Had she thought, because she moved so much about the earth,

With the One Coin for Fee

Helen R. Hull

Experiment: Four short stories. Coward-McCann, New York (1940), pp.

1-67.

Crossing alone the nighted ferry

With the one coin for fee.

Perhaps to understand the story, you need to understand the setting.

Certainly it contained, in concrete and tangible shape, the forces which

worked to produce the beginning of the story. And without this

particular setting, there never could have been this ending. Perhaps the

extraordinary, sweet, concentrated air which runs under the great dark

wings of a hurricane is in part responsible for the ending; at the very

heart of darkness and destruction is this breath of concentrated life,

burning out too rapidly sluggish blood, toxins of habit and hate and

age. It is exhilarating as any great fear may be, it gives a kind of

intoxication unlike the ordinary earthly forms in that the feeling of

release, of freedom and power, is not an illusion. It may be temporary,

but it is real while it lasts. And one good whiff may well make a man

believe, as it penetrates to cells which had never breathed before, that

the trouble with this world may be that it is keyed down to thin, dull

air.

All that is surmise, but the setting itself is real enough. Some changes

occurred on that day in late September, but up to that day not much had

changed for more than a hundred years. A town in southern New England,

touching the coast and stretching inland a few miles; the town itself

centered about the river, before it spread out to make the head of the

bay, bridges with turntables and draws for the vessels that came up to

the docks, with warehouses and ships’ chandlers’ shops along the docks,

with business streets, a few, at the foot of the hills, and residence

streets climbing the hills; with a mill or two, and factories farther

inland, along the river banks. North of the town lay farming country,

and south of it the widening bay and ocean. Out of the town ran the

shore road, and here macadam had replaced the original road where white

sand poured from the turning rims of wheels; some of the estates had

been cut into building lots for summer cottages; the tip of the western

side of the bay was Grady’s Amusement Park, with bathing pavilions, a

skating rink, a Ferris wheel, and concession stands around the parking

place for the cars which had produced this development.

A few miles out from town, where the shore thrust a finger into the bay,

so that you had the last of the river on one side, and what seemed to be

real ocean on the other, stood the old Lathrop place. The shore drive

cuts across the base of the finger, ceasing to be a shore drive for

several miles. When the drive was put through, there had been some

dickering through an agent with Mrs. Susan Lathrop Field, the last of

the Lathrops, who was abroad at the time, in London, on the Riviera, in

Cairo. She had no sentiment against selling the shore land for the

drive; on the contrary, she had a desire to make good money (which she

no doubt needed!) at the town’s expense. Finally the town council

overrode the one elderly alderman who still felt that the town owed a

great deal to the Lathrop family, and voted to confiscate a right of way

in a convenient straight line across the property, behind the barns and

stables, and through what had been a small training track old Lathrop

had used for his horses. People whizzing past in cars saw only the

weathering out-buildings. In the winter the square bulk of the house

showed through arching branches of the great elms and oaks, with dark

rust stains from hinges of the closed shutters staining the dingy

clapboards, and the two great chimneys, one at each end, standing like

patient lifted ears.

Across from the barns and sheds, and in its season, the house, lay the

rest of the bisected property, fields and woods, and what had originally

been the farmer’s house, a sturdy, story-and-a-half building, like those

you see in Maine and New Hampshire. It stood on a swelling mound of

land, a neat road winding past it to the garage, its paint smooth-white,

its opened shutters sleek and green, the meadow tamed into a lawn under

its charmingly curtained windows. _They_ said that Mrs. Field had had to

come down in her price, when there was no shore land left except that

around the old ark that no one wanted, and almost no one remembered that

Margaret Turner’s father had been the farmer on the Lathrop place. For

Margaret had bought the little house, and she was there, that fall of

nineteen hundred and thirty-eight.

