I Want to Go Home

by Frances Lockridge

  “We all do,” Meredith said. “And—nobody can find her last letter, which gave her new address. Lockwood’s got people trying to find her. An agency or something.”

  “So she doesn’t know?” the doctor said.

  “She doesn’t know,” Frederick Meredith agreed. “Unless Lockwood’s got in touch with her since yesterday. Would it make any difference?”

  “If Mrs. Phillips got here?” the doctor said. “No—no difference. It would make your step-mother happier. That’s all the difference.”

  “She’d know her?”

  “Now she would, certainly,” Dr. Hardy said. “Probably tomorrow—probably two or three days from now. Quite possibly up to the end. There’s no real telling. The old lady’s mind’s all right. Chances are it will remain all right. But if you get in touch with Mrs. Phillips, tell her to come by air.”

  “We will,” Meredith said. “But—she doesn’t like planes. Her husband got killed in a plane. Taking off from his carrier, or something. Just dived. Something wrong with the plane. Right afterward, I know, she—well, you can see how she’d feel.”

  “Do myself,” the doctor said. “However—”

  He stood up.

  “There’s nothing much to do, Mr. Meredith,” he said. “The nurses keep her comfortable. She’s not in pain. Just tired, poor lady. Tired to death.” He looked at Meredith. “There are a lot of worse ways,” he said. “She’s had a life.” He hesitated over something else. “Quite a person, your step-mother,” he said, then. He went toward the door. “I’ll come in in the morning,” he said. “Don’t let people tire her. Or excite her too much. Not much strength left in her heart, you know. Just let her rest.”

  “Of course,” Meredith said. He walked after the doctor toward the door. “If we should hear from Jane? Mrs. Phillips? If she’s coming? Would it be better to wait until she’s actually here? Because mother would be excited, of course and—eager. Impatient.”

  The doctor stopped. He stood for a moment, looking at nothing. “I’d wait, anyway,” he said then. “I mean—if she were coming tomorrow, I’d tell your mother today. But if she’s coming—oh, Monday, say, tell her Sunday. See what I mean? When it’s sure and—close. So she doesn’t get in a dither—imagine things. She’s remarkably fond of the girl, I imagine?”

  “Yes,” Meredith said. “Oh yes. Feels more like a mother than a great-aunt, I’ve thought. No children of her own, you know. And Jane grew up here. There’s a very close tie. Used to be, anyway.”

  The last few words came more slowly. Dr. Hardy looked at him, waited a moment and heard nothing more. He flicked his hand, then, and went down the central corridor of the old house. Outside he turned and looked back at it. What an enormous old box it is, Dr. Hardy thought; what a great stone box. He went on to his car, standing in the warm sun on the driveway. He wished it were a convertible, so that he could put back the top and ride in the sun. He was a little surprised to find he had this wish.

  Back in the study, Frederick Meredith sat down again in the chair under the lamp. He did not, however, return to the Reader’s Digest. Instead he took an envelope from his pocket and slipped from it a single sheet of note paper. “Dear Aunt Susan,” he read, again. “I’ve decided to come home. I’ve suddenly realized—” He read on. “Can’t think of your changing,” he read. “As ever, Jane.” Then he read the postscript. He sat for perhaps a minute after he had finished reading. Then he put the letter back in its envelope, and the envelope back in his pocket. So Jane Phillips could not think of her aunt’s changing. Well, neither can I, Frederick Meredith thought. Neither can I.

  He could reach the telephone without moving. He picked it up and heard his wife’s voice. It was light and quick, as always.

  “—no, I’m afraid not,” Alice Meredith was saying to someone. “There isn’t any change and I suppose it may be any time. So about Tuesday—” Meredith replaced the telephone in its cradle. There was no particular hurry. He lighted a cigar and, when it was going properly, crossed the room to a window and looked out at the shaded lawn. They had let the old oak grow too much as it chose, he thought. Some of those lower branches should have been cut away long ago, years ago. The house needed light let into it, particularly on this side. Perhaps later—

  He went back to the telephone and was in time to hear somebody—Mrs. Conover, he thought—say, “well, you know how we all feel, Alice” and then the click of a replaced receiver. In an instant, there was the second, louder click when Alice Meredith hung up on the extension. Meredith waited a few seconds longer and then got the dial tone. He dialed the operator and asked for a New York number. He heard the call go along its relay; he heard the distant summons; he heard a detached, feminine voice say, “Lockwood and Blaine, good afternoon.” Another feminine voice, less detached, more responsive, intervened before he heard John Lockwood’s voice.

