There being nothing she could do, Kay went up and sat on the windowsill to watch Thea dress for dinner, going into costume as a matron of Yarmouth. She had been so pure, so much better, so far removed from ordinary women—now here she was, Secretary of the Krito-sophians, in a tambour lace dress over dove-grey satin, putting cold cream on her face that Kay had watched her buy in Paris for twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars, for half a teacupful! Where was her noble charity now?
The burden of scorn was heavy to bear, and Kay knew it was unfair. It had been a relief to run off to Bar Harbor with Francis, and watch Olive with her captive Mr. Dawlish. Olive had offered her a room at the hotel for an extended visit. “If you’re getting ready to take life seriously,” she said, which made Kay laugh a little, interiorly.
What was she to take seriously? She had no skill worth flogging, beyond hitting a golf ball; there was no one to marry. For a while it had looked as if she might be assumed into an engagement with another Wetmore cousin, Terence, but that had come to nothing. Because there was nothing in it. It was all right for Terence—back from France with new determination, he had married (to the dismay of his mother) Doris Sweeney, who was a telephone operator, and gone to live in Hebron with Doris’s family. It was a great relief to Kay not to have people throwing them together anymore, and Doris was quite nice and kind.
Marion Hilton drove out to dinner with the Krito-sophian ladies, two of whom were her aunts, another her future mother-in-law. Safely engaged to Murray Judge (after a short, exciting romance with an unsuitable American), she was in line for membership. Worthy, round-faced, worried, nice—though she could not stop herself from occasional piercing honesty. She’d have to curb that, to fit into the Krito-sophian circle.
Drinking sweet sherry in the drawing room before dinner, they sat a little removed from the older women. Marion stared at Kay with the ordinary rudeness of a childhood friend. “I like your Boston frock!”
Kay smoothed her dress. Francis had taken her to Filene’s, for their usual annual visit. Fawn linen, very nice.
“But what happened to your eye? What have you done to it?”
Her hand went up to the bruise. “Hit myself, just before the wedding. I was adjusting—some strap, you know, and my hand slipped, and I gave myself a knuckle punch. My eye swelled up horribly.”
“No, it’s black—above your eye—”
“Oh, that—it’s just a mole.”
“Oh my, are you worried about it?” Marion’s own eyes, sky blue, could barely focus close up; that only added to her dreamy look. She was such a pretty girl.
“It’s nothing. It does keep growing, though.” Kay stood. “Let me refill your glass.”
Soon she would be so ugly she’d be unable to go out in public at all. At the drinks cart, Kay pulled her dress, which had rucked up behind, over her lumpy waist and straight-down hips again. There was something stark and comforting about being ugly in this world, about not conforming to the way people want you to look.
Or she could shake herself out of this ill temper and spare a thought for Thea, who did not point out one’s blemishes and was kindness itself. Kay would take her a glass of sherry.
But it was time to troop into the new dining room, which had been the sitting room before Aunt Lydia could not go upstairs. Thea gestured around the table and seated the Krito-sophians in an order that would make them agree with their neighbours, more or less, and only talk each other’s ears off. Very skilfully done; Kay saluted her with her eyebrows in South Pacific fashion.
Lena Hubbard went in and out with the soup tureen and the biscuits, Jerry Melanson carried the roast, and the customary heavy meal lifted on the evening tide and got under way.
Sharp-tongued Miss Yarrow congratulated Kay on her cultural achievements. “I understand that you could give us all some pointers in the use of the Latin tongue!” Since Miss Yarrow was the new Latin teacher at the Yarmouth high school, that was very condescending.
“I am better at Greek,” Kay heard her own mouth say, and then she felt heat rising in her cheeks and added, “It is not boasting, but only that I was lucky enough to have had a good teacher.”
Miss Yarrow hmmphed, perhaps taking that as an insult. Conscious that she herself was scowling, Kay turned to Mrs. Judge and asked how her daughter was finding normal school in Truro. The conversation veered onto various offspring and supposed friends of Kay; all the Krito-sophians had much to say about Higher Education and Life Paths.
Safe for a while, Kay cut her portion of meat into neat pieces and stared down at her plate. Roddy was too far away to talk to, and she disliked everyone else around the table. Her stomach was sullen, aware of Pilot out in the stable, and what must be done, but she put a forkful into her mouth anyway.
At last they retired to the front parlour and sat in little groups, and Thea asked Kay to play. She went obediently to the piano. Roddy came to turn the pages for her, so they were at least removed from the general talk. He leaned against her on the piano bench, knowing about Pilot and needing comfort. She played a selection of moderately difficult pieces, not nearly so well as Thea would have done, and endured the ignorant praise of her technique.
The conversation became general, and Miss Yarrow, sitting on Kay’s right, had a question about the rites of the South Sea Islanders.
“I am no authority. I do not know anything at all about the South Sea Islanders,” Kay said. “I have seen the sea, that is all a person like me can say.” She went to the mantel, tidying the china figures there to give herself something to do.
