by Belva Plain
Mr. Donald Meig was a pale tan presence. He wore impeccable pongee summer suits and his pale tan hair showed the even tracks of the comb. His smile was courteous and faintly supercilious. Clearly, Martin’s presence was not welcomed. It was tolerated because he was the doctor’s son.
“Fancies himself an aristocrat,” Pa said.
Meig was not a money snob—for he would despise that as vulgar—but a “family” snob. He liked to talk about “good old stock.” As if all human stock weren’t equally old! At his table he sat among a clutter of Irish silver and English porcelain, with a stuffed swordfish over the golden oak sideboard—a big fish himself in the little pond of Cyprus.
“Your mother’s people were Scotch-Irish?” he inquired once of Martin, and without waiting for an answer, “I’ve some of that myself. It’s not the usual strain around here. Most of the Scotch-Irish went to the Appalachians. There’s a branch of my family there still. Went west through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky, you know.”
Martin hadn’t known. His mother’s people had gone from Scotland to the north of Ireland and, after a couple of generations there on the farms and in the cloth mills, had come here shortly after the Revolution to work again on the farms. Pa, of course, was a much later arrival from the same part of the world. These simple histories were taken for granted at home; one neither concealed them nor boasted of them.
Meig concluded pridefully, “People tend to settle near their own kind, naturally. Like the Dutch in the Hudson River Valley. We’ve some Dutch in our family, too. No landowners, no Van Cortlandts, just small farmers, poor and hardworking.”
Well, Martin thought, everyone has his quirks. Nevertheless, he asked Mary, “Is your father the absolute authority in everything, always?”
“I suppose you could say he is,” she told him. “I don’t want you to think he’s a tyrant, though. Aunt Milly says he ought to have got married again, it would have been better for his disposition. Only, he’s afraid to marry someone who wouldn’t be good to Jessie. So you see, he’s really a good father. I try to remember that.”
Martin wondered what the mother could have been like. Probably she had been like the daughters, for even Jessie had gladness, with her energetic, tossing head, her opinions and her curiosity. Meig was so profoundly different! The woman must have been suffocated in that house, he thought.
“May I ask,” Meig said to Martin, “why you call my daughter ‘Mary’?”
“Because she likes the name,” he answered.
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know why. She has always been called ‘Fern’ at home.”
His mouth closed in disapproval. As if the world and all the people in it were too common, too intrusive?
And yet, sometimes, Martin had caught him looking at Mary as though he were wondering that such radiance could have come from himself.
“Why are you smiling?” Martin asked her once.
“I was watching that bee,” she said. “See how greedy it is!”
Its burrowing body was furred with gold dust, buried in the flower, in its damp and tender warmth. And Martin flushed at the parallel image which flashed into his head. He felt the tingle of heat in his neck. Could she have such thoughts too? For the first time in his experience he felt he knew too little about women.
They walked in warm rain. He had never known anyone beside himself who didn’t mind being soaked in rain. Outside of someone’s open window they stood hiding behind a wet syringa, listening to the Quartet from Rigoletto coming over the radio.
“I remember,” Martin said, “the first time I knew that music could make you laugh or cry. So many different kinds! The organ in church, all waves and thunder, or the band in the town square that makes your feet dance. And once at Reverend Dexter’s, I heard four men playing violins. I remember wishing I could hear music like that again.”
“My mother played the piano,” Mary said. “We used to get out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs to listen. The house was different, then.”
“You really want to get away, don’t you?” he asked gently.
“I think I do, Martin. And then I think: It’s home, I’d miss it. I’m confused … What I really want, with all my heart, is to paint! To put everything down that I feel in my heart, in here! The meaning of life!”
How young! he thought, with tenderness.
“I think, if one can do that, one will never be lonely. But then, you would first have to experience life, wouldn’t you, before you could paint it?”
How young, he thought again.
Grape summer, dusky blue. Rose-red summer, deep in clover!