  “John,” he said. “Have you got any track of Jane?” He listened a moment. “Well, you can call off your hounds,” he said. “She’s written. She’s coming.” He listened again. “The middle of next week,” he said. “From the Coast. Thursday.” He listened once more. “By train,” he said. “Of course, she doesn’t realize there’s any—er—time element. She’s not leaving until Monday.” He listened. “Obviously, John,” he said. “If we decide it’s advisable.” John Lockwood spoke again. “Why don’t you?” Meredith said. “We can talk it over. All of us.” Once more he listened. “I’ll see they are,” he said. “About six, then.” He replaced the receiver. He went out of the study and up the broad stairs to the second floor and down a corridor. His fingers flicked against a door in the polite parody of a knock and then he opened it. Alice Meredith, slight and pretty, managing somehow to look as if the gray in her hair were premature, smiled at him from a chaise by the window, put down a book.

  “What did the doctor—” she said, and did not need to finish. Her husband, very large and solid, shook his head. “Nothing new,” he said. “No change.” He looked down at her. It was one of those days when it was almost impossible to believe that she was forty-seven. “He’s careful, like all doctors,” he said. “I think he expects it to be about a week. Just growing a little weaker, each day.”

  “Poor Susan,” Alice Meredith said. “Poor, dear Susan. She’s always been so alive.”

  She got up from the chaise and put her hand on her husband’s arm. She was light and quick like her voice; she was, Frederick Meredith thought, not a little as Susan Meredith had been thirty-odd years ago. It would be easy, given the name as a starter, to imagine there was a family resemblance. People had imagined that. They had been surprised—some of them had even seemed a little unsettled—to discover that there could be no family resemblance, since there was no family relationship.

  “Jane’s coming,” Meredith said. “She wrote.”

  “No,” Alice said. “Not really. After all these years? Did John—” Again she did not need to finish, and again her husband shook his head.

  “Coincidence,” he said. “She just happened to feel like coming back, apparently. Coming home, she says. She doesn’t know about mother.”

  “She wrote you?” Alice said. “Susan?”

  “Mother,” he said. “Yes. I opened it along with the rest, of course.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I mentioned it to the doctor.” He paused, looking down at her. “Indirectly,” he said. “Not in relation to the letter. Merely if we got in touch, if she started east. He advised against telling mother until just before Jane got here.”

  “Of course,” Alice said. “So wise, I think. Don’t you, dear?”

  She did not seem to expect an answer. She sat down on the chaise and looked up at him.

  “I just called John,” Meredith said. “He’s coming out. This evening, in time for dinner. To—talk things over.”

  She continued to look up at him.

  “It would make a great difference, wouldn’t it?” she said. “For everybody. And dear Susan is st
ill—still quite—what should I say—conscious?”

  “Being of sound mind,” Meredith told her. “Yes, Alice. Entirely of sound mind. Until the end, the doctor thinks.”

  “Of course,” Alice Meredith said. “Of course. About a week, the doctor thinks? And Jane?”

  “Next Thursday,” Meredith said.

  Alice continued to look up at her husband. Her eyes were light blue. They seemed to have a quick alertness of their own. He nodded slowly.

  “Yes, my dear,” he said. “It could make quite a difference, obviously.”

  “To Elliott and Grace,” she said. “To the children. To John.”

  “To everybody,” Frederick Meredith agreed. He crossed the room, stood for a moment looking out of a window—on this side of the house the land was bright—and then turned to look down, again, at his slight, quick, pretty wife. “To everybody,” he repeated. She turned so that she could continue to look up at him.

  “So unexpected,” she said. “So like a lottery, isn’t it, dear? Or a horse race.”

