by Jane Rule
“I think so. Well, I haven’t seen Dina.”
“She’s not coming,” Rosemary said.”
“Why not?” Cole asked, obviously disappointed.
“She didn’t say,” Rosemary answered. “You’d better come sit down, Agate.”
“Yes, go ahead,” Cole said. “I’ll just wait a few more minutes and be along.”
Ida Setworth, resting a moment from a strained conversation with old Judge Howard, who was deaf, watched Agate and Rosemary come round the house. Anyone next to Agate would fall in the shadow of life. She had the height and carriage to make the size of her belly somehow marvelous, and those golden eyes in her golden face were remarkable. Beside her, Rosemary did not have even an attendant charm. She looked tired, ill, old. Even Harriet, who was walking over to greet them, seemed young and pretty next to Rosemary, though there couldn’t be many years’ difference.
“Are you being looked after, Miss Setworth?” Peter asked.
“Yes, thank you. I was just thinking how pretty Harriet looks today.”
“Yes, doesn’t she?” Peter sat down next to Ida, wishing there were something he could say or do, understanding that there was not.
“Was Dina invited?” Ida asked, watching Rosemary.
“Oh yes,” Peter said. “She was on everyone’s list. I don’t see her though. That’s odd.”
Rosemary was greeting Amelia. “I’m sorry I was late. It’s a wonderful thing to see this garden full of people again. Nothing could have made Harriet happier.”
“She’s a happy sort of person,” Amelia said with approval.
Rosemary smiled, but the sweat gathered at her hairline, one drop quickly escaping past her ear. She reached for a handkerchief.
“Just the heat?” Amelia asked, concerned.
“No,” Rosemary said with a wry smile.
“I hope you’re getting pills then. The blessing nowadays is that you don’t have to be that uncomfortable.”
Cole came up to Amelia and Rosemary. “I phoned Dina. She’s just sitting in the shop. I told her to lock up and come along.”
I hope she said she would,” Amelia said.
“She said she’d see.”
“Excuse me,” Rosemary said. “I must speak to Ida.”
Cole glanced at her with alert uncertainty as she left. “Anything wrong?”
“No, dear,” Amelia said. “Nothing but change of life.”
Cole knew he was blushing and hated it. He was not embarrassed, He was irritated. It seemed to him that women always had some urgently important physiological excuse for everything from sweating to slander. He just had to stand, humiliated, in the tics and twinges of his own system, without periods, pregnancies, changes to excuse his terrors. It wasn’t fair.
Across the lawn Peter stood as Rosemary approached, easy in his manners, which was what Cole had first envied and admired in him. A kind invulnerability. Fake. Cole could have forgiven Peter even that. Or thought he could. It was Peter’s apparent ability to cover the whole thing up that made Cole angry. He had even somehow been able to influence Feller and Grace Hill so that statements were retracted or at least never made public. And now, to ensure his safety, he was marrying Harriet. Perhaps that was why Dina had not come. She had helped to whitewash him herself, but she obviously couldn’t stomach this final step of correction. Cole’s indignation only faltered at what should have happened instead. He didn’t want Peter humiliated, fired, or jailed. It wasn’t that. He wanted only some sign, some gesture … of guilt? If Peter was guilty, admitted his guilt, the burden of Cole’s own fantasy guilts would be more bearable, or at least he thought so. Was that the temptation he had had to read Cousin B’s diaries? If even such a woman as that could be shown to have a nervous stomach or secret lust, life might be easier. But Cole didn’t want communal shame, even with its comforts. That’s what he had struck out against: the unbearable, easy, desired knowledge of Grace Hill’s announcement. Still, he hated Peter’s way out, and he was ashamed of Dina a little, too. Why did she have to go even so far as to pretend she believed nothing was wrong?
“Cole?”
“Yes, Harriet,” he answered out of his distraction, embarrassed again.
“Are you all right?”
“All right? Yes, yes, I’m fine.”
