely. (“You really ought to write popular songs, Richard,” Elinor had once said to him earnestly. “You really ought to.” And he had looked at her tolerantly.)
But there were times when it pleased him to break the mood, to change the subject suddenly, as if to prove all the more how complete his hold was over them.
“No,” he said. “It’s so silly, me jingling and jangling like this—with that moon, and that sky. And the sand . . . Doesn’t it look just like water, the waves and waves of it? Florence, look; can’t you see a boat coming over the crest of that dune there—pirates, maybe, or smugglers?”
“No-o-o-o. Not pirates, Richard,” said Florence from her seat in the corner of the porch swing, and though she’d put on the shiveriness in her voice in part jokingly, Richard knew that he had touched her on her weak point. Florence, he’d discovered, had a fear of aloneness, of being unprotected, that amounted almost to a phobia. She drew the curtains at night, less against the prospect of being observed than against the very loneliness of the dunes around the cottage. She locked the doors when they went to bed, and though his thoughts had so far been vague it had struck him as a possible advantage, a key, somehow, something to be remembered.
“No smugglers, either,” she said now, and he reached out and touched her hand briefly.
“Don’t you worry,” he said. “Not while I’m here, anyway.” And again it gave him that family feeling; he was the protector, the one who soothed, reassured, who controlled things.
They got along very well, those first weeks at the cottage. And meanwhile, the nights, the days . . . The days lengthened into the nights, and then, inexorably, the nights lengthened in turn, shortening the days.
Summer is a happy time, but it is a harrying, hurrying time, too. It is a mixed time. Haste and laziness are mingled; it is a time when time seems to stand still, and each day is like every other day, and yet different; it’s the time when the calendar almost, but not quite, supersedes the clock, and you think in terms of days instead of hours, of whole seasons instead of days.
You are closer to the sky in summer, or at least it seems so, and especially at the seashore; you are closer to the sun. You are closer, really, to nature—and at the seashore, in summer, nature is reduced to its most elemental, elementary features: a slice of cliff, a narrow rind of beach, dune contours, the endless pulse of waves, a slow daily progression of light, heat, coolness, shadow—and all this in a landscape so sparse that each fence post, each tree (almost, each spear of grass) has its separate accent; is itself a sort of sundial, and the course of its shadow, and the length of it, as the shadow moves across the hot sand beneath, are as good a time-teller as anyone needs, in the careless days of summer.
One can say, “Oh, we’ve got lots of time for a swim still. The sun is still over the trees.”
One can say, “It must be lunch time now. The sun’s right above the path.”
One can say, “My! It’s late. See, the cliffs are in shadow.”
The seashore is a kind of jumping-off place, where nothing save the tenantless sea is before you and everything else is behind you; and the summer fits it perfectly, for the summer is a jumping-off time, a time when anything imaginable can happen. But the trouble is, it has to happen quickly, for the one bad thing about summer is that, somehow, it is always over almost before it has begun; and whether or not you think about it in that way, really—in terms of days’ lengths, and solstices and equinoxes—there is something, perhaps something instinctive and elemental, that makes you realize it without even thinking.
Summer is the shortest season. June ends, and July begins, and passes in a haze of heat and lazy summer silence. But with August—and without your quite knowing why—the pace quickens: it is as if the earth itself had shifted position a little, and as the sun moves away, sliding south toward another hemisphere, all the shadows fall differently, stretch and lengthen differently, become steadily longer, larger, more all-covering.
Dinner time, that great punctuating point in the whole random day’s length of summer—when at the Hacketts’, at least, one was supposed to sit down to the table in more or less presentable garb, instead of the fragmentary raiment that everyone wore during the daytime—well, as August passes, shadows seem to encroach on the dinner time, too.
At first, eight o’clock, or even eight-thirty, is the dinner hour, and even then the long, hesitant summer twilight lasts long enough to light most of the meal. But as time passes, time also shortens; one must change and be dressed and ready for dinner by eight o’clock at the latest, by seven-thirty, finally, by seven—or the lights must be turned on, or the candles lit, the table moved in from the porch to the living room, the whole meal overcast with an ominous, autumnal formality.
And meantime, if the summer is to mean anything, if the season is to contain all the accomplishment one had wanted it to contain, one must hurry (“Hur-ry, hur-ry,” Louisa had said), hurry, hurry, or all its magnificent early promise will be wasted.
Richard was a Kansas boy; he was new to the ocean and new too to the summer in its seaside aspects; to him the beach down the path from the cottage was a jumping-off place indeed. It didn’t matter that it was only the Sound that it led to, and on clear days (on clear days only) he could see, over the level waters, the gray, inch-high boundary that indicated the coast of Connecticut; it didn’t matter that, in actual fact, he was looking back toward his native Kansas, instead of off toward the ocean and Europe. The sea is the sea, and it is easy to imagine that it rolls on endlessly; if you can’t see the opposite shore, or can see it only shadowily, it is easy to imagine that no barriers are there at all, and the wave that breaks before you breaks breathlessly, because it comes from so far, so far—from Spain, from Portugal; from Cornwall, or Ireland, or the Azores.
So time passes, in such lazy imaginings. . . . Who has ever known a summer when everything turned out just as he wanted, and he managed to get everything he wanted to do done?