  “A race,” he agreed. “A photo-finish.”

  “Poor dear Elliott,” Alice Meredith said. “Poor Grace. Do they know?”

  He shook his head.

  “Such a surprise,” she said. “Particularly for poor Grace. It would make such a difference. Such a great difference. More than to anybody else. Was there a return address on Jane’s letter?”

  He smiled, the smile remaining on his lips. He nodded.

  “So of course we could wire her,” Alice said. “Tell her how little time there is. It might make all the difference.”

  “Precisely,” Meredith said.

  “But then,” Alice said, “she was so—so upset—about airplanes after George was killed. It would be so difficult for her, wouldn’t it? And the doctor thinks it will be at least a week.”

  “He doesn’t know,” Meredith said. “He makes that very clear. It might be tomorrow. It might be two weeks from tomorrow.”

  “But not longer?”

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  “It’s such a responsibility,” she said. “On you and John. And Elliott, of course. Sometimes it’s so hard to know what to do, isn’t it, dear? I must tell Grace that John’s coming.” She looked at him, seeking advice. “Only that much, I think?” she said. “So she can tell cook? Not that one more will make any difference, but I’m sure cook would like to know.”

  “I think so,” he said. “After all, Grace’ll learn soon enough.”

  “Poor dear Grace,” Alice Meredith said, without any particular grief in her tone. “I’m afraid she’ll be terribly upset, aren’t you, Frederick?”

  He was looking out the window again, and did not answer. Then he said, “Here come the kids. Been swimming, apparently.”

  “At the Conovers’,” Alice Meredith said, and came to stand beside him, looking down at the elderly convertible, top down, in the drive. “Little Susan’s getting so pretty, isn’t she? So very pretty.”

  “All girls of seventeen are pretty,” Meredith said. “Or almost all. You must have been beautiful.”

  “Dear Frederick,” she said. “So sweet. I was, rather.”

  “I wish Arthur looked like you,” he said. “Or, anyway, like something.” He considered. “Even like me,” he said. He regarded the top of his son’s head. “Like almost anybody,” he amplified. “He merely looks like something somebody wadded up.”

  “Frederick!” Alice said. “Your own son!”

  “I suppose so,” Frederick Meredith said, without enthusiasm.

  “Frederick!”

  He laughed and turned to her. She shook her head at him.

  “I’d like to have seen what you looked like at twenty,” she said. “Probably your face was every which way.” She looked down at their son. “Too,” she added. Her face was suddenly serious, remote. “He’s got a wonderful mind, Frederick,” she said. “I’m sure he has. Dear Arthur.”

  He did not reply to that and she did not seem to expect a reply. They watched Susan Lockwood, considerately named for her great-aunt, and Arthur Meredith across the lawn from the car to the house. The girl was very pretty; her short white tennis dress showed most of long brown legs, all of brown arms; she had dark hair—almost black hair—swinging to her shoulders. Walking beside her, moodily, Arthur Meredith appeared immature and unfinished. His long body seemed too extensive, too various, for the muscles which controlled it.

  “Poor dear Arthur,” his mother said. Her next remark seemed unconnected, but neither of them, apparently, found it so. “It would be about three hundred thousand, Frederick?” she said.

  “A little better, probably,” Meredith said. “After taxes.”

  “Dear Aunt Susan,” Alice Meredith said. “So capable. Almost like a man in some things. One is so fond of Susan. And if—if Jane should get here, Frederick, while Susan could still—make changes, you know, it would be only a fraction of that, of course.”

  “Twenty-five thousand,” Meredith said, still looking out the window.

  “Such a difference,” Alice Meredith said. A boy of about twelve, wearing shorts and part of a shirt, came up the driveway. He was swinging a bag at the end of a long loop of cord; he swung it around and around, as if he were about to throw it. “There’s Silas,” Alice Meredith said. “He must have come across lots, bringing their things. Because they wouldn’t let him drive, I suppose.”

  She turned away from the window.

  “Really, I must tell Grace,” she said. “She feels so responsible, always. Dear Grace.” She started toward the door and stopped in the middle of the room. “Taking charge of things for Susan, and Elliott having to commute every day. And to them, of course, it would make even more difference, wouldn’t it?”

