September Song

by William Humphrey

  On your drive to the next offering after the palace whose owner recently received a life sentence the agent says, “Poor dear Mrs. Delaney! All alone in that big house, except for the servants. It is several years since one of her doctors asked how she was and she said she was happy now to have settled all her children in nursing homes. Say nothing to her about buying the place. It’s been in the family since the Creation. They trace their line to Adam and Eve. It’s the great-grandchildren who have put it on the market. Pretend that she knows you. She won’t know that she doesn’t. She’ll invite us to tea. Just don’t bring up the subject of the Boer War. She’s quite bitter about that.”

  On your typical weekend in the country you are shown maybe six houses. You don’t just breeze through twenty rooms, guest cottage, stables, kennels, pool, four-car garage, the caretaker’s apartment over it. You’re in no hurry. You’re enjoying your private guided tour. Seeing how the other half lives. Except in your bracket the fraction is a great deal smaller than half. You show your seriousness by turning on faucets to test the pressure. You ask about local taxes. Heating costs. Train service. The availability of domestic help. To the agent you’re the perfect prospect. You like everything you’re shown, and you’re not easily pleased. But the retirement home you’re looking for will be your first, and you want to make sure it’s your last.

  At the end of your weekend in the country the agent says, “If you’re interested in any of the properties you’ve been shown, all have been inspected, appraised, approved, and we will be glad to help negotiate the mortgage with our local bank at quite attractive rates.”

  I say, “I have never in my life bought anything on credit. You won’t find me in Dun and Bradstreet.”

  There is no bill to pay when we check out of the inn.

  We get away in time to beat the traffic down to the city.

  Monday morning bright and early it’s back to sorting mail.

  September Song

  WHO HAS NEVER DAYDREAMED that the phone will ring and the caller be an old lover?

  Virginia Tyler was now seventy-six, and that fantasy, foolish to start with, had become embarrassing. Yet though it was twenty years since she had heard from John Warner, sometimes, sitting by the fire at night and studying the flames, it returned to her. She would have to shake her silly old head to clear it of its nonsense.

  And then it happened! As she would say in her letter to the children announcing her intention to divorce their father and remarry, her heart leapt. She had thought it had withered and died, and been half glad it had—unruly thing! She did not know until then that it had lain dormant, like those seeds from the tombs of the pharaohs that, when planted, blossom and bear.

  Toby was in the next room, doing his daily crossword puzzle.

  “Is it for me?” he called.

  Outwardly calm, she said, “No, it’s for me.” Inwardly, both ecstatic and furious, she said, “It’s for me! Me!” His smug assumption that every call was for him!

  Into the receiver she said, “Hold on. I’ll check it out upstairs.”

  The phone had to be left off the hook so as not to break the connection. But she had no fear that Toby might listen in on the conversation. He was incurious about her private affairs. As far as he was concerned, she had no private affairs, no life of her own apart from his. And he was right: she didn’t have, though she had once had, and a wild one it was.

  It is said that as we die our lives pass in review before our eyes. It was as she was brought back to life that Virginia Tyler’s did.

  Listening to that voice on the phone, she was lifted into the clouds. She saw herself in flight, alone, at the controls of her plane.

  To join her lover she had taken flying lessons. Her friends all thought she had gone out of her mind. At her age! Then already a grandmother!

  “This grandmother has sprouted wings! I’m as free as a bird!” she said as she touched down on her solo flight.

  Toby, who had a fear of flying, was proud of her. He gave a party in her honor to celebrate the event. Actually, though she pooh-poohed it in others, she too was afraid of flying. Her fear was a part of her excitement, and a source of pride. For her love’s sake she risked life and limb. Winging her way to him, earth-free, added zest to the affair, and youth and glamour to her image of herself. Outward bound, leaving home, she was a homing pigeon. Her path was so direct the plane might have been set on automatic pilot, guided by the needle of her heart.

  John too was a licensed pilot. It was he who first interested her in flying. They were winged; they were mating birds. They nested in many far-away places. She did not share Toby’s interest in cathedrals, art museums, yet though she resented his pleasure in traveling by himself, his lone European pilgrimages gave her the opportunity to be with John. He would tell his wife that he was off to a conference in Cleveland, Birmingham, Trenton. She would wonder why they always chose such dreary places, and decide to stay at home. The lovers would alight for a week on Nantucket, in New York City. Registering at a hotel as husband and wife, answering to the name “Mrs. Warner,” never lost its thrill for her.

  Planes were for rent at the local airport. Her visits to Boston to see her mother became more frequent. Toby was pleased that she and her mother now got along so much better than always before. She said that now that her mother was old she felt she must make up to her for the bad feeling between them over the years. Her mother said, “I’m just your excuse to fly that fool airplane. At your age!”

  On her forty-eighth birthday Toby gave her a Piper Cub. That brought her a twinge of remorse.

  “Now that you own your own plane you’re flying not more but less—hardly at all,” he said. “Don’t you like it? Did I buy the wrong kind?”

  “Oh, I’ll get back to it in time,” she said.