“I feel as if I’d lost track of you this summer,” Harriet said.
Cole, against his resolves, began to stammer the old excuses.
“Yes, I know,” Harriet said. “I understand. But it isn’t just that, is it? You know, Peter would very much like to talk with you and he simply hasn’t had a chance. Don’t wait too long to let him, will you? He cares a great deal about you, and he wouldn’t want some sort of misunderstanding to settle between you.”
“Peter hasn’t anything to explain to me,” Cole said, in a confused sense of loyalty and fear.
“I think he does. I know he wants to. Sometime give him a chance.”
She had to turn away then to speak with Feller and Grace Hill, who were leaving after what Feller considered a decent interval. He wondered, as he walked back around the house with his wife and Harriet Jameson, if it would be more difficult for him or for Grace to admit that it had been a pleasant hour. They had made such a habit over the years of having no such thing to admit.
Harriet, leading the way, was the first to encounter Dina, standing uncertainly in the front drive in a violet linen dress.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Dina,” Harriet said. “Do you know the Hills? Of course you do. Everyone knows everyone.”
“I didn’t know you owned a dress,” Grace Hill said.
“We haven’t really met,” Feller said quickly. “Peter tells me you’re as interested as I am in the downtown development plan he’s working on.”
“Yes,” Dina said.
“When it gets to the talking stage, I hope you’ll come over to the house one evening. A thing of this sort profits by some off-the-record discussion early on.”
I’d like to.”
“Good,” Feller said, turning Grace firmly toward their car. “Thank you again, Harriet. You know how pleased we are for you both.”
Harriet, embarrassed by Grace Hill, though her own surprise at Dina’s dress was acute, waved them off quickly and walked with Dina back into the garden.
“I didn’t know you were interested in real estate.”
“I have a piece of property next to Mr. Hill’s… parking lot.”
“How interesting.”
“It could be,” Dina said, her senses suddenly distracted by the roses.
At the edge of the lawn she hesitated, trying to collect the reasons for her so recently changed resolution, for she really had had no intention of being here. What she hadn’t realized was that she should then have refused. Cole’s phone call was a rebuke which she accepted. She did not want to offend Miss A or Peter Fallidon or Harriet Jameson, no matter how awkward her position would be. So she had put on the dress she had bought so long ago to meet Peter, and here she was, faced with this gathering of friends to celebrate an engagement she did not pretend to understand, and she was simply, genuinely frightened.
“Dina!” Peter called and crossed to her.
Cole saw her at the same moment, and even Peter’s intention of greeting her could not postpone his own.
“That woman is Dina Pyros?” Agate asked, near Miss A to see that she was all right and to take some rest herself.
“Yes,” Amelia answered.
“I thought she was supposed to be some sort of character in boots and trousers.”
“Today she’s a guest,” Amelia said, not quite taking in the significance of her own remark.
Rosemary, still sitting with Ida, looked down at her own hands.
“It’s silly to say I wouldn’t have recognized her,” Ida said. “Hadn’t you better join her? She may need you.”
But Dina already had the company of Cole, Peter, and Harriet as she crossed the lawn to greet Miss A. A stranger, observing
the party, might even have supposed that this was finally the guest of honor not only from the attention given her but from her own manner, dignified and careful in the unaccustomed clothes, in her fear.
It was Cole who remembered to introduce Agate, out of his guilt at never having taken her to either George’s or Nick’s. Dina greeted the very pregnant and handsome young Agate with honoring and distant envy which seemed nothing more than kindness to those around them. Agate, who refused to feel awed by anyone, stood for a shy moment and then excused herself to go into the house.
Rosemary, watching Agate leave, saw her own excuse.
“I wonder if she’s all right.”
Ida no more than nodded to Rosemary’s departure. Since it was so rarely possible to care for whom one cared about, it was fortunate that there were always a number of substitutes. Ida did not have to move for anyone. Then she saw that Maud Montgomery was also sitting by herself in the shade. Ida raised herself up and walked over to her old friend.