She had spent her summer holidays there even before she bought the

house, and although she had never lied outright about the matter, she

had somehow created for her occasional guest the impression that these

were ancestral acres about her, their original glory damaged by the

wanton stroke of the road through them, by the change in the quality of

the residents along the western shore of the bay. Margaret had not set

about creating this impression. She had said, and it was true, “When my

father set out those trees,” and, “Once the lawns ran to the very edge

of the beach, you can’t imagine how beautiful it was then!” and, “It

would have broken my father’s heart if he had seen what changes—” Her

guests, a girl from the private school where Margaret taught

mathematics, motoring with her mother to their summer place on the Cape,

or two or three of her fellow teachers, skipping about the country in a

polished Ford, stopped on their journey to have tea in Margaret’s

charming living room, with its English chintzes, hooked rugs, pieces of

old mahogany and pine. As they drove away, the girl’s mother might say,

“You can tell that Miss Turner comes from a good family, I’m glad

there’s someone like that in your school,” and the girl might answer,

“Well, I sort of like her, although most of the girls are just

paralyzed! She’s terribly sarcastic.” And the teachers, some of the

younger members of the faculty, who had stopped to boast about their

trip around the Gaspé, would say, “Of course, if you had a place like

that, that had been in your family for generations, you would rather

spend your summer that way. She didn’t seem the least bit stuck up or

cold, did she, when you see her in her own setting?” And when Margaret

sighed as she said, “It would cost too much to put the big house in

shape, or to run it,” she was sighing in all sincerity at a dream of her

young girlhood; she didn’t intend to suggest a picture of herself as

brave and wise, settling into the cottage, earning the money for its

shingles and paint and a part-time handyman and gardener, never

complaining at lost elegance and leisure.

Probably Margaret Turner never examined too closely the impression she

had established about herself and the old Lathrop place. It mattered

little to anyone except herself, and for herself it was like a warm,

dark cloak within the folds of which she could hide the emptiness of her

hands or her heart, a cloak drawn around a self not quite symmetrical

nor firmly fleshed, a trifle warped and withered from meager fare, from

thwartings and overstrain. She hadn’t planned to weave a complete

garment, she had just sketched a line or two of it, she wasn’t entirely

to blame if in mild gossip, casual references, people clothed her thus.

Among the items which no one except Margaret knew were these: she had

spent every cent of her savings (they weren’t much, on her small salary)

including her one insurance policy which had matured when she was sixty,

in buying the house and furnishing it; there was still a small mortgage,

which she meant to pay off before she retired. She understood vaguely

that the school at which she taught did something for its teachers when

they were too old to be of further use. Surely enough to live on—taxes,

coal, a little food. But after 1929 there had been uneasiness among the

older teachers. The endowment of the school was small, the contributions

from alumnae diminished (married women couldn’t expect their husbands to

do much for their wives’ old school, not with the market the way it

was!) and in the need to reduce expenses, there began a weeding out

among the older members of the staff. Margaret Turner held her wiry

figure more erect, had her white hair waved more often, tried a little

rouge under her handsome dark eyes, and moved with an effect of great

vivacity about her work. “You have your own home,” some of them said to

her, “you don’t have to worry. Did you hear about poor old Simmsy? The

trustees cut her pension in half the other day, they don’t know how long

they can continue that pittance, Simmsy isn’t seventy yet and she says

all her folks live to be ninety at least.”

The trustees were sorry, but there was nothing in the bond about

pensions. In prosperous times they could make generous gestures, but

after all, women of intelligence, on regular salaries all those years,

should have some foresight about the future, and since retrenchment was

necessary, it was only fair to keep the younger teachers at work. There

had been a dinner last May, a dinner of farewell to two women who had

been longest with the school. They weren’t older than Margaret, but

their age was on the record because they had started early, and had been

less canny than Margaret. They’d let themselves go a little, too,

Margaret thought, as she sat at the dinner listening to pleasant

speeches from old girls about how much these women had meant to them.

Earmarked as elderly, too comfortable about figure and dress. If she was

careful, she might fool them into keeping her on for a few more years.

