“Excitement goes when you’re too old for toys,” Inga said. Yet, she had anticipated this day; something filled her deeper, warmer than excitement. Jeff had worn a sense of waiting, too, which she had thought for the holiday, though evidently it had not been, for he wore still a look of waiting as the day was ending.
When Vern’s green coupe appeared, its rattling outdid the clanking of the cattle gap. Possibly because it was Christmas, he had the decency to nod, passing them. That boy might be the death of us all, Amelia thought, the car going toward the back.
“Christmas gift!” Jessie called before leaving with Vern. “Christmas gift!” they called, in return. Soon Latham and Amelia went home to take naps. Inside, Jeff made a fire that was reluctant, as the logs were damp. Cleaning up Christmas debris, Inga offered balled gift wrappings, which he stuffed among the kindling. “It’s not going too well,” Inga said.
“Well, I tried.” He stood staring down at the flameless fire, convinced that Amy had gone off on her own too soon. She had grown tougher, as he had wanted her to, but, damn it, this tough? “If you could be reincarnated, how would you like to come back?”
“My goodness,” Inga said. “I don’t think I’d want to be.”
But if you were to have no peace. Leaning against the mantel, Jeff knew he would have none until he had seen the end of what he and Amy had started. He felt so incomplete. “I,” he said, though Inga had not asked, “might like to be a butterfly.”
Inga considered that without answering. It was not in her background, her nature, to be fanciful. Instead, she said, “No luck?” when the logs only hissed.
“None,” he said moodily.
She sifted through Christmas cards on a table. “Surprising some of the people we didn’t hear from this year.”
What good does it do to be remembered, someone had asked. Who? he wondered. “People get busy,” he said. Inga, wanting to please him, tried to think of something. “Perhaps I’d like to be a mountain goat,” she said, with an eager look.
He said appreciatively, “Not a bad choice.” Looking at her, he wondered about this blonde, in the room, looking through Christmas cards. Perhaps prolonged truth was not possible between two human beings, even though married. How long it seemed they had lied to one another, by saying nothing. His heart beat warily, and he chided it: If only you had stayed out of the way! He was equally unhappy about losing Amy so soon, and that she was still a partly frozen child. Moving from the mantel, he said, “Many of these books must go to a library. I’ll start cataloguing them tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” she said anxiously. As he had knelt to poke again at the fire, the door knocker fell and Inga answered it.
“Christmas gift!” Icicles shook on the tree from the night entering, though the neighbor’s shout itself might have set them aflutter. “Got you first,” he cried.
Jeff heard Inga mutter something in return, the customary answer, he imagined. “Grandbabies been running over the house all day,” the neighbor said. “But we wanted to bring you some eggnog. And oh, the carrier made a mistake and left all these cards at our house. Sorry I didn’t get them over sooner. But grandbabies got me run ragged.”
The night’s cold crept away as the door closed, and the icicles set. Jeff had seen stars in all their magnitude before Inga shut the door. In the doorway, she held a napkin-covered bowl, her face happier. “Look! cards got left next door by mistake.” Her other hand was full. “Let me get cups, though.” The silver bowl caught roundly all the glorious color of the Christmas tree lights. And entering the dark kitchen, Inga for some reason was surprised when the reflection disappeared, though that bright warmth could not go on and on, for nothing did. Carrying the bowl and two glass cups, she took also the cards back to the living room. After setting down the tray, she said with a fluttery wave of her hand, “I forgot cookies.” She waved again, fluttery in the doorway. “There are the cards. But one is a letter.” She disappeared, leaving him before the fire. She had rather he read the letter than have it lying there between them. So, it was still going on. In the dark kitchen, remembering Jeff’s face, she again had the strong sense that something had ended. She turned away, having gone close to inspect the clock. Almost, Christmas was over and Jeff still had that sense of waiting. It was not then the day’s being over on his mind. Why had he had such a sense of urgency about the books? He looked toward something reluctantly. Maybe that another year was ending, she thought.
When Billy Walter gave her a puppy for Christmas, Amy could only feel that she was crazy about Billy Walter. She had opened a large box, to find inside a blond cocker, damp but ecstatic.