“Don’t you think it’s a little peculiar to invite that young woman to a party of this sort?” Maud asked at once.
“Didn’t you know she’d bought the three parking lots next to the Hill property?” Ida asked.
“She did?”
“Some time ago,” Ida said.
“This town is changing out of all recognition,” Maud said, looking about the garden, familiar to her since childhood, at faces she had known most of their lives if not of hers. “Some things I find it better simply not to tell Arthur.”
“How is Arthur?” Ida asked.
“Are you all right, Agate?”
“In great shape,” Agate answered, out of the way of the caterers in Amelia’s chair in the library, a can of beer beside her.
“It’s hot,” Rosemary said.
“You want one of these?”
“No, I’ve had more than enough punch.”
“It hasn’t anything much in it,” Agate said.
They sat in an easy silence for some time, glad of the cool escape, Agate too preoccupied with physical discomfort to care what happened next, but gradually she was aware of Rosemary’s own distance.
“Is anything the matter with you?” Agate asked.
“Me? No.”
“Who is Dina Pyros anyway?”
“Dina?” Rosemary asked. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Agate said. “The way Cole talked about her, I thought she was a sort of a town character, driving around in a beat-up truck.”
“Yes, well, she’s a furniture dealer… antiques.”
“She’s… enviable,” Agate said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Imagine pulling off that sort of entrance at such a raggedy little party. And she’s got an incredible face. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” Rosemary said. “But so do you.”
“Oh well, so do you, if we’re handing out morale raisers, and neither one of you is pregnant, which is enviable in itself.”
Rosemary didn’t answer.
“Social workers aren’t supposed to go darkly sensitive all of a sudden.”
“Sorry,” Rosemary said, getting up.
“Don’t dash off,” Agate said. “Are you heartbroken over Harriet’s carrying off the handsome bank manager … or what?”
“In ten years or so I suppose people are going to tell you things like that,” Rosemary said, smiling.
“They do now. You’re one of the few cool hold-outs.”
“A bond between us,” Rosemary said.
“You can see my big secret before your very eyes,” Agate said.
“I must go.”
Agate watched her from the window. An odd woman whom she’d come to like against her own first judgment, which was that Rosemary Hopwood was cold. Miss A didn’t like her. No, that wasn’t really true. Rosemary troubled the old lady. Agate didn’t know why. They were saying good-bye now, familiarly affectionate. Then, as Rosemary turned to leave, Dina Tyros moved away from the others and spoke to her, standing curiously close for all the space there was. Rosemary listened, then shook her head without looking up, but Dina walked along with her until they got to the roses.
Across the lawn, the old ones were getting ready to leave. Agate couldn’t let Maud Montgomery out of the garden without another helping hand. She came down the back steps and out into the group just in time to hear Mrs. Montgomery’s parting comment.
“A year ago this wouldn’t have been a surprise, but by now we’d just about given up hope.”
“Thank you,” Harriet said with a smile that was irretrievably sweet.
Cole closed in on Mrs. Montgomery from one side, Agate from the other, and together they jolted her with as much show of accident as they could out of the garden while Amelia and Harriet exchanged amused glances.
“There doesn’t have to be any hope for our generation,” Ida Setworth said. “It’s a good thing there’s so much for yours.”
Peter leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, realizing that from now on until they died he would be kissing these old ladies good-bye as if he had been born to them.
XVIII
AGATE WOKE ALONE IN A dark center of night, thinking at first she had felt pain. She waited. The child in her was so still it might no longer even be alive, a thought so suddenly horrifying that next to it giving birth took on pure value.
“Wake up, little monster,” Agate said softly, shifting her weight, her hands against her belly, and she felt a movement that was not her own. That’s better.”
