by Sloan Wilson
Although the meetings were curiously frustrating to experience, and although they were difficult and expensive for John to arrange, they were a great pleasure to remember and to anticipate. If it weren’t for Susan Halsey, they doubtless would have continued.
Susan, a scrawny girl with a pinched, lonely face, developed an attachment for Molly, and wanted to travel with her on the way to and from school. It proved impossible to keep from her the fact that Molly was meeting John between trains in New York. Susan was touchingly eager to co-operate when she found out about it. Molly seemed to her to be a figure of romance, and she liked to think about her having a passionate love affair. The whole situation seemed wonderful to her, much too wonderful to keep from her friends. She told only her best friends, of course, or girls she hoped would become friends, for Susan had been unpopular, but as she always said before repeating the story, she never told it to anyone who could not really and truly keep a secret. Before long the news that Molly Carter regularly met a very handsome boy between trains in New York was common gossip throughout the school. Some of the older girls added elaborations about night clubs and hotels. At sixteen Molly had a figure which seemed to make a platonic love affair implausible, and her reticence among the other girls struck many as secretiveness.
Still waters run deep, a tall senior a year older than Molly observed, and confided to Molly that she herself hadn’t been a virgin for three years.
It wasn’t long before the story of Molly’s great romance reached the ears of Miss Summerfield, the headmistress. Usually she let such gossip die a natural death, but this rumor kept mounting until she felt she had to do something about it. Although Miss Summerfield had in one of her more earthy moments observed to a colleague that running a girls’ boarding school was worse than trying to run herd on an entire pack of bitches in heat, she displayed small humor to the girls and their parents. Gravely she told Molly that although she was perfectly willing to believe in her innocence, it was not good form for a young lady to meet a young man alone in New York, and that she would have to take the matter up with her mother if it didn’t stop. “And I’ll know, dear, if it doesn’t stop,” Miss Summerfield concluded. “You’ll find that in actual life, secrets are very difficult to keep.”
Perhaps not in actual life, Molly observed to herself, but certainly she had no hope of keeping secrets at Briarwood Manor. Most of the student body went through the New York stations before and after vacations, and speculation about Molly’s trysts had reached such a point that she felt herself to have no more privacy than a Golden Plover surrounded by bird watchers. All this embarrassed Molly greatly, and the letter she wrote to John about it was awkward. Certainly she couldn’t repeat to him the nature of the rumors which had been circulating, and it was hard to explain what her mother’s reaction would be if Miss Summerfield notified her. Molly didn’t know what her mother and grandmother would do in such an eventuality, but she was sure it would be ghastly. She shrank almost physically from the prospect of discussing John with Helen and Margaret. Such a conversation would be punishment enough. Furthermore, she was quite sure that if her mother heard she had been seeing John, new steps would be taken to make it harder to see or even hear from him again.
In March of 1956, Molly wrote John that they couldn’t meet in New York before or after their Easter vacation, and her explanation didn’t sound convincing to him. The gossip of silly girls and the fear of the reprisals of old women wouldn’t dissuade Molly if she really wanted to see me, he thought, and the fear came rushing up in him that she was tiring of him, that her excuses would continue now whenever he wanted to see her, that the kind-as-possible letdown he had so long expected was beginning. At seventeen, John felt he knew a great deal about the psychology of women, oh, he was realistic about it, and didn’t fool himself at all. The boys at Colchester Academy talked a great deal about this subject, and it was widely known that a woman will do anything for a man she loves, and any display of caution is proof of a lack of passion. John imagined many reasons why Molly didn’t want him to come to New York to see her any more. His love for her had betrayed him, he was sure—he probably had been so obvious, it had undoubtedly shown in his eyes and in the tone of his voice, and Dick Woller might be at least partly right when he said that no woman really respects a man who loves her, that most women want a man to be casual, a little rough or even cruel. John had been too awkward and stumble-tongued, he felt, and the last time he had seen Molly, he had been having a little trouble with his complexion again, and that probably had disgusted her. Dick Woller said that girls were contemptuous of men who didn’t make passes at them, and maybe Molly thought he was too timid. But then again he had held her hand awfully tight in the movies the last time, and maybe she thought he was getting too fresh. Worst of all, she probably had met another man, someone at college, probably, with a car of his own, who could run up to Virginia and bring her to football weekends and dances, who wouldn’t expect her to sit around in waiting rooms of railroad stations with him, or to endure one double feature after another. Soon she would probably marry someone like that, John thought in despair, someone who wasn’t afraid to try to kiss her. Women really are just animals, Dick Woller had said; and although that scarcely seemed plausible with respect to Molly, maybe Dick was at least a little right. What really affects a woman is not kindness nor steadiness nor intelligence nor even a man’s looks, Dick Woller had observed, it’s just a matter of sex appeal, and some guys have it and some guys don’t. Muscles aren’t at all sexy to a woman—it’s just a certain something, Dick Woller had concluded, and he had smirked.