After the dinner, in the teachers’ cloak room, one of them, puffing as

she bent to pull on her galoshes, said: “You know, horses have a better

deal. They shoot ’em when they’re through with ’em.” The other, who was

plump and pink and whose good humor was not yet entirely deflated by the

sharp pricking point of fear, said, “There’s one thing sure, we’ll have

good company at the poorhouse. All the best people will be there!”

“Haven’t you relatives?” Margaret had asked. “You used to talk about

your sister’s children—”

“Distant relatives.” She chuckled. “That’s a good phrase. Very distant.

You know, in hard times there’s nothing so distant as a relative.

Self-protection, in case you wanted something. Don’t be funny. No, the

only useful relatives are the kind you have, nice ones who’ve passed on

and left you well fixed.”

She’d like to visit me this summer, thought Margaret; she saw the notion

in the change it made as it crossed the woman’s mind. Nothing so harsh

as calculation, more a quick child-wish, as if she pressed her face,

eyes round, mouth pursed a little, close to a windowpane beyond which

was something longed for. I couldn’t, thought Margaret; I couldn’t stand

having anyone around all the time, I don’t really know her, anyway I

couldn’t afford it, I’ve got to be careful. “Drop in, if you’re in my

neighborhood.” That was it, turn away quickly, you haven’t seen the

entreaty. “I’d be delighted to give you a cup of tea.”

“Well, I don’t know just where—” The porter had knocked on the door

then. Mrs. Montagu, one of the old girls, was waiting; she had her car,

she’d be glad to drive them home, it was raining. Margaret had bade them

good night, good-by, she wasn’t quite ready to go. She wasn’t ready to

be one of the elderly, discarded figures, with Mrs. Montagu, no doubt,

feeling a pleasant glow at her thoughtful kindness to them.

The first of June, Margaret had packed her trunk, and filled a box with

books and pictures, emptying the room in the residence hotel for women

of every sign of her tenancy. Usually she stored the box in the basement

until fall, but this year she sent it by express to her house at the

shore. No one noticed; there was a new management, and the chipper desk

clerk didn’t realize that Miss Turner had lived in the hotel since it

opened. He didn’t even ask if she wished the same room in the fall. At

least, thought Margaret, she wouldn’t regret leaving; the building had

run down. And she didn’t have to explain that she meant to look for a

cheaper room, one where she could prepare her own breakfast, and perhaps

supper. The lunches served at the school were really dinners. If she

could save a little more, if she could count on two more years—if only

they didn’t pare the salaries another ten per cent—

She spent June setting her house in order, waxing each piece of

furniture, watching the warm color, the subtle texture of wood shine out

as the bluish film of wax disappeared under her slow patient rubbing,

polishing the silver, cleaning the rugs. She no longer did much with

gardens, except for weeding around the few perennials. When she stooped

over, black spots moved crazily across her eyes, and the hollows in her

temples throbbed. For a few years after she bought the place, she had

hired a man to help her, but fifty cents an hour was much more than she

needed for her own living. She had a boy from the village come once a

week to cut the grass, and on pleasant days she attacked with clippers

the tufts he had left along the edge of the walk and drive, around the

trees, close to the granite blocks that made the foundation of the

house. In the long June evenings she crossed the highway, looking

carefully in each direction to make sure no car was about to rush at

her, with young voices shrieking or horns screaming; she walked past the

old Lathrop house, looking up at the discolored shutters, she looked

under the pines for lilies of the valley, she had picked them there when

she was a child, they still grew, small sheaths of green enclosing the

staff of tiny, cream bells. She kicked her toe against the unkempt grass

which thrust itself through the old graveled path, she frowned at the

lilac bushes with the straggle of dead branches at the center, with a

few brownish spikes among the heart-shaped leaves where blossoms had

grown neglected in May. It just shows, she said. It just shows! They had

everything to start with, everything, and I had nothing. Now Susan

Lathrop is a ruined old woman with no one to say a good word for her,

and I—her face set in bleak pride—no one has ever had a word to breathe

against me. No hint of the slightest scandal. Although it wasn’t easy,

always—

The grounds in front of the house looked green in the soft twilight,

with the pointed blades of June grass, but as she crossed them, her feet

sank into the matted grayish tangle of old, uncut growth. As Margaret

went toward the shore she thought, I’d like to see Susan Lathrop face to

face, I’d like to ask her—I’d say, how could you do this to yourself,

how could you fall so far? Look at the two of us now, think what you had

then, money, beauty, position, safety, love, oh, most of all, love!