“I hope you don’t have any ideas about that girt,” Pa said at supper one night “You’ve been spending a lot of time over there.”
“Enoch!” Ma cried.
“No, no, Jean. Martin knows I don’t interfere. It’s only a cautionary word or two, which he can take or leave. They’re not our kind, Martin.”
“What kind are we, Pa?” Martin spoke mildly, yet there was a tension in him, not of anger or resentment, but apprehension over being told something he might not want to hear.
“Why, it’s self-evident,” Pa answered promptly. “Can you see that girl washing dishes in this kitchen? The worlds don’t mix.”
Worlds. Are we then destined to stay in the one world for which we were made, like pegs in holes or keys in locks? The design cut and not to be altered? Yet, look about you, it is often so.
“I wonder how long the Meigs will go on living like that,” his father said. “They say the plant’s gradually going downhill.”
Martin was surprised. “Websterware? The backbone of the town?”
“I’ve some patients who work there, and they tell me the business has been running on its own momentum for years. Meig isn’t the man his father and grandfather were, you know. He’s in over his head and too proud to acknowledge it.”
His sister Alice remarked, “Rena works in the office at Webster’s. She says people all know Mr. Meig keeps Fern shut away here until he finds the right marriage for her. Disgusting, isn’t it? As if a woman were a prize racehorse to be mated with a prize stallion.”
“Alice!” the mother cried.
Alice tittered. Ever since she had been “going with” Fred Partridge, she had become bolder, almost smug in her new security. Soon she would enjoy the status of a married woman. Fred, who taught gym at the consolidated school, was a decent fellow, as neutral as his own eyes and hair, and totally incurious about everything. Once Alice had had yearnings. She had been serious and enthusiastic. Now her enthusiasm was visibly draining away. She was “settling” for Fred Partridge.
Martin felt sadness for his sister, as for all eager, young and shining lives, all women who were not Mary Fern.
His mother was saying, “I hear the crippled one is smart. Is that so, Martin?”
“Her name is Jessie,” he corrected stiffly. “Yes, she is.”
“And is the other one really so good-looking?”
Alice cried, “I can’t imagine who told you that, Ma. She’s thin and much too dark, and—”
Martin stood up, murmuring something, and fled.
* * *
In the motionless air the candles made stiff tips of yellow light. Moths struck with a fleshy thump on the screens. Conversation, on this last night before Martin’s departure for the city and internship, moved around the table between Jessie, Donald Meig and an aunt and uncle from New York. Only Mary and Martin were silent.
He was ill at ease and his feet hurt He had bought white shoes, an extravagance because they would be so seldom worn, but he couldn’t have come to dinner here without them. Clothes were insurance, a kind of statement that a person “belonged,” whatever that meant. Idiotic! But that’s the way it was and always had been. “Costly thy apparel as thy purse can buy.” Shakespeare knew about people like Donald Meig. He knew everything about people.
Mary was serving a salad from the bowl which had been put before her. The gauzy, cherry-c
olored sleeve had fallen away from her bare arm. She had the look of someone who had strayed by accident into that room and that house.
Jessie was laughing; she had a hearty, appealing laugh that sometimes brought tears to her eyes. It was really a pleasure to watch her! It occurred to Martin that in these few weeks he had become accustomed to her, sitting with her summer shawl gathered in stiff, concealing folds, her rapid hands moving as she talked, her bright eyes observing everything.
And recalling suddenly what she had said about her sister at that first meeting, he wondered what she might be guessing, what she knew …
A sharp ache shot through Jessie for the young man in the cheap suit and the stiff, new shoes; the earnest young man with the proud, quick face and the eyes looking so hungrily at—someone else!
Oh, if I had Fern’s body what I would do! she thought Soft, dreaming thing, she lives in fantasy. I would make sure of that young man. He’s worth a dozen of any others I’ve seen. The way he looks at her over the top of the glass when he drinks, pretending not to!
Oh, if I had her body!