“Taffy,” Billy Walter had said, and touched Amy’s hair.
“Billy Walter, he’s adorable, and how sweet!”
Now, Christmas lights on trees along Quill Boulevard looked dim compared to car lights, but stars seemed unusually large, to shine brighter in the cold. “I know it seems silly,” Amy said, peering intently through the windshield. Lights blinking seemed swimming in the night. “I know it’s silly, not to want to go to a motel just because it’s New Year’s. But it seems wrong.”
The fishtail wavering of the motel’s too many signs muddled with light from the boxed decorated trees on the street. However, the headlights of traffic, going two ways, guilelessly outdid them. A pucker on his lips was all that showed Billy Walter found her reasoning female and incomprehensible.
“If that’s the way you feel,” he said, with a shrug. “I certainly don’t want to push in where I’m not wanted.”
“It’s not that. I want to be with you. I just feel if we go to this crummy place the first night of the year, the whole year will be like that. I know it seems silly.”
Billy Walter looked at his watch, bending toward it in the light of a motel sign, his chin set. “O.K., sugar, I’ll take you on home.”
Opening her mouth to protest that it was early, that she did not want to be dumped home at this hour, Amy realized she had only one alternative. As he reached for the key, she thought of being alone and said, “Oh, all right. It is silly. It was just a momentary feeling. I don’t really know why I said it.”
“The message of Christmas get you?”
“You know I’m not religious. Though a long time, I believed heaven was a place with God and Jesus walking around. A Sunday-school teacher told me Jesus was a man who went around telling stories and had tuberculosis. Billy Walter, what a comedown! I do like idealizing things.”
Guffawing, repeating “tuberculosis,” Billy Walter got out of the car and ambled to the motel office. There, he leaned charmingly toward the woman behind the register. Within a moment, her hennaed head thrown back, she was howling with laughter. Watching, Amy could not help her own lips twitching. Billy Walter was, as her mother said, an overgrown puppy. Seldom did Amy think Billy Walter’s jokes really funny, but enjoyed watching him tell them for he enjoyed his own hugely and life with him would be a continuing series of practical jokes. Recently, agreeable as always, he had gone with her to a show of modern art, held in a medieval-looking building which lent an air of solemnity. Rightly, he had not pretended to be impressed by a square within a square as a picture, and neither was she. Like Billy Walter, she had soon found the whole collection a bore, but kept sheepishly trailing from picture to picture. After following her for some time, like a dutiful consort, only his hands behind his back were restive, Billy Walter left the room. Looking around, Amy found that, not surprisingly, he was gone. He reported later having seen a good buddy—a really good old boy—whom he had not seen in a long time. That boy, foresightedly, had a fifth of vodka in his car. With it, they had spiked not only their own punch but cups they thoughtfully carried to the elderly hatcheck lady. At the afternoon’s slow end, she was handing out coats in vague directions and usually to the wrong owner. Taking Amy by the hand, howling and at a gallop, Billy Walter raced with her down the museum’s steps.
The woman behind the desk now gave him a paper cup, and raised one to t
ouch it. Cheers! they would be saying, Amy thought impatiently. Right then, being cold, she would have gotten out of the car, except that a car full of Negroes came swervingly from behind the motel; tailpipe dragging, it went off down Quill Boulevard. The screeching sound drew Billy Walter to the front window, where he seemed to remember Amy. He made an obvious farewell to the woman and headed for the door. But she went on talking, her mouth widening and closing like a snapping turtle’s, persistently, as if never would she get through telling Billy Walter all she had to tell him. He always, from the merest encounters, came away knowing more about people, Amy felt, than if she had spent the day with them. He chided her when she said that. Wasn’t she, after all, the one who wanted to have experiences and know about people? She shouldn’t waste time, then, being shy. However, she knew she went on being dependent on Billy Walter for information. He very shortly forgot details, often could not recall them a second time, while Amy vicariously lived these lives. People seemed to endure such sad small ones, without malice. She was fretful, often, wanting something in return for living.
Standing in the motel’s doorway, Billy Walter was calling, “The little woman’s going to give me hell!” He came along, followed by the woman’s shooing motions and laughter and gave Amy a paper cup. After drinking from it, making a face, she said, “What’s that?”
