Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters

by Edith Wharton

  Charity sat down obediently, and Mr Royall, his hands behind his back, paced slowly up and down the room. As he turned and faced Charity, she noticed that his lips were twitching a little; but the look in his eyes was grave and calm. Once he paused before her and said timidly: ‘Your hair’s got kinder loose with the wind,’ and she lifted her hands and tried to smooth back the locks that had escaped from her braid. There was a looking-glass in a carved frame on the wall, but she was ashamed to look at herself in it, and she sat with her hands folded on her knee till the clergyman returned. Then they went out again, along a sort of arcaded passage, and into a low vaulted room with a cross on an altar, and rows of benches. The clergyman, who had left them at the door, presently reappeared before the altar in a surplice, and a lady who was probably his wife, and a man in a blue shirt who had been raking dead leaves on the lawn, came in and sat on one of the benches.

  The clergyman opened a book and signed to Charity and Mr Royall to approach. Mr Royall advanced a few steps, and Charity followed him as she had followed him to the buggy when they went out of Mrs Hobart’s kitchen; she had the feeling that if she ceased to keep close to him, and do what he told her to do, the world would slip away from beneath her feet.

  The clergyman began to read, and on her dazed mind there rose the memory of Mr Miles, standing the night before in the desolate house of the Mountain, and reading out of the same book words that had the same dread sound of finality:

  ‘I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment whereby ye may not be lawfully joined together.…’

  Charity raised her eyes and met Mr Royall’s. They were still looking at her kindly and steadily. ‘I will!’ she heard him say a moment later, after another interval of words that she had failed to catch. She was so busy trying to understand the gestures the clergyman was signalling to her to make that she no longer heard what was being said. After another interval the lady on the bench stood up, and taking her hand put it in Mr Royall’s. It lay enclosed in his strong palm and she felt a ring that was too big for her being slipped onto her thin finger. She understood then that she was married.…

  Late that afternoon Charity sat alone in a bedroom of the fashionable hotel where she and Harney had vainly sought a table on the Fourth of July. She had never before been in so handsomely furnished a room. The mirror above the dressing-table reflected the high head-board and fluted pillow-slips of the double bed, and a bedspread so spotlessly white that she had hesitated to lay her hat and jacket on it. The humming radiator diffused an atmosphere of drowsy warmth, and through a half-open door she saw the glitter of the nickel taps above twin marble basins.

  For a while the long turmoil of the night and day had slipped away from her and she sat with closed eyes, surrendering herself to the spell of warmth and silence. But presently this merciful apathy was succeeded by the sudden acuteness of vision with which sick people sometimes wake out of a heavy sleep. As she opened her eyes they rested on the picture that hung above the bed. It was a large engraving with a dazzling white margin enclosed in a wide frame of bird’s-eye maple with an inner scroll of gold. The engraving represented a young man in a boat on a lake overhung with trees. He was leaning over to gather water-lilies for the girl in a light dress who lay among the cushions in the stern. The scene was full of a drowsy midsummer radiance, and Charity averted her eyes from it and, rising from her chair, began to wander restlessly about the room.

  It was on the fifth floor, and its broad window of plate glass looked over the roofs of the town. Beyond them stretched a wooded landscape in which the last fires of sunset were picking out a steely gleam. Charity gazed at the gleam with startled eyes. Even through the gathering twilight she recognized the contour of the soft hills encircling it, and the way the meadows sloped to its edge. It was Nettleton Lake that she was looking at.

  She stood a long time in the window staring out at the fading water. The sight of it had roused her for the first time to a realization of what she had done. Even the feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought her this sharp sense of the irretrievable. For an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing. She heard the door open behind her, and Mr Royall came in.

  He had gone to the barber’s to be shaved, and his shaggy grey hair had been trimmed and smoothed. He moved strongly and quickly, squaring his shoulders and carrying his head high, as if he did not want to pass unnoticed.

  ‘What are you doing in the dark?’ he called out in a cheerful voice. Charity made no answer. He went up to the window to draw down the blind, and putting his finger on the wall flooded the room with a blaze of light from the central chandelier. In this unfamiliar illumination husband and wife faced each other awkwardly for a moment; then Mr Royall said: ‘We’ll step down and have some supper, if you say so.’

  The thought of food filled her with repugnance; but not daring to confess it she smoothed her hair and followed him to the lift.

  An hour later, coming out of the glare of the dining-room, she waited in the marble-panelled hall while Mr Royall, before the brass lattice of one of the corner counters, selected a cigar and bought an evening paper. Men were lounging in rocking chairs under the blazing chandeliers, travellers coming and going, bells ringing, porters shuffling by with luggage. Over Mr Royall’s shoulder, as he leaned against the counter, a girl with her hair puffed high smirked and nodded at a dapper drummer who was getting his key at the desk across the hall.