What had wakened her then? If she was in the beginning of labor, it might be some time before the next pain, spasm, whatever it was. Better to go back to sleep. But she was anxious and alert, as if she had been given some warning. Turning on a light, she sat up awkwardly. Then she waited, as if for some message, sound, sign. Silly. But she wasn’t at all sleepy. Read. There was nothing to read. She had been so tired in these last weeks that she had stopped keeping a book beside her bed. Perhaps she should go downstairs, get a book, or make herself a cup of hot soup. But she might waken Cole, who slept these days as if he were on bomb alert. Not for the first time she regretted burning those last diaries. Just the thing for a time like this: a moth-eaten scandal or two, a high-minded or seedy little confession. No, she didn’t really regret it. Nobody, dead or alive, should pain the world with her invented or real motives, judgments, fears. Enough to have to put up with what people actually did or said. Somebody like Maud Montgomery didn’t need a diary. Had Beatrice Larson, as her sister insisted, been a tactful women? And self-contained? Those mean little diaries used as a harmless dumping ground? Rosemary Hopwood reminded Miss A of Beatrice. Was that why? All that cool good humor being listed like a long, unpaid bill that someone would have to receive in the end. Those were their problems. Agate had her own bill about to come in… somebody’s anyway. She knew what her mother would say: “This is the price of our permissiveness”… no, “trust.” Her father? Surely, even without her help, he would have contrived an elaborate way not to know. He didn’t believe in creditors, particularly if they were his own children. “The woman pays,” Agate said, and snorted. Why think of it like that at all? “Not a debt at all,” Rosemary would have said. “Not a punishment. A responsibility”… but in her view someone else’s, as soon as Agate got on with the job of delivering it. Like milk, or the paper. “I’m the baby girl.” Somebody had put an order out in a bottle at the back door. What time was it? Quarter to three. She turned out the light and lay down again, her body as comfortable as she could expect it to be. Why then was she so wide awake and apprehensive?
“You’re the diary of my misspent youth,” Agate said to her hard house of a belly. “Against the law to get rid of you. Shouldn’t have written you in the first place. A couple of bitches, B and me.”
A boy or a girl? If she was to give it up—and, with reservations, she had decided to—she was not to think about that. People shouldn’t have sex and ego things
about their kids anyway, even keeping them.
It wasn’t a pain. It was a sound. No sound that indistinct could have wakened her, but why should it even now send a shock of adrenalin through her system? This old house cracked and heaved like a dyspeptic sleeper every night. Was Cole up? She strained in listening and heard nothing. Could she recall it? Something being moved.
Agate got out of bed and started to turn on her light, then decided against it. She wasn’t really afraid of burglars, but she was afraid of the sound itself, and, if she was going to locate it, she wanted to be the subject rather than the object of discovery.
In the front upstairs hall there was no sound from Cole’s room, his door closed. Miss A’s door was open, but she often left it so. Agate did not want to turn on the hall light, though it was difficult to see anything. If she could just look into the room, check Miss A, perhaps that would be all that was necessary, Passing the open bathroom door, Agate nearly tripped on the old slippered foot, extended into the dark hall. A scream died in her chest. Fallen. The old lady had fallen.
“Miss A?” she called softly, as she reached around to turn on the bathroom light.
Amelia Larson, lying on her back, stirred.
“Miss A?”
Her eyes opened, and she said something very softly. Agate knelt down beside her with hardly space for her bulk of body between where Miss A lay and the tub.
“I’ve fallen,” Amelia said again.
“How long have you been here?” Agate asked, a stupid question, which Amelia didn’t try to answer. “It’s all right. You’ll be all right.”
Agate wanted to lift Amelia Larson into her arms, but even if she had been able to, she had the sense to know she must not move her. Could she at least put something under Miss A’s head? Better not. Cover her. That she could do. Why hadn’t Cole awakened?
“Cole! Cole!”
His door opened and he stood blind with sleep, staring at her.
“Miss A’s fallen in the bathroom. Call the doctor. Call an ambulance.”
He pressed his forehead, brushing the fine hair away, and then simply nodded.
“You can phone from her room,” Agate said sharply, as he started down the stairs.