  She wondered at his lack of suspicion, and his misplaced trust in her shamed her. It also rather irritated her. Was it that she was too old, too long settled, too domesticated to be suspected of any wrongdoing? She was so conscious of her guilty happiness she felt it must show in telltale ways of which she herself was unaware. She had read Madame Bovary and remembered Emma’s saying to herself in awe, “I am an adulteress!” She felt transfigured, hardly knew herself. This alteration in her must show, if not to Toby then to others. She half-hoped it did! Her dread of disclosure had to contend with a wild wish to have the whole world know. They took her for a middle-aged matron, conventional, unadventurous, yoked to a dull, inattentive husband. They should only know! As for Toby, he took her for granted. Wouldn’t it give him a shaking up if she were to tell him!

  They never considered getting divorced and marrying each other. As she could see, his deception troubled John, but the guilt he felt was as much toward his son for what he was doing to his mother as toward her. Bruce adored his mother. At twenty-three he showed no inclination toward any other woman. It was doubtful that he would ever marry. He adored his father, too. Adored him as the consort of his queen. Marcia was a fiercely proud woman—perhaps even proud of enduring a marriage that went against her grain. To be divorced would humiliate her.

  She too balked at the step. Toby was a one-woman man and without her would be helpless in a hundred little ways. She pitied him—another reason for not loving him—but while it often grated her, she took a certain satisfaction in his dependence upon her. She was fond of Toby, in her way. Some of his habits irritated her: his reading at meals, his smoking in the car, etc., but she was fond of him—or so she kept telling herself. She did not love him, but she shrank from hurting him—or from the guilt she would feel if she did. She told herself that given the choice between her deceiving him and her leaving him, he would choose to have her stay. She had her children, too, whom she hesitated to shock, whose censure she dreaded. And she feared her mother, a Boston puritan, one of a long line, with strict views on sex, marriage, duty, self-denial. A formidable woman. Once when somebody said to her offhandedly, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” she took it as a personal affront
. Drawing herself up stiffly, she said, without a trace of self-irony, “I am. If I weren’t I’d change.”

  And both were daunted by the prospect of such upheaval, the loss of disapproving friends, the sheer undertaking of creating a new life in a new place. Bad though they might be, old habits were hard to break, and fresh frontiers, while beckoning, were also scary when you reached a certain age. It made you feel old, cowardly and lazy to admit it, but it was easier to rock along with things as they were.

  Still, despite all these deterrents, she would have made the break if he had urged it. But, as when they danced, he led, she followed.

  “If only both of them would find others,” he said, which would not only have freed them but salved their consciences. “But Marcia doesn’t like men. Except Bruce.”

  “And Toby has got me,” she said. “Old Faithful. Or so he thinks.”

  To receive letters from each other in secret both rented boxes in post offices where they were unknown. Yet it all ended when Marcia found one of her letters to him. She was almost ready to excuse his carelessness. He had been unable to destroy it! Any one of her letters to him was a giveaway. They were not the gushings of a girl with a crush on, say, a professor. They were her pillow talk, the uninhibited outpourings of a long-somnolent woman to the Prince Charming who had awakened her with his kiss. Asbestos sheets rather than writing paper would have better suited their contents.

  In his last letter he wrote that he had promised Marcia never to see her again. But his love was undying.

  The Piper Cub was sold.

  Her wings had been clipped.

  Over the succeeding years:

  The children all left home.

  Married.

  Had children.

  Toby retired.

  He grew increasingly hard of hearing and that made him less talkative than ever. One mate’s deafness made the other one dumb. She pitied him for his infirmity, yet his refusal to get a hearing aid exasperated her. She had to repeat everything she said to him. It was so frustrating! She knew that his resistance to a hearing aid was not because he was vain of his appearance. Of that he was all too careless. It was that to wear one would be a constant reminder, like eyeglasses, false teeth, of decay. She was ashamed of her irritation with him, but that did not keep her from feeling it.

  She knew that people long together grew impatient with one another’s ways and weaknesses and magnified them out of all proportion. His chronic sinusitis was an affliction he had not sought, yet his honking into his handkerchief so annoyed her that sometimes she had to leave the room. It was he who should leave the room.

  He had always been bookish; his hardness of hearing made him burrow still deeper into books, leaving her more than ever to herself. One winter evening, snow flying, wind moaning, the two of them sat in silence before the fire, he reading, unconscious of, indifferent to whatever she might or might not be doing. To see just how long this could go on she sat there for hours. At last she rose, took his book from him and tossed it into the fire.

  “Now what did you do that for?” he wondered aloud as she made her way upstairs.

  Now had come the call she had waited twenty years for, never expecting it. It was as though some dear one had come back from the dead. And as though she had too.

  “That was John Warner on the phone,” she said. The care with which she enunciated the name conveyed the need she had felt to place the person.

  “John Warner?”

  “Mmh. Remember him?”

  “John Warner … Oh, yes. Yes. Long time no see. What’s with him?”

  “His wife has died.”