Long ago, the maids talked, two of them standing in the bathroom. “Poor child,” they said.
I looked around for the child before I knew the child was I.
In the mirrored door, I saw myself, naked and pink. There were Fern and Fern’s friend, come to stay overnight And I saw they were alike, and I the different one. How old was I? Four? Five?
The seamstress came to make my dresses with wide, embroidered collars. Berthas, they used to call them, and they were so pretty, ruffled or pleated for concealment. They didn’t conceal. I took the hand-mirror, and twisting, I could see my back, could see how the cloth where the ruffles stopped was stretched over the sharp knife-blade of bone.
I remember those long rides in the car and the doctors’ waiting rooms where Mother read Heidi aloud while we waited. Heidi was a brave girl and I must be brave, too. Then the doctors came in their white coats. They were kindly and tall, touching my back with cold fingers. There was much talk, and after that the long ride home.
“Tired?” Father would ask Mother, and she would answer, “No, I’m all right.”
At the best toy stores they stopped to buy new dolls. They never knew I didn’t care that much about dolls. I had rows of them, stupid-looking things with long yellow hair and patent leather shoes. I used to undress them, taking off their lace-edged panties and petticoats. Their backs were smooth and straight from their shoulders to their little round behinds. They looked like Fern.
Once at school I stood with a circle of children dancing around me. I can hear them now: they’re laughing and pointing. “Jessie is a—” they chant, but I don’t remember the word. Don’t want to, perhaps? I remember the teacher, with her indignant, trembling voice, coming at a run. The children flee and I walk inside with her, hand in hand.
In the playground I had been so fierce and proud, but now at her gentle comfort, I sobbed on the teacher’s shoulder. She reached in the drawer and gave me her clean handkerchief. It smelled of eau de cologne. I can smell it still.
Aunt Milly wants Fern and me to go to Europe with them this winter. They’ll stay at the Carlton in Nice. Me at the Carlton with Fern! Tea-dancing. Steps leading down. You stand at the top of the flight, waiting to be seated. Eyes turn up to see who you are. And I shall be standing next to Fern. No! Thank you. And thank you again …
Mary stirred uncomfortably. If only Jessie would take that look off her face! A moment ago she was laughing and now she looks thunder-dark. Will I never grow used to her?
“Jessie’s handicapped,” they told me so seriously, long years ago.
I must have been still a baby. I thought “handicapped” meant there was something wrong with her hands, until the day I noticed her back.
“What is that? Does it hurt?”
“No,” Mother said, “it hurts only in her mind.”
I remember thinking that, if everybody looked like Jessie, then I would be the queer one and people would stare at me.
“They don’t mean to stare, they don’t mean to be unkind, they’re only curious. But she will have that all her life,” people said.
Yet she was always tougher than I. Peppery as she was, it was she who did the hitting.
“You must never hit her back, never,” they said. “You’re so much stronger! Suppose you were to hurt her? To break a bone? What then?”
And I could see her tumbling, shattered on the floor, like that Oriental vase which Uncle Drew had brought from China and which a maid had broken, bringing lamentation to the morning.
I hit Jessie. She struck the table edge and a great reddening lump like an egg rose on her forehead. Feet came running—Carrie, the cook, Mother, Father. I was stiff with fright She wailed and they picked her up. Father whipped me, me, his favorite, as I knew even then. He was so proud of me! His fierce voice, his fierce face were like an ogre’s.
“Don’t you ever hit Jessie again! Don’t you touch her! Do you hear?”
Uncle Drew took me aside. He was the only one who felt sorry for me. I stood between his knees while he sat on the sofa, his hands on my shoulders.
“You haven’t hurt her, Fern. Everyone’s excited, but you haven’t hurt her, Fern. Remember that. It’s only a bump and will go away in a day or two.”
I didn’t want to go away to school. I had friends here. And I didn’t want to leave my dogs! But Jessie had no friends. A small, private school would be better for her, they said.
Mother said, “We can’t send Jessie away to school and keep you here, can we?”
