Home from the Hill

by William Humphrey

  42

  Libby was miserable at college, and missing Theron was only one of the reasons. She had never been away from home before, and the guilt she felt over her deception of them made her more homesick for her parents than ever. She did not make friends with other girls easily, at best, and the girls in her dormitory, envious at once of her looks, were piqued by her manner and by her steady refusal of dates with boys who had never asked many of them. She haunted the mail table in the social room; when a letter for her did arrive she disappeared with it. The other girls attributed her privacy to conceit and held it against her that she took no one into her confidence.

  Her grades shamed her, but her heart was not in her studies, and to tell herself that her father had sent her there not so much to learn as to get her away from home did not allay the guilt she felt over the waste of his money.

  Theron’s letters, of which she had just two, were no comfort. Awkward, stiff, embarrassed, formal, with never a breath of what was between them, they were not only unsatisfactory in themselves, but constrained hers in reply, pent up in her the love she needed to lavish upon him. They reawoke the sense that had come to her that night that the whole thing had never happened.

  And so, friendless, lonely, homesick, when she discovered that she was pregnant, fear left no place in her thoughts for shame or for anything else. She was panicstricken. Even her roommate noticed and asked what troubled her. Fortunately their intimacy was only a polite pretence, and she felt no call to make her excuses very elaborate. Her impulse was to pack at once and go home. But home was just the place she could not go.

  Perhaps she was mistaken. She waited. She attended classes, did her assignments mechanically, received letters from home that in their very inconsequentiality accused her unbearably, and one letter from Theron that in its ignorance irritated and angered her.

  But it was Libby’s nature to cease fighting a thing as soon as she saw that it was inevitable, to save her strength for things over which there was some chance she might prevail. So that by the time there could no longer be any hope, any doubt, she had already begun to resign herself and to take calmer stock of her situation. Was it so bad, after all? In fact, the initial, instinctive fear past, she wondered what had been wrong with her thinking—in fact, wasn’t it the very best thing that could have happened? Now her father would have to drop his objections to Theron. She was truly his now. It was his child she carried, the boy’s who loved her, whom she had loved then, loved more than ever now. Be ashamed of that?

  She was a woman. She felt superior to the girls in the dorm, the same whose innocence had shamed her only a few days before. School seemed childish, her presence there unreal. She packed and left on the morning train.

  On the train she felt that she was coming home to him. She had misgivings, moments when she thought how terribly young they both were for this, moments, even, when she doubted him, moments when remembering that night she imagined herself again lying in the darkness waiting for the words that never came. But it was daylight now, and the old train lumbered on and the landscape became more familiar and the more familiar it became the more steadily her confidence ran.

  It was when she reached the foot of her street that she began to waver a little. It had been dark for some time now, and she wished she had phoned ahead—at least had chosen a less dramatic hour of the day to arrive unexpectedly. She had walked from the depot, and her suitcase and portable typewriter had grown heavy. At the foot of her street she set them down to rest her arms, and counted the lights of the houses up the street until she came to the lights of her house. She tried to imagine what her parents were doing at that moment; each possibility conjured up a tranquil domestic scene upon which her sudden descent from out of the night would be a shock. And if her mere coming would be a shock, how much more shocking the reason for her unannounced arrival. She picked up her things and commenced walking, and she began to anticipate the actual scene of confiding her condition to her mother.

  In the past few days she had not forgotten that there were obstacles yet to be overcome, and so she had chided herself whenever her daydreaming had got over-detailed. Still it had seemed only sensible to begin a little planning, and she had thought much of her own home, her own family soon to be. Thus she had come to forget the necessity of this first meeting; whenever she had reminded herself of it, the pain had given way to assurance, the shame had disappeared altogether, and she had seen herself as the strong one, lending her mother comfort and strength. And she would be the one to tell her father; she was stronger and could do it better than her mother. But now as she trudged up the old street, familiar even in the dark, along which she had come home from high school, from grammar school, with each step nearer the light she was guided by, the sense of confident young womanhood deserted her and she began to feel herself her parents’ daughter again.

  She opened the gate and listened to its familiar creak. A problem then came into her mind that seemed to magnify with each step she took up the walk: should she just walk in or should she ring the doorbell? She felt somehow a stranger, obliged to ring, felt she had no right now, for she was not alone, to make herself so at home as just to open the door and walk in. She rang. She could not see them, but she imagined them in their customary armchairs, her father in his old run-over slippers, reading his newspaper, her mother sewing, could see them look up at the sound of the ring, as they always did, and say, or say by a mutual lifting of brows, “Now who could that be, do you suppose?” She thought what quiet lives her parents led; visitors, she thought, must be a rarity now that she was not at home and boys no longer came to call. She remembered how she had so often disenthroned her father from his favorite chair for parlor dates in what suddenly seemed a lifetime ago. And for a fleeting second, before the door was opened, those old carefree times of parlor dates with a different boy each night rose up, a powerful and attractive memory, inside her.