Because of you my brother ran away, and died. He was going to make a

fortune for you in the copper mines, you couldn’t wait! And Lester Field

had begun to love me, when you came home that summer. I was nobody, and

you—you were Susan Lathrop. And now, people respect me! But they snicker

when they speak your name.

Sometime, surely, they would meet, and Margaret would speak out. She

could scarcely have bought her house for this one purpose, she could not

have said why she had such satisfaction in the small perfection of her

own place and the steady disintegration of the large house and its

grounds, but as she thought of Susan she drew in her full upper lip so

that her mouth was thin and hard, and her eyes, under the deep arched

lids, were black-brown, pupil and iris merged in hatred. When she

reached the edge of the land, she would shake herself, thrusting her

hands into the pockets of the leather jacket she wore against the

evening air, she would say, why do I bother with thoughts of her, here’s

this nice sea air to breathe, and even a little sunset left. Sometimes

she sat on the rickety steps of the old bath-house, watching the flat

sand run with opalescence as the tide came slowly, spreading the curving

edge of thin advancing water, withdrawing it, in rhythm which seemed so

hesitant that she was astonished when at last there was water at her

feet. The tide eddied in lines of color about the irregular dark piles

which marked the line of the long pier; the pier itself had cracked up

in winter ice, had been carried away piece by piece. Beyond the tip of

land the water of the outer bay was already darker, its movement shaking

off the reflection of lingering sunset color. Sometimes Margaret walked

through the stiff grass to the outer shore, but not often; the rocks

there scuffed her shoes, the air was colder, and well down the bay the

lights of the amusement park twinkled crazily, like a dissipated,

earthbound constellation. Always when she turned away from the water she

was surprised to find the land so dark, evening already caught around

the old house, under the trees. She would walk more quickly, feeling dew

from the long grass on her ankles, looking to right and left before she

crossed the highway, and sometimes as she waited, while a car roared

past, the glare of the headlights briefly on the great barn, on a bit of

broken paddock fence, she could see, before the thicker darkness settled

again, her brother standing there, his hand on the shining neck of a

restless mare, and beside him Susan Lathrop, her figure like an

hourglass in the dark riding habit of the early nineties, her reddish

gold hair curling under the stiff brim of her hat, her face vivid with

laughter. She was more alive than anyone I ever knew, thought Margaret.

Now she’s a raddled old woman. They say she dyes her hair and paints her

face. After all, I don’t want to see her. It’s been years—

But in July, when Margaret just missed seeing her, she was conscious for

days of her disappointment. It gnawed at her when she woke up at night,

when she lay waiting for seven o’clock to come, so that she had a reason

for getting up. If only she hadn’t been pampering herself, if she had

gone in to the village shopping, if she had been working around the

place, instead of staying in bed! She had caught cold, it had rained so

many days in July that she had grown careless about keeping her feet

dry, she had felt feverish, she had put herself to bed in a small panic.

She couldn’t afford to be sick, she had to keep herself well, she had to

go back to school in the fall. She had, from her ground-floor rear

bedroom, not heard any car drive along the grass-grown gravel road to

the Lathrop house. When her own doorbell had rung, she had lain very

still, waiting for whoever it was to go away. The next day the boy came

to cut the grass; the steady rains made it grow almost faster than he

could run the lawn mower. She listened to him for a while, following him

about the familiar ground by the variations in the noise he made. When

he reached the final square of grass behind the house, she got up,

feeling exactly like an old dishrag; she meant to dress, but the labor

seemed stupendous. She guessed it wouldn’t hurt the boy to see her in a

bathrobe, not after some of the sights he saw at Grady’s beach. But she

took off the net she had tied over her hair, and combed the waves

carefully into place. Even her hair looked sick, limp, flattened to her

small head. She made herself tea and toast, she wrote a list of supplies

for the chain grocery store in the village, they wouldn’t deliver unless

she ordered two dollars worth, but perhaps Sam could bring the things

out for her. Then, with her purse, she went to the kitchen door as Sam

ran the lawn mower into the shed.