“Well! I had hoped your journeying would be more salutary. They say that travel ought to broaden the mind, you know.” Miss Yarrow’s little eyes drilled test holes into Kay’s blank face, seeking some ore or other.
Kay hated her. And everyone.
Thea said, “Don’t listen to Kay, Miss Yarrow. She learned a great deal on all our travels and never stopped studying for a moment. Her piano, and literature, and Latin, and an enormous amount of Greek—enough for a boy!”
To shield Kay, though any defence would be wasted on Miss Yarrow, Thea added seriously, “Here is what I know of the Islanders, Miss Yarrow: that they are not unlike the Indian people my father worked with in the West. They, like us, are a portion of that fallen race for whom Christ died, they have souls to be saved or lost.”
Miss Yarrow drew back her head on her thin neck.
But Thea continued, gravely. “They are accessible to the Grace of God. They have intellects of a superior kind, which receive instruction readily. The people in all those islands are remarkably skilful in all kinds of handiwork, and they are as capable of improvement in their social condition as any other race—or more so, due to the benefits of their geography.”
All that sounded to Kay very much like Father holding forth to Dr. Bryce when the doctor had come to inspect the school. Boasting of the cleverness of his charges as if they were pets, except of course that he judged them to have souls, which he believed dogs did not.
As the word dogs appeared in Kay’s mind, a bitter flame ignited in her stomach. But she could do nothing about that.
She could do nothing about anything! She was a mediocre pianist, she knew very little Latin—and anyway, the world had no purpose for that except to turn one into a wizened-up Miss Yarrow—and she had entirely failed to learn Greek, even with the best of teachers.
Miss Yarrow pressed on, getting Thea to her real question. “And what of that young fellow you brought home? Where has he gone off to?”
Before the question was finished, Thea had already picked up the big silver tray and was taking quick steps to the door. “Lena! Oh, there you are— Take this, will you, and where—will you send Roddy to me?”
He had slipped out the window at the end of Kay’s playing. She thought he had gone down to find his father, in the barn with Pilot.
Relieved of the tray, Th
ea turned back and crossed the drawing room to the open French doors. “Rod? Roddy?”
She stepped out onto the veranda, looking in her lace dress like a picture from a magazine, a lovely mother searching for her child. She worked too hard and never rested, but she was still a delight to look at, long and graceful in her body. Life was very unfair, that sisters could be so unalike.
“Aren left us,” Kay told Miss Yarrow. Since Thea was not going to answer. “Not finding the people of Yarmouth to his liking, he went to Halifax and found work there.”
“That’s gratitude for you,” said Miss Yarrow.
* * *
—
In late evening, as if they were on the deck of the Morning Light again, Kay and Thea sat on the veranda in their nightdresses looking at the moon over the orchard. Kay had been crying, but had stopped now.
“Why can we let Pilot die, but not Aunt Lydia?” she asked.
Thea gave the question room, but at last said, “People believe that pain, the act of suffering, brings human beings closer to God. We cannot know what value her suffering may have.”
What value might Pilot’s suffering have? Kay wondered.
Thea said, “God disposes. It would be a sin for any human being to presume to know when someone should die.”
“I think God has forgotten to take Aunt Lydia.”
Thea rocked to and fro slowly, gently, making no noise. It was mostly her work that kept the old lady alive, feeding and turning and tending to her, and Kay ought not to carp about that long tenderness. If she could keep tending Pilot, she would.
“We are to do it in the morning,” she said.
“I know. I will take Roddy in to see Dr. McKee, to spare him watching, as he would no doubt feel he must. There never was such a boy for feeling responsible. He is to be given a trial of asthma cigarettes, and perhaps that scientific excitement will take his mind from it.”
Kay almost laughed to think of Roddy puffing away behind the barn, as if they were pilfered cigars. But the barn made her think of target practice there with the rifle, and she set her thoughts away from that.
“It is a pretty moon,” she said out loud.
“It is,” said Thea.
They had learned silence during the war, and it was still useful.
2
Pilot
Francis had taught her to shoot before he went away to France. He said Thea was too gentle, and Roddy was too young, but now that all the men were going overseas, someone ought to know how to handle a gun. Kay felt a dark mantle of duty fall on her then: if the Germans came over the sea and landed their U-boats at Meteghan and made their sneaking way overland, it was she who would fend them off with the hunting rifle.
At six in the morning, she could not wait any longer, nor excuse herself from the task. She got up and dressed quietly, and washed her face.
She took the rifle down from the summer kitchen doorway, breaking it open and checking to see that it was clean. It was, but she used her handkerchief to worry at a smudge of oil. The cartridges were on the shelf over the icebox. No need to keep them handy any longer, but they had never gone back to their original home in the barn.
Francis was in the barn already. The plate of beef on the boards, uneaten. He had slept there, she saw, sitting propped against the stall wall with his legs crossed in front of him and one hand on Pilot’s flank.
She should have spelled him off, not for his sake but for her own.
“Those guns were used at Ypres,” Francis said, seeing the rifle when she set it carefully on the hayrack. “Ross rifles. By Vimy we had the Lee–Enfield.”
That was the most he’d ever said to her about the war. She knelt and buried her hands in Pilot’s warm fur.