“Rye, I think. Isn’t it terrible? But the woman inside gave it to me for you. ‘Happy life,’ she said.” Amy took the cup back and drank its contents obligingly.
With the Christmas season past, its decorations gave everything a leftover quality. On the door to which Billy Walter fitted the key, with difficulty, were strung lopsided letters reading Merry Christmas. In the motel’s office window, the pointed and blush-colored bulbs of an artificial candle had gone out. “Go on in, sugar.” Billy Walter stood aside, the door thrust open. Closing it, he said, “I told that woman about getting that old lady at the art show drunk, and I thought she’d split a gusset!” The room was filled up with his size and his own laughter.
“What’s her story?” Amy said, a little jealously.
He was roaming the room inspectingly, and said, “Oh hell, there’s some rumpus in the kitchen. The help’s all drunk and fighting. Her husband’s gone home to get his pistol.”
If asked to close his eyes and relate what he had seen roaming the room, Billy Walter would have remembered little. While apparently watching him, Amy could have said that there were cigarette burns the size of dimes in the green chenille spread, faded by bleach. Glasses had left white rings on the top of the tilty bureau, and its lamp had little for a shade but a wire frame. The shower curtain, having lost holders, hung limp as a scarecrow. Amy pranced from the bathroom wearing a diaphanous and frilly slip, naturally enticing to Billy Walter. Taking her by the wrist, he drew her toward the bed, down on top of him. There, Amy faltered. She, in her mind’s eye, kept thinking of the square within a square, the picture at the art show that had been incomprehensible. Why had she pretended to like it? And why had she not come now glumly, as she felt, from the bathroom to be enticing?
No longer than he lingered over her many questions did Billy Walter linger after making love. He heaved himself from the bed, restless and ready for some other activity. He considered himself practical, that he faced life head-on. But Amy, watching him from the bed, wondered if he were not actually trying to escape things, rushing about and always busy. He told her she was morbid and obsessed by death, and she had answered that she was not afraid of being sad. Now he was hurrying toward the shower. She impulsively reached out for his hand, but with an occupied air, he barely brushed hers and went on, by-passing her attempt to make them closer. He seemed to know there was no such thing as being inseparable.
She sat up to disappear from the bureau mirror, with steam coming from the shower obscuring it. Lavishly soaping, Billy Walter sent a sweet warm scent into the room. Lighthearted and complicated as a bird’s chirping, he whistled above the shower’s noise. As against the stall’s tin sides the spray lessened, Amy quickly read a letter, taken from her purse.
Jeff:
I’ve wondered so much what’s happened to you?? I’ve hesitated to call or write you at home. I’m dying to know when your book is coming out??? Will you let me know? I had to come home on short notice for the opening of my father’s dancing school—eek!!! You can imagine! Otherwise, I would have phoned you. He’s not well. All the same things here; how ’bout there?? I am doing some social work with crippled children and like that. I have written little things in bits and pieces, not much. But remember how warm it was once in the woods in December, or was it November??? Anyway, want to meet again?????
Love, Amy
The top sheet held a mercuric and disinfectant smell, not at all pleasing, as Amy read the letter hidden beneath it. Though the water still ran, she felt fearful of Billy Walter suddenly coming in and asking what she was doing. More clearly, she saw how shabby the letter was, with all its inane flip question marks. And it reeked with the confidence that, summoned, Jeff would come. He had not thought it worthy even of a fresh reply and had merely scrawled an answer on the bottom.
This letter is the only stupid thing you’ve ever done, Amy. That’s because you wrote it out of your head and not from your heart. And this one is the one I never meant to write. I never intended to fall in love with you when all this began. I took you in only to shape you into what you wanted to be. But yours is the girl-woman face and figure I see when I close my eyes. No, I won’t meet you again, for a ghost would be between us, as now I think when you are with him a ghost is between you, whether he knows it or not.
Billy Walter, roughly toweling his head, came out flinging water drops like a dog shaking rain. “You look like a mouse burrowing in your purse. What’s always in them so important to women?”
“Things to hide behind mainly,” she said, smiling. “The face you see isn’t really me. It’s made up. I don’t think you realize that.”