John wasn’t at all sure what that certain something was, but he was quite sure he didn’t have it. At any rate, he felt Molly couldn’t think of him as he thought of her, or she wouldn’t have cut off the meetings. Probably he had bored her, and she had just been trying to be nice. In despair he sat down and wrote her a note held short by pride saying he had received her letter about not meeting in New York, and that he understood.
In the stern resolve not to press himself upon Molly, John did not suggest any more meetings. When summer came, he went back to Mr. Newfleld’s camp in Maine as a Senior Counselor. Often she wrote him from Buffalo, but she did not ask him to visit her there, and he had no way of knowing that she was afraid he no longer wanted to come.
Chapter Twenty-Four
KEN AND SYLVIA returned from Europe in October of 1956. Ken wrote Molly a letter which was different from his weekly bulletins to her about books and plays he had enjoyed. He wrote:
DEAR MOLLY,
Sylvia and I have bought a small house in Redding, Connecticut, and I would like you to visit us there, or in Florida. I can easily understand how these divorces have been hard on you children, and a certain amount of bitterness is inevitable, but I frankly think that two years of this foolishness about your refusing to answer my letters is about enough. Judging from your verse in your school’s literary review, which I’ve subscribed to, and from all I know about you, you’re a remarkably mature and sensitive young lady. After all, you’re almost seventeen years old now. You’re growing up, and do you propose to avoid your father for the rest of his life? What would you think of a character in a book who did that? Wouldn’t she appear cruel and a little smug to you, not just righteous? Sometimes it helps to think of yourself in the third person, to pretend you’re a character in a story. Now, I ask you, do you think a real heroine would be so hurt by her father divorcing her mother that she would refuse to see him ever? A child yes, but an adult, no, and you’re becoming an adult.
Sylvia is writing about the same thing as this to John, who’s being just as difficult as you, and I propose that the four of us get together during your Christmas or spring vacation, or any other time you choose. I am suggesting two weeks of lying in the sun and getting back to normal. We’ve all had enough hating lately, and it’s time to relax. How about it, baby? Are you your old man’s daughter or not?
All my love,
>
DAD
The letter moved Molly. When John wrote to ask with elaborate casualness whether she were going to Florida for Christmas, she said she would. The plans were all made when Margaret Carter had her accident.
On November second the postman delivered a package to the Carter house from a shop in Buffalo that framed pictures. It contained a framed scroll Molly had received from her school as a poetry prize. If Molly had known her mother would have it framed, she would never have sent it to her. As it was, Molly had hesitated, but any printed honor meant so much to Helen and Margaret that it would have been cruel to refuse, and anyway, they had made fun of her locking herself in her room to write poetry for so long that there were aspects of vindictiveness and practical self-defense in mailing them her pay, the fancy, illuminated scroll. Maybe it would cause them to let her alone.
When she unwrapped the framed scroll, old Margaret stood looking around the house, wondering where she should hang it. The living room seemed best. Anne, the girl next door, was having trouble with her studies at the local high school, and Peggy Talbert, her snooty mother, would die when she saw it. Ordinarily Margaret would have waited until Bruce came home, for he did all small chores like hanging pictures, but he was at the wrestling matches. Since his retirement, he did little but attend prize fights and wrestling matches; it was almost impossible to keep him in the house. Helen was at a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and Peggy Talbert was there too. Margaret suspected that Helen would ask Peggy in for a cup of tea when she drove her home; Peggy had been only too glad to accept the invitation to ride in Helen’s Cadillac, and why not, Margaret thought; that old Plymouth of the Talberts’ was nothing in which to ride to a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Anyway, Helen would probably ask Peggy in for tea when they got home, and Margaret wanted that scroll Molly had won to be on the living-room wall when they arrived. It would make a good conversation piece.
In the new house Ken had bought her there was a molding around the top of each wall from which to hang pictures. Margaret got the stepladder from the utility room and balancing herself precariously, climbed up there to hang Molly’s scroll. As she put her fingers on the top of the molding, she made a horrifying discovery: the thin strip of wood, which was about three inches from the ceiling, was covered with dust and dirt. The thought that the four walls of each of the twelve rooms in the house had such moldings, all of them concealing filth, was dizzying to Margaret. She was tired and vertigo had been bothering her a lot lately, but she was scared by the possibility that Peggy Talbert might find out about that dirt—that she might climb up there to run her finger along the molding when no one was in the room, and then tell everyone about it—this would be unthinkable disgrace. Margaret had never been one to take disgrace easily, nor to lie down in the face of great difficulty. Tying a bandanna around her hair, she prepared herself for action, and unlimbered her vacuum cleaner. Four walls in twelve rooms contained many hundred feet of molding, and the stepladder was heavy for an old woman. The suction pipe of the vacuum cleaner was awkward to lift up to the ceiling; the hose was too short, and the wire kept getting twisted as Margaret tried to pull the machine along the floor. She leaned out as far as she could from the top of the stepladder to clean as much space as possible before having to climb down and move all her equipment farther along the wall. It was a desperate battle, but in her lust to get at the dirt, Margaret had superhuman energy. She might have got the molding, in the living room at least, completely clean, if the hose of the vacuum cleaner had not wound around her legs like a snake. She fell from the top of the stepladder with her arms outstretched, and she uttered one piercing shriek before her head struck the metal cylinder of the vacuum cleaner on the floor. The machine kept purring, and when Helen came in two hours later, it was keening over her as though she were dead.