  That would make it sound as though his wife had just died. That he was newly in need of sympathy, condolence. But she had died three years ago. Three years! Oh, why had he waited so long to call her? Three precious years! All that time lost when there was so little time to lose, to live! Yet she could explain his hesitancy to herself. She could imagine him longing to call her but thinking, “After all these years? She has forgotten you, you sentimental old fool. No doubt she replaced you with another lover. You’re too old for this nonsense—and so is she. What right have you to disturb her settled life? There is not an ember left of what was once a fire—not on her side. With three children she’s a grandmother many times over—a great-grandmother by now.”

  But he had called! He had overcome his fear of looking ridiculous, of being laughed at, rejected. He had trusted in her faithfulness, had trusted that she would respond. He alone of all the world believed she still had a heart that did not just pump but palpitated.

  “Oh, dear! Poor man. Yes. His wife was a very beautiful woman.”

  “Mmh. You have no trouble remembering her, I see.”

  She was doubly jealous.

  “He says he would like to meet me. In the old days he used to be rather … fond of me.” This last she said in a musing tone, as though after all these years just now recalling it. “If you can believe that.” Her little jab was lost on him.

  “Where is he?”

  “In Boston.”

  “Then of course you must go. Poor man! To lose his wife.”

  A meeting between an elderly widower, recently bereaved, still in mourning, and a onetime friend who just happened to be of the opposite sex, a seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother, contentedly married for half a century: what could be more innocent?

  She resented the assumption that her capacity for love, for adventure—even for mischief—had been worn away by the abrasion of time. It had just been rekindled. What the world would ridicule as her silliness aroused her defiance. No fool like an old fool, all would say; act your age. That was just what she was doing. Who better than she knew her age? The stopwatch was running, and her countdown to zero was for a launch.

  “But you’re a woman of seventy-six!” Those were his first words to her when, on her return home from Boston, she asked him for a divorce so that she might marry John Warner. The trip had been like a weekend pass from prison. Now she was demanding her parole. She felt she owed no apology. She had earned her freedom by her years of good behavior.

  John showed his age and she was glad he did. She had feared that he would find her too old. He did not try to tell her that she had not changed, and she was glad of that too. He accepted her as she was. He said, “You look wonderful!” And his eyes shone with a light that she had not seen in a man’s since last looking into his.

  They drove down to the Cape, to his saltbox on the shore. They strolled on the beach. Arm in arm. Together they prepared the meal and dined at home. He was still all that he had been, and he made her feel that she was too. A few wrinkles—what were they? The intervening years vanished as though at the wave of his wand. It was she—she!—across the table from him, in the candlelight’s flattering glow. No book lay on the surface separating them. She did not mind his self-assurance; she liked his certainty that she was his.

  He had let her know over the phone something of what she might expect if she agreed to meet him. He held her hand, and it was the splicing of a long-severed electric connection, the current restored; but he did not want just to hold hands. He paid her court, turning upon her all his charm, his wit, but briefly—telegraphing his intentions. She appreciated his gallantry, but she must not prolong it. There was not time for coyness. He had a lot to accomplish in a short while—more, indeed, than she guessed. For just picking up where they had broken off all those years ago and carrying on as before was not what he had in mind. He had in mind much more than that.

  After dinner they danced. He had mapped out his flattering but needless campaign of conquest down to orchestrating on tape the background music. They swayed to:

  You were meant for me.

  I was meant for you.

  To:

  Although you belong to somebody else,

  Tonight you belong to me.

  To—in the sultry voice of Marlene Dietrich:

  Falling in love again—

  Oh, what am I to do?
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  Long as I’m near you

  I can’t help it.

  Being the music of their youth, it made them feel young. Until the finale, in the cracked old voice of Walter Huston—his proposal to her in song:

  For it’s a long long time from May to December

  But the days grow short when you reach September

  She needed no persuading to spend those remaining days with him.

  “But you’re a great-grandmother!” said Toby.

  “I do not need to be told my age. Nor that I am not acting it. I see it in the mirror. I feel it in my joints. I am an old woman. But I am still a woman. A woman in love. I am not afraid of making a fool of myself. What you are afraid of is my making you look foolish. You won’t miss me. You will still have your books, your slippers and your pipe.

  “Your first words to me ought to have been, ‘I love you. Don’t leave me. Give me a chance to prove my love to you and to win back yours.’ It would have done you no good. It’s too late in the day for that. But it is what you ought to have said.”

  “Well! This has certainly been a whirlwind romance.”

  “I liked him when I knew him before. Now, as you have so chivalrously pointed out, I have got no time to lose.”

  In truth, she both did and did not feel her age. Her years with Toby after the loss of John had dragged by, they had piled up. And yet in their very sameness they ran together, uncountable, all one. They were easily shed. They were like a sleep. A sleep from which she had now awakened.

  “So,” she said. Discussion was at an end, it was time now for decision. “Are you going to give me what I want, or do you mean to contest it?”

  “Well … If that is what you want…”

  So that was how much she meant to him! Not worth putting up the least fight for. Her heart sped on wings to her old, her new lover.

  Then her conscience told her that she was being unfair. If he was so readily acquiescent it was because he had been stunned, crushed. In just one minute, the duration of an earthquake, his familiar world had crumbled.