  It was her mother who came to the door. Libby looked down and saw her luggage and felt that the scene was horribly trite and ugly, the daughter returning home by night carrying her bags and her burden, met at the door by her mother. Her mother had her reading glasses on her forehead. She peered into the darkness, which Libby was reluctant to quit, waiting for her dilated eyes to focus. “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Why,” said Libby, stepping forward, “don’t you know your own daughter?” Instantly it seemed a false note and she wished she had not said that, not for a moment established any false cheerfulness that would have to be retracted, that would make what had to come still more of a shock.

  “Libby! Why, come in this house, child! Why on earth didn’t you let us know?”

  Her mother’s unthinking joy at seeing her did more than anything yet to unnerve her. And yet, she thought, looking at her simple face, her weak eyes, she could handle her mother. But that thought ceased instantly to be any comfort; it was just that, knowing her mother’s trust in her, her easy forgiveness of all the past, smaller worries she had brought her, the knowledge of how easily she could handle her mother, that shamed Libby now, made loom larger still what so short a time ago had seemed such a simple matter.

  “Why, it’s our own Libby, that’s who,” her mother called over her shoulder into the living room. “And looking prettier than ever, though I say it who shouldn’t.”

  At that moment her father appeared in the hall, peering around the doorjamb, carrying his newspaper, wearing his old slippers, just as she had imagined. The sight of those slippers, the unsuspecting comfort they symbolized and which she was about to destroy, made them a reproach to her.

  “Well!” said her father, trying to smile. He came forward, automatically offering his cheek to be kissed. She could not kiss him. She made a fuss over putting down her bags, so as to seem too occupied. It was obvious that he was alarmed, and once her father took alarm he was instantly panicked. He hesitated to ask what had brought her home. Then he said, “Nothing wrong at school, I hope.” It was what anyone would h
ave said, but not the way anyone else in the world would have said it. Something was wrong, his tone said; he just knew it, something terrible, something he was not going to be able to stand. “Quick, tell me I’m wrong,” it pled. Her father was a fearful, apprehensive, a delicate man: she had forgotten that, hadn’t she?

  It was only a moment that the three of them stood together in the hallway while his question hung in the air, but that moment undid Libby. She looked from her father’s apprehensive face to her mother’s bland and unsuspecting one, and she broke down. Gone now were her confidence and maturity and that defiance which once, thinking of her father’s reaction, she had possessed abundantly. She had determined then that she would not take much shaming from him, that her own sense of shame was sufficient unto the deed. She had felt strengthened then in the knowledge that she was less wicked than her father would think. She had given herself to the boy she loved and who loved her, and that made all the difference. Her own knowledge of that was enough, she had said then; in fact, it had been a source of strength that only she knew, and she had vowed jealously to refuse to justify herself. She had determined to let her father think what he would; indeed, to judge him by what he chose to think. Against those who chose to think the worst, it was better not to defend yourself. Those who thought the worst stood self-accused. But now it was no longer a question of whether she was less wicked than they thought, whether she had had her justification. All that counted now was that she had done something they could never understand, which they might forgive—and that was an intolerable reproach—but could never think anything but wrong. She had broken their hearts. She had dug their graves.

  Mr. Halstead knew that something was wrong, which is to say, he knew—try as he might to keep from admitting it to himself—knew precisely what was wrong. His misgivings about his daughter ran in just one groove (he thought—one amongst the welter of his thoughts—how pretty, how desirable she looked even now), and he felt an instantaneous conviction, felt a shrinking sensation, a kind of flinch of his whole being—that dreadful moment which comes just before the confirmation of worst fears. He heard a voice inside himself say quite quietly, “It has come.” He had had moments before in his life of sensing that the dread of a thing was a standing invitation to it, and now there came to him a sense of grotesque self-discovery and of a law, going beyond, including his own case, an understanding that the thing you have lived in fear of is the very thing for which you have lived. It had an appropriateness that was almost satisfying, and in those moments when illuminations flickered about him fast as summer lightning, he saw in one flash how silly and wasteful, and even mocking, it would have been if after all the effort he had spent avoiding this one, some other perfectly irrelevant and unprepared-for catastrophe had come knocking at his door. What could have happened to him but this?

  Her mother made a step towards her and Libby made a move to fling herself upon her breast. Then she caught herself. She had no right. She turned and buried her face in her arm upon the newel post and sobbed.

  She had determined before that when they were married, then her father would know that Theron had been the boy. He could suspect it all he wanted to before, she would not tell him. He hated Theron enough already, and though she could not quite see her father getting out a shotgun, she did not want him armed or unarmed going to call on her lover and making a scene. It never occurred to her to try to divert his suspicions from Theron, however; only to refuse to confirm them. And it never occurred to her that he might suspect anyone else. Now her contrition—plus one other consideration—completely diverted Mr. Halstead’s suspicions. Had she seemed unrepentant, as she had planned, resolute, defiant, then he might have known. But now he remembered his recent encounter with the Captain—three months after he had turned Theron out, and he interpreted it as evidence of his success in getting rid of that boy. And Mr. Halstead was a fatalist, like all country men, and he had (though he had this once, O Lord, forgotten it) a country man’s fear and mistrust of cities and city men. He was dumbstruck, appalled, at how he had failed to heed those two most fundamental articles of his creed. He had packed her off to get her out of the way of the Hunnicutt boy, and she had come back like this. He had found her about to be struck by a snake, had snatched her up and heaved a sigh of relief and congratulated himself and set her down again—in the middle of the nest. He was utterly incredulous, yet utterly convinced. It would be this way.