  Charity stood among these cross-currents of life as motionless and inert as if she had been one of the tables screwed to the marble floor. All her soul was gathered up into one sick sense of coming doom, and she watched Mr Royall in fascinated terror while he pinched the cigars in successive boxes and unfolded his evening paper with a steady hand.

  Presently he turned and joined her. ‘You go right along up to bed – I’m going to sit down here and have my smoke,’ he said. He spoke as easily and naturally as if they had been an old couple, long used to each other’s ways, and her contracted heart gave a flutter of relief. She followed him to the lift, and he put her in and enjoined the buttoned and braided boy to show her to her room.

  She groped her way in through the darkness, forgetting where the electric button was, and not knowing how to manipulate it. But a white autumn moon had risen, and the illuminated sky put a pale light in the room. By it she undressed, and after folding up the ruffled pillow-slips crept timidly under the spotless counterpane. She had never felt such smooth sheets or such light warm blankets; but the softness of the bed did not soothe her. She lay there trembling with a fear that ran through her veins like ice. ‘What have I done? Oh, what have I done?’ she whispered, shuddering to her pillow; and pressing her face against it to shut out the pale landscape beyond the window she lay in the darkness straining her ears, and shaking at every footstep that approached.…

  Suddenly she sat up and pressed her hands against her frightened heart. A faint sound had told her that someone was in the room; but she must have slept in the interval, for she had heard no one enter. The moon was setting beyond the opposite roofs, and in the darkness, outlined against the grey square of the window, she saw a figure seated in the rocking-chair. The figure did not move: it was sunk deep in the chair, with bowed head and folded arms, and she saw that it was Mr Royall who sat there. He had not undressed, but had taken the blanket from the foot of the bed and laid it across his knees. Trembling and holding her breath she watched him, fearing that he had been roused by her movement; but he did not stir, and she concluded that he wished her to think he was asleep.

  As she continued to watch him ineffable relief stole slowly over her, relaxing her strained nerves and exhausted body. He knew, then … he knew … it was because he knew that he had married her, and that he sat there in the darkness to show her she was safe with him. A stir of something deeper than she had ever fe
lt in thinking of him flitted through her tired brain, and cautiously, noiselessly, she let her head sink on the pillow.…

  When she woke the room was full of morning light, and her first glance showed her that she was alone in it. She got up and dressed, and as she was fastening her dress the door opened, and Mr Royall came in. He looked old and tired in the bright daylight, but his face wore the same expression of grave friendliness that had reassured her on the Mountain. It was as if all the dark spirits had gone out of him.

  They went downstairs to the dining-room for breakfast, and after breakfast he told her he had some insurance business to attend to. ‘I guess while I’m doing it you’d better step out and buy yourself whatever you need.’ He smiled, and added with an embarrassed laugh: ‘You know I always wanted you to beat all the other girls.’ He drew something from his pocket, and pushed it across the table to her; and she saw that he had given her two twenty-dollar bills. ‘If it ain’t enough there’s more where that come from – I want you to beat ’em all hollow,’ he repeated.

  She flushed and tried to stammer out her thanks, but he had pushed back his chair and was leading the way out of the dining-room. In the hall he paused a minute to say that if it suited her they would take the three o’clock train back to North Dormer; then he took his hat and coat from the rack and went out.

  A few minutes later Charity went out too. She had watched to see in what direction he was going, and she took the opposite way and walked quickly down the main street to the brick building on the corner of Lake Avenue. There she paused to look cautiously up and down the thoroughfare, and then climbed the brass-bound stairs to Dr Merkle’s door. The same bushy-headed mulatto girl admitted her, and after the same interval of waiting in the red plush parlor she was once more summoned to Dr Merkle’s office. The doctor received her without surprise, and led her into the inner plush sanctuary.

  ‘I thought you’d be back, but you’ve come a mite too soon: I told you to be patient and not fret,’ she observed, after a pause of penetrating scrutiny.

  Charity drew the money from her breast. ‘I’ve come to get my blue brooch,’ she said, flushing.

  ‘Your brooch?’ Dr Merkle appeared not to remember. ‘My, yes – I get so many things of that kind. Well, my dear, you’ll have to wait while I get it out of the safe. I don’t leave valuables like that laying round like the noospaper.’

  She disappeared for a moment, and returned with a bit of twisted-up tissue paper from which she unwrapped the brooch.

  Charity, as she looked at it, felt a stir of warmth at her heart. She held out an eager hand.

  ‘Have you got the change?’ she asked a little breathlessly, laying one of the twenty-dollar bills on the table.

  ‘Change? What’d I want to have change for? I only see two twenties there,’ Dr Merkle answered brightly.

  Charity paused, disconcerted. ‘I thought … you said it was five dollars a visit.…’

  ‘For you, as a favour – I did. But how about the responsibility – and the insurance? I don’t s’pose you ever thought of that? This pin’s worth a hundred dollars easy. If it had got lost or stole, where’d I been when you come to claim it?’