“It’s good-looking. That’s what counts,” he said.
“And I carry mad money. I’m always afraid someone will go off and leave me.”
“I’m going to now, to get ice,” he said. “I need a little hair of last night’s dog.”
With his usual alacrity, Billy Walter was dressed. He seemed never hampered by buttons or zippers as other people were. Things went smoothly for him, and Amy looked at him in faint surprise. With a cardboard container, he started for the door. “If you go out without a coat and your hair wet, you’ll get a cold,” she said unexpectedly.
He came back with a thoughtful air, his eyes on her. He gave his head one more swipe with a towel before putting on his coat. “Nice to be taken care of in more ways than one,” he said.
She felt shyer under his look and said, “Well, you would.”
The door banged behind him. His matter-of-fact footsteps disappeared with a crunching sound on the cold pavement outside. The bathroom looked as if a child had been there bathing. Only toys left behind were missing. All the towels but a small one had been used and left in damp huddles on the floor. He might have attempted to mop up water with them. Spray was left running down one wall, the shower curtain hung out, dripping. Amy went about instinctively, and happy to do it, cleaning up. Cold water splashed repeatedly onto her face left her, momentarily, while bent over the basin, with blank thoughts. If she was thinking anything, she thought fondly of Billy Walter. In his way, he needed someone after all, she had considered.
She lifted her face and searched for the one dry towel, at the moment of a terrific impact against the side of the building. Immediately, Amy’s thoughts raced around between earthquakes and explosions and fallen airplanes. The Sheetrock wall had bent inward, the blow enough to give the shower stall’s tin sides a slight ringing. Struck still, she might have been holding the towel to her mouth to silence her own terror. Once the impact was over, the area’s normal silence seemed ominous. Standing on the closed toilet cover, Amy could see out the tiny window, set
close toward the ceiling.
“Man,” a voice had said beneath the window, then repeated the word. “Man.”
Behind the motel was a courtyard of cinders, and its dim outlines, its contents, were revealed by light flooding out from the kitchen. There, the door was open, with a stocky white man filling it. In the courtyard, three other men tussling had disarranged the even rows of garbage cans. Now, a lid clattered and rolled off like a tire. She could see they were Negroes. Evidently, they had fallen, as one body, against the side of the building by her room. Bending and swaying and groaning now, they seemed engaged in some tortuous form of calisthenics.
Two of the men had pinned back the arms of the third. He was straining back toward the kitchen, where the white man still silently observed. Behind him, visible as a shoulder, part of a face, the rest of the kitchen help watched, awed and quiet. The Negro, with his arms held back, was shepherded past Amy’s window, toward the end of the building.
“He going to kill you,” a voice whispered by Amy’s window.
At the end of the building, having shoved the smaller man around it, they seemed figuratively to dust their hands before lightly running back to the kitchen. In the light from her window, Amy had seen that the pinioned man had blood streaming down his face. When the two men entered the kitchen, the white man closed the door and the courtyard was left to bleak darkness. Indecisively, but then with more determination, Amy grabbed the one half-dry towel off the rack. While she had stood there, almost clinging to the window ledge by her fingertips, the sound of their feet on the cinders had been haunting. A whiff of something remembered and not immediately placed was insistent. As she came into the next room and dressed, the sound, like a reprise in music, returned at intervals—while she fastened her stockings, stepped inside her skirt, considered there was not time for her sweater and only put on her coat. Behind the house where they had lived when she was small had been a great trellis of roses and a narrow cindered alley. In it, wild sunflowers had grown, enormously beyond her head. And there, in rooms attached to or atop garages, Negroes had lived. On hot Sunday afternoons and evenings, they sat outside for air. Amy had become gradually aware that their conversations or laughter ceased whenever white children, who cut through or played in the alley, passed by. She had realized finally that the alley was the entranceway to their houses and was their only yard, and that she had been a trespasser on these, even though the city owned the land. All her sympathy had gone toward the Negroes and yet alone and meeting a colored man, she had fled in terror. The exact reason had been nameless, but feeling received from white grownups had made her instinct sure. Her feet running, the slow steps of the alleyway’s occupants going to and from home, had come to her again, looking out the motel window.
The Wintering Page 33