  And yet it was as though he had formed not a single dire conjecture, as though he had had nothing but hope; the confirmation was as much of a blow, maybe more, than if no suspicion had crossed his mind, to hear her say (bluntly, because neither had asked, and she could not stand her mother’s trusting silence, her father’s fearful hush): “I’m going to have a baby.”

  43

  What made poor Mr. Halstead’s situation positively maddening was the consciousness, even to such an unphilosophical mind as his, of how very near it approached to comedy. To the figure he now cut—small-town father of the girl undone by the city slicker—there attached a tradition of jokes and comic songs. This very thing influenced his determination not to force Libby to name the fellow, though mostly it was because he had a horror of hearing the name upon her lips. It was no situation in which to hang back out of fear of looking foolish; but even if he had known, there was nothing he could do. He would have been laughed away, a figure of fun, the outraged father up from the country, if he went up to the college town and hunted out the fellow and demanded that he make an honest woman of his daughter. Libby’s fate at the hands of one of them had given him an image of the typical college man that cowed and dispirited him—oh, why had he not formed it earlier! It was of a rakish, well-dressed, athletic young buck, tennis racket or a golf club in his hand, foot upon the running-board of his latest white roadster, a creature altogether out of his class, against whose money and worldliness and proud cruelty he would have been helpless, whom he would not have known how to combat any more than his poor girl had known. He could just see the fellow insolently smiling, could hear his laughter and that of his friends following as he stole away, defeated and humiliated.

  But all this was nothing to the humor that inhered in his being of all fathers the one to whom this thing had happened, he, whose vigilance over his daughter had amounted to a mania in itself comic. That it should happen to him! The mind rejected it—the irony was too obvious; the aesthetic sense repudiated it—it was altogether too fitting, too direct a reversal.

  Mr. Halstead’s whole soul rejected it, and that sustained him for the moment. Nor was he without other resources. His wife clearly looked to him to manage the problem completely, and this gave a much-needed lift to Mr. Halstead’s self-esteem. Just how he was to justify her confidence had yet to be thought out, but one thing was settled: the problem was his, to do with as he in his wisdom determined. Silencing his wife when she broke into rather conventional reproaches against Libby had established his dominion; indeed, his wife appeared grateful at being relieved of the role of disappointed parent. She had no principles anyhow but what she had picked up, and only wanted to be told to by him to forgive her daughter and only child for anything. At the moment they were upstairs crying together; he could hear them, and could hear his wife trying to mute them both, so he could think.

  What he was to do, then, was the thing to which he must give his mind. But his mind had a way of its own, and kept returning to what he had done.

  Without knowing it, for he had not consciously thought of him at all, Mr. Halstead had completely reversed his opinion of Theron Hunnicutt. In fact, he had gone as far in the opposite direction as before he had gone in thinking him a menace to the town’s young womanhood. His upright figure, cloaked in small-town virtues, open-collared, direct, frank, level-gazing, had silently stolen into Mr. Halstead’s mind and taken up a stand alongside the image of Libby’s seducer. Now it made its presence known, and Mr. Halstead groaned aloud at the monstrous mistake he had made. A thought traitorous to this
mood suggested that nothing had happened to make him change his estimate of that boy. Mr. Halstead spurned that thought. He would meet squarely every reproach he had coming to him. Wasn’t the honorableness of Theron’s intentions attested to by the fact that three months afterwards he was still in love with Libby—so much so that his father had tried to intercede for him? He had done that boy an intolerable injustice. It was for this that he was being punished. He being punished? He was not being punished—unless it was with the knowledge that his innocent daughter must pay for the rest of her life for his wrong.

  And if he was mistaken now, if the Hunnicutt boy’s intentions had not been good, and if he had been the one to have got her into this fix, still the situation would have been better. For with her unknown seducer he had no chance; with Theron in that place he would at least have been able to fight on home ground. Theron could have been brought to marry her. That boy had a sense of decency; you could tell it by looking. His father had that, no matter what else he might be. His mother, too, came of a solid, old family with a tradition of doing the right thing. Oh, the incredible folly of what he had done!

  But the question was, what was he to do now? He had never had anything to conceal in his life. He knew now the horror of that old saying that in a small town everybody knows all about everybody else’s business. How long would it be before everyone knew? He had been too embarrassed to ask Libby how far gone she was. Surely it was not long. Surely she had not done it in the very first week she was out of sight of home. No matter when, every day counted if …