And Father said, “You will meet nicer girls in boarding school, anyway.”
But the girls all came from New York or Boston or Montreal. It was the same as having no friends at all.
Now she doesn’t want to go to Europe this winter. If she doesn’t go, Father will want me to stay home, too. But I’m going. No matter what, I’m going.
I shall be sorry to leave Martin. I might fall in love with him if I could know him a little longer. And still in a way it seems I’ve always known him. Even his silence speaks to me. Is it possible that he loves me already? But he’s going away tomorrow … But he will come back. It’s only a few months, after all. Maybe, then … And I shall see Europe … all the sparkle … I’ve never been anywhere at all.
I think Jessie has fallen in love with him, though. I’m sorry if she has. I hope she hasn’t. Life is very, very harsh …
“It will be such joy having you with us, Fern,” Aunt Milly was saying and then, addressing Martin, “We’ve invited Fern and Jessie to go to Europe with us, did you know? We shall leave just after Labor Day and spend the winter. I do wish, Jessie, you would change your mind and come along, too.”
Jessie shook her head.
“It would do you the world of good, you know. Take you out of yourself. You really do need—”
“I really do need a new spine,” Jessie said, and laughed.
Aunt Milly blushed. “Oh, Jessie, I only meant—”
“I know what you meant, Aunt Milly. You meant well.”
“Nice is wonderful in the winter, very mild,” Uncle Drew observed. “You can always change your mind, Jessie. Up to the last minute.”
The voices crossed the table in a neat little fugue.
Aunt Milly said to Fern, “You’ll be seeing the great art of the world. It’ll help immensely in your career, you know.”
“Career!” The father was irritated. “Don’t, please, give her more grandiose ideas than she already has. It’s a pretty hobby and that’s all it is.”
“Excuse me, but you’re hardly a Judge,” Mary said.
“And you think you can judge?”
“No, but there are other people in this world who can.”
“Was that thunder I heard, by any chance?” Uncle Drew asked, changing the subject.
Martin smiled at him, receiving a knowing, answering smile. A kindly soul! Worlds removed from the heavy-handed petty tyrant at t
he head of the table!
“Mary, let’s go for a walk,” he proposed when they had left the table. “And Jessie come, too.”
“I don’t want to,” Jessie said.
Mr. Meig frowned. “It’s going to rain any minute.”
“Rain won’t hurt anyone,” Aunt Milly told him.
“We’ll not go far,” Martin said.
The town was closed for the night. Houses wore shut faces; their windows were drooping eyelids. A horn blew somewhere, a forlorn, far call in the silence. They circled through dwindling streets from pavement to asphalt to dirt, and where the fields began, turned back, talking of this and that and of nothing in particular.
“So you’ll be going away,” Martin said. “I’ll miss you, Mary.”
The words were unforgivably banal. He wanted to say such beautiful, extravagant things: I’m enchanted, I think of you all day. Why was he so awkward, so tongue-tied? Was it the family, the gloomy house, the gloomy father? Perhaps, in another setting more private and free, or if he were a few years farther along and had something definite to give—
The smell of rain was in the air when they came to the gate. Eastward, the clouds were darkening with approaching storm, but in the west the afterglow still streaked the sky in lines of copper and rose and a yellow like the inside of a peach.
“Oh look!” Mary cried. “It sparkles! Martin, look!”
But he was not looking at the sky. He was looking at her, standing there with her hand held to her throat and the wonder on her face. There was a pain in his heart that he couldn’t have believed possible.
At the front door they stood cramped between overgrown laurels. And quite suddenly the rain came, spattering on the leaves.
“Well,” he said. “I guess I’d better start.”
“I’ll think of you. We all will.”
He had meant only to kiss her good-bye. But when he had caught her to him, he was unable to let her go. How long he would have held her there he didn’t know, but someone stirred in the vestibule as if to open the door. So she turned quickly into the house and he went clattering down the steps into the rain.