  This, apparently, needed no answer. It got none.

  Two

  Susan Lockwood, driving her father from the station in the old convertible, its top down and bouncing aimlessly in disordered folds, saw the 1947 Cadillac in the parking circle and said, “Oh, Uncle John’s here.” Her father said, “Ummm.” She pulled up beside the Cadillac and stopped. She did not immediately move to get out of the Plymouth. She devoted her attention to the Cadillac, regarding it with wide dark eyes. “Um-uh!” she said. “Out of this world, isn’t it, daddy?”

  Elliott Lockwood looked at the long, blue car.

  “Not out of his,” Elliott said, with something like asperity. “Just out of ours, Suze.” Then his brows drew together, making lines in a forehead remarkably smooth for a man of forty-seven. “Wonder what brings him here?” he said. “D’you know, Suze?”

  “I didn’t know he was coming,” Susan Lockwood said. “I don’t know if mother—”

  “Probably not,” Elliott said. “Probably not, Suze. She—” He did not continue.

  “She what, daddy?” Susan said. She opened the door and swung out, brown legs swirling.

  “Nothing,” Elliott said, his tone abstracted. He went on, more or less to himself. “Cousin Frederick. Dear cousin Alice. And now brother John.” He sat for a moment, looking at the blue Cadillac, but seeming to look through it. Then he opened the door on his side of the Plymouth and swung out, almost as quickly as his daughter. He was blond and tall; his fair hair waved a little. He was so much younger looking, Susan thought, than the fathers of any of her friends. A year ago, even six months ago, that apparent youth of his had been something to be proud of. Only recently had that pride, that pleasure, somehow—for some reason which remained inexplicable—seemed to lose its brightness. She had even begun to feel, again very obscurely, a little embarrassed that her father was so much younger looking than the fathers of other girls. So boyish, even.

  “Your great-aunt, Suze,” Elliott Lockwood said, as the girl came around the car toward him. “No change?”

  “Oh no,” Susan said. “I don’t think so, daddy. Cousin Frederick didn’t say anything.” She joined him. “The doctor was here,” she said. “He just stayed about the same time as usual, and we
nt away again.”

  “By God,” her father said, suddenly and with force. “I’ll bet it’s Jane. I’ll bet John’s—” Again he stopped. He looked down at his daughter and smiled at her, at the enquiry in her eyes. “Never mind, Suze,” he said. “Have a good day?” Now his rather high, clear voice was young, too. It was almost as young as his daughter’s.

  “Swimming,” she said. “Tennis. Dad—what about it?”

  “School?” he said. “I don’t know, Suze. It—depends. You know that.”

  “On Aunt Susan,” the girl said. “Daddy—” This time it was she who did not finish. He waited and, after a moment, she looked at him and there was an odd expression in her dark eyes, as if an unfamiliar thought—or realization—had formed itself in the brain behind the eyes. “Skip it,” she said, “It’ll be alright.”

  They went on to the house. Elliott Lockwood went up the stairs two at a time; he opened the door of the room with something like a flourish. His wife was sitting at her dressing table, with the lights on; she was leaning forward toward the mirror and looking at herself. She was a slender woman, but her slenderness was not rounded as was her daughter’s. She separated strands of hair above her ears and found a good deal of gray in the hair. Her face was not so lineless as her husband’s; her lips drew down just perceptibly at the corners and there were little lines between her brows. She did not look around immediately when Elliott came into the room. He walked over, put his hands on her shoulders, drew her back against him. She took little part in this. When he released her she smiled at his reflection, and the smile was only a smile, meaning nothing in particular.

  “So boyish, darling,” she said. “So ardent.”

  There was ridicule in the words, but it was not unfriendly.

  “John’s here, Ell,” she said. “Why?”

  “‘I’ve been working on the railroad,’” he said. “‘All the live-long day.’ You’ve been here. Why? The old girl?”

  “I don’t think so,” Grace Lockwood said. “Even Frederick, even dear Alice, would have mentioned it. Frederick saw the doctor.”