  Charity remained silent, puzzled and half-convinced by the argument, and Dr Merkle promptly followed up her advantage. ‘I didn’t ask you for your brooch, my dear. I’d a good deal ruther folks paid me my regular charge than have ’em put me to all this trouble.’

  She paused, and Charity, seized with a desperate longing to escape, rose to her feet and held out one of the bills.

  ‘Will you take that?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I won’t take that, my dear; but I’ll take it with its mate, and hand you over a signed receipt if you don’t trust me.’

  ‘Oh, but I can’t – it’s all I’ve got,’ Charity exclaimed.

  Dr Merkle looked up at her pleasantly from the plush sofa. ‘It seems you got married yesterday, up to the ‘Piscopal church; I heard all about the wedding from the minister’s chore-man. It would be a pity, wouldn’t it, to let Mr Royall know you had an account running here? I just put it to you as your own mother might.’

  Anger flamed up in Charity, and for an instant she thought of abandoning the brooch and letting Dr Merkle do her worst. But how could she leave her only treasure with that evil woman? She wanted it for her baby: she meant it, in some mysterious way, to be a link between Harney’s child and its unknown father. Trembling and hating herself while she did it, she laid Mr Royall’s money on the table, and catching up the brooch fled out of the room and the house.…

  In the street she stood still, dazed by this last adventure. But the brooch lay in her bosom like a talisman, and she felt a secret lightness of heart. It gave her strength, after a moment, to walk on slowly in the direction of the post office, and go in through the swinging doors. At one of the windows she bought a sheet of letter-paper, an envelope and a stamp; then she sat down at a table and dipped the rusty post office pen in ink. She had come there possessed with a fear which had haunted her ever since she had felt Mr Royall’s ring on her finger: the fear that Harney might, after all, free himself and come back to her. It was a possibility which had never occurred to her during the dreadful hours after she had received his letter; only when the decisive step she had taken made longing turn to apprehension did such a contingency seem conceivable. She addressed the envelope, and on the sheet of paper she wrote:

  I’m married to Mr Royall. I’ll always remember you.

  CHARITY.

  The last words were not in the least what she had meant to write; they had flowed from her pen irresistibly. She had not had the strength to complete her sacrifice; but, after all, what did it matter? Now that there was no chance of ever seeing Harney again, why should she not tell him the truth?

  When she had put the letter in the box she went out into the busy sunlit street and began to walk to the hotel. Behind the plate-glass windows of the department stores she noticed the tempting display of dresses and dress-materials that had fired her imagination on the day when she and Harney had looked in at them together. They reminded her of Mr Royall’s injunction to go out and buy all she needed. She looked down at her shabby dress, and wondered what she should say when he saw her coming back empty-handed. As she drew near the hotel she saw him waiting on the doorstep, and her heart began to beat with apprehension.

  He nodded and waved his hand at her approach, and they walked through the hall and went upstairs to collect their possessions, so that Mr Royall might give up the key of the room when they went down again for their midday dinner. In the bedroom, while she was thrusting back into the satchel the few things she had brought away with her, she suddenly felt that his eyes were on her and that he was going to speak. She stood still, her half-folded night-gown in her hand, while the blood rushed up to her drawn cheeks.

  ‘Well, did you rig yourself out handsomely? I haven’t seen any bundles round,’ he said jocosely.

  ‘Oh, I’d rather let Ally Hawes make the few things I want,’ she answered.

  ‘That so?’ He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and his eye-brows projected in a scowl. Then his face grew friendly again. ‘Well, I wanted you to go back looking stylisher than any of them; but I guess you’re right. You’re a good girl, Charity.’

  Their eyes met, and something rose in his that she had never seen there: a look that made her feel ashamed and yet secure.

  ‘I guess you’re good, too,’ she said, shyly and quickly. He smiled without answering, and they went out of the room together and dropped down to the hall in the glittering lift.

  Late that evening, in the cold autumn moonlight, they drove up to the door of the red house.

  BUNNER SISTERS

  PART I

  I

  In the days when New York’s traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an i
nconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.

  It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side-street already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the windowpane, and the brevity of the sign surmounting it (merely ‘Bunner Sisters’ in blotchy gold on a black ground) it would have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried on within. But that was of little consequence, since its fame was so purely local that the customers on whom its existence depended were almost congenitally aware of the exact range of ‘goods’ to be found at Bunner Sisters’.

  The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was a private dwelling with a brick front, green shutters on weak hinges, and a dress-maker’s sign in the window above the shop. On each side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with fronts of brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the knotty wisteria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its curtainless windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were not exacting in their tastes; though they doubtless indulged in as much fastidiousness as they could afford to pay for, and rather more than their landlord thought they had a right to express.