But she wasn’t. She was only hopelessly injured at the age of seventy-two—with a badly fractured skull and three broken ribs and a triple-broken leg. An ambulance took her to the hospital, where she lay unconscious for three days. When she came to, she insisted upon being taken home. The doctors said it was inadvisable for a person so ill to go home, but the fact that the nurses and attendants didn’t pay much attention to her, except to attend to her bodily needs, infuriated her, and she raised so much hell that the doctors decided she might as well die at home as anywhere else.
Margaret was established in state in her big bedroom, with a radio and a television set and an air conditioner and a large dinner bell which she was supposed to use if she needed help quickly, and which she rang constantly. Everyone waited on Margaret because the doctors said that she would live only a few weeks at most and her last days on earth should be made as pleasant as possible, poor dear; anyone could see that.
Only she didn’t die quickly; weeks went by, and she was still there, loudly clanging her dinner bell. Helen began to hope (certainly the word was not “fear”) that she was eternal, that she would recover, in spite of what the doctors said, and lie there forever complaining that no one cared about a poor dying old woman, no one cared at all, not even her husband, who still spent most of his time at athletic events; oh, he was a great sportsman, Bruce was, Margaret said.
It was a great comfort to have her mother home, Helen told her friends; having her with them in her last days meant a great deal. Of course, one difficulty was that Margaret abused the nurses so much that none stayed more than a week, and Helen finally had to give her mother the sponge baths and all the rest of it, but it was a great joy to tend her mother herself, Helen said.
Molly put off her visit to Florida until spring, and John, upon hearing about it, spent Christmas with Bart to preclude the possibility of Bart’s demanding that he spend the spring vacation with him. Throughout the Christmas vacation Molly was pressed into service as a nurse. She was taught how to give her grandmother sponge baths, and it was evil of her to think that the withered old body with the ribs showing through the yellow skin and the nipples without breasts were ugly. Oh, it was proof of the evil within her that she was sickened to the point of nausea, she told herself. Margaret was her poor, kind old granny whom she should love dearly, and the old lady had never done a wicked thing, not in her whole life, and it was cruel of Molly to get to the point where the very smell of the medicines in her room caused nausea, even before she opened the door.
That was not a gay holiday season for Molly. The usual topic of conversation at the breakfast table was Margaret’s weight. Because of her broken bones, she couldn’t be placed on the scales, but she was obviously getting thinner at an alarming pace. By New Year’s Day, her head was like a skull, but sometimes she seemed to be gaining; that was the puzzling thing. Sometimes she looked healthier, and Helen would say, “I think the poor dear has put on a few pounds,” and Bruce would agree before excusing himself to watch an early morning movie before the start of the wrestling matches.
Obviously Molly couldn’t be spared to return to school. Poor Margaret might go at any time, her mother said. Miss Summerfield, the headmistress of the school, said Molly was so far advanced in her studies that it wouldn’t hurt her to miss a few weeks, and the child could stay home as long as she was needed. No one had any idea that Margaret could last so long. In January the doctors were mildly surprised that she was still alive, and by February they were astonished. The woman certainly has an enormous will to live, one tired young physician said as he heard the clang of her dinner bell while he was walking down the stairs from her room; she must have led a rich life.
At the end of February, Margaret was still alive; emaciated grotesquely and unable to lift the heavy bell now, but living, with her cold eyes glittering brightly. Helen thought that probably Molly shouldn’t go back to school that year because she was needed so much at home, but to everyone’s astonishment, old Margaret drew the line there. In a faint voice she said her granddaughter should go along; a young girl shouldn’t be prevented from graduating from school by so
meone else’s sickness.
On March second, Molly returned to Briarwood Manor, surprised to find herself almost loving the place, but only a week later Margaret died, and Molly had to go home.
It was a beautiful funeral, all Helen’s friends said. The casket cost four thousand dollars and was guaranteed to last forever. The undertaker fixed Margaret up so she looked so natural, all her friends said; just like her old self.
The inside of the casket was lined with cream-colored satin done up in flounces which old Bruce couldn’t look at because it was just like the counterpanes on the beds in an establishment he had visited every year in Buffalo when he got his Christmas bonus. Helen and Margaret had never found out about his Christmas bonus, and in good years it had lasted several nights. The satin flounces, with their evocation of the many Christmases of years past, made old Bruce extremely nervous, never mind some other details, like the rouge on poor dead Margaret’s cheeks, she, who had never worn rouge in her life. It wasn’t appropriate for Bruce to go to wrestling matches the week his wife died. He would have got drunk if liquor didn’t upset his stomach, but as things were he simply stayed in his room and watched the wrestling on television, his small eyes blazing with pleasure as one man jumped high in the air and landed on the belly of another.