“The bolts jammed. A boot heel might help, might not.”
Kay nodded.
His voice was calm. He had been awake all night, though. “Everything did jam. The Lee–Enfield, even. But some men called the Ross sheer murder. I had forgotten that.”
She did not dare to answer, not wanting to make him think more, or not think, or have to react in any way. She had no courage at all where Francis was concerned. But she could be brave enough to do this, in case he could not.
She bent to kiss Pilot and looked into his eyes, and touched his dear head, carefully avoiding his sores. He tried to lick her hand, but his tongue was dry and the movement seemed to hurt him.
“I’ll do it,” Francis began.
But she said, “No, I can.”
She stood and lifted the rifle and checked it again, with her back to her dear dog. “You hold his leg,” she said, and then she turned and sighted and shot him once in the back of the head. He moved a little as if he was not dead, so that she lifted the gun again, but the movement stilled. Then he was more still. That was all.
* * *
—
Even as fast as she walked the four miles, she missed the noon DAR train. So she walked along to the South Western station to wait for the two o’clock, which would land her in Halifax after nine.
Nobody she knew was on the train; that was lucky. The engine staggered to a start and pulled out of Yarmouth, slowly at first, then gathering, gathering, like the lump in her chest was gathering. She sat back in the red leather seat, pressing against the slight give of the wicker seatback, and set herself to be still and show nothing.
Three Acadian men sat by themselves at the end of the carriage, playing a silent card game on the table between their seats. Kay had a little French, acquired from books and tested at hotels in Calais and Tahiti, but these men had their own way of speaking, with flattened accents and words from English and other words she’d never learned in France, and she could not keep up. When Acadian carpenters or woodworkers came to the house, she tried sometimes, but they were a separate country. Only the girls who did the wash would speak to her, but their tongues went too fast, as if telling secrets—and Kay was not good at talking to people anyhow, even when they wanted to talk to her.
Thinking of other lands and peoples, with Pilot weighing on her memory and not knowing in what state she might find Aren, Kay sagged into the windowsill and slept. She woke fitfully from station to station, and finally, fully, as the train steamed into Halifax. She had slept on her hat. It was squashed, but she could steam it.
The station was not a bad place to be let off, even in late evening. She was hungry, though. At the terminal gates, she turned and walked down Barrington Street, hoping to find Aren at the victualling yard. He was not there. The man she asked shook his head and would not say more; perhaps he was a war veteran, for he looked distressed when she asked again. Instead, she left the yard and stopped at a milk bar for a bowl of soup. She had the number of the house, Francis had dug it up. Gottingen Street. She would just walk over and find Aren there.
His name was written on a snip of paper slid into a brass holder in the front porch. One of eighteen slots in that tall house. Eighteen, to match his age. Too young to live by himself in this strange place. There was a button to press. She put her finger on it, not hoping for much, but a grating bell sounded, and after a moment she heard feet on stairs, and then the inner door was opening.
When she saw him, her brother, tears started to her eyes. She pushed them back with her fingers. “I’m not crying for you,” she said. “We had to shoot Pilot. I had to do it myself. It was only fair, you can’t ask Francis to do that anymore.”
Aren’s eyes filled too, but he let his tears spill out, and then she could too, the two of them crying in the vestibule as if the world was all over at last.
He put his head down into his hands and Kay reached her arms around him, his folded-up elbows tucking into her embrace, and laid her cheek on his warm head. She was still taller than him, at least. She hadn’t meant to say it fast like that and shock him, but he always made her tell what was in her mind, whatever it might be. That
wish to tell—she did not have that with other people. Because he would listen rightly.
They were half in, half out of the little porch. She had already cried too much and had not much water left in her, so she pressed gently to make him back up, and he shook his head and did. The inner door, on a strong spring, shut behind her foot.
Inside, the narrow hall was shadowy, but Aren led her to the stairs, keeping her hand in his. Three flights up, before he pulled at a door and they went into his new home.
“He was ill, he was in terrible pain so that he could not move—cancer had made great sores on his jaw, and swellings—it all came up quite suddenly, he did not seem really ill before we left for Boston, but we came back to find him so.”
There was no more to explain, nothing that could have been done.
“Francis says he was old for a big dog…”
Her tweed coat hampered her. She shucked out of it, and looked around for a place to put it. There was nowhere in this tiny space, this half room. A partition made of crumbling boards had been added down the middle of an ordinary small bedchamber, leaving half a window and six or seven feet of width. Maybe nine feet in length.
Aren wiped his eyes with one sleeve. He took her coat and found a cloth to brush off the one chair. “Here,” he said. “Sit down, stay for a moment.”
She had not thought beyond this, beyond telling him and finding some comfort. Where was she to stay tonight? The Barrington Hotel, down at the corner, perhaps. And never tell Thea. Or if she ran, she could catch the ten thirty DAR goods train, and be back for breakfast.
The room was cold. She could not ask for her coat back—Aren had hung it on the only clothes hook he had, taking his own jacket off it first and tossing it in the corner.
The Difference Page 25