“I thought I better cut it today,” he said, “looks like more rain.”

Sure, he’d bring out the groceries, he was going to the rink tonight

anyways. Then he added, “Too bad you wasn’t home yesterday. You sure

missed a treat.” He put the list in the pocket of his blue shirt, and

slid the four quarters into a trouser pocket. “I was at the garage when

she came back, see? They stopped for gas.”

“Who did?” (I’m glad I didn’t answer that doorbell, it must have been

one of the girls from the school.)

“Old Mrs. Field, you know, the one used to live out here. She asked Bill

did he know where you were, and he said he guessed you were home, you

always was. She said you must be dead if you was here, not to hear her

ring. She’s kinda deaf, you have to holler at her, or mebbe it’s her

earrings, they’re big as a traffic light. ‘Who’s living in the

farmhouse?’ she said, ‘and where are they?’ Bill said Miss Turner, and I

guess she’s home. She said, ‘Turner? Turner? I’ve heard that name

somewhere.’ She was sitting up front with the chauffeur, he was a dark

looking fellow, like a dago—”

“Is that all she said? What did she want?”

“The chauffeur said, we can’t hang around here any longer, and he let

the clutch in so hard the old dame bounced back with her hat over one

eye. Honest, Miss Turner, you oughta see her! Dolled up like a mo’om

picture star.”

“What did she want of me?” Margaret’s throat was dry.

“Gee, I don’t know. Bill says just as well you wasn’t home, you wouldn’t

want any truck with that piece of goods.” The boy was grinning a little,

his sandy, immature face touched with slyness, at the recollection of

some male ribaldry he wouldn’t repeat. Margaret could see it, in the way

he glanced at her under his lids, in the way he rubbed a finger against

a spot on his chin. She couldn’t say go on, tell me every word he said,

for all she was parched with thirst for more than this sip of news. She

nodded, her eagerness burning in her cheeks, her silence coaxed the boy.

“It wasn’t even the same fellow she had last time she stopped here. Bill

said he was a light-complected fellow, and anyway his picture was in the

papers, you know, when his wife chased ’em across the country and was

going to shoot him, only Mrs. Field gave her about twenty grand and she

divorced him instead. Bill says boy friends come kinda high at her age,

and what’s she going to do when her money gives out?”

(You shouldn’t stand here gossiping with a village boy! It’s horrid,

undignified.) Margaret could hear the rebuke faintly, as if her usual

decent self, the one she offered to public view, had withdrawn almost

beyond inner earshot. And then, at the queer smirk the boy’s face wore,

she had a quick revulsion, a protest of her sex against the bawdiness at

which she could only guess that must have shouted in Bill’s actual

remarks.

“She has to have a chauffeur,” she said, crisply. “You don’t know—”

“Huh, if you’d heard the way he spoke to her!” But Sam could take a

hint, if Miss Turner didn’t want any more it was okey with him. He stood

away from the door against which he had lounged, he said, “I’ll leave

the groceries when I come by after supper, you send word by the postman

if you want me before next week.” Then he had gone.

Margaret sat down at the table in her quiet kitchen. She poured a cup of

tea, but it had grown luke-warm, and she could not anywhere find energy

to rise, to light the gas under the kettle. Painted, bedizened Jezebel,

she thought. The village loafers making lewd sport of her. Well, Bill

and Sam weren’t exactly loafers, but the idea was the same. She thought

she’d heard the name Turner! Why, she must have lost her mind. Perhaps

that was the explanation. How could she have forgotten—Anger tightened

in Margaret. Perhaps Susan Lathrop had never known we had a family name!

An anger of her childhood, bitter, seeming when she first knew it

entirely futile, and yet serving as a drive through the hard years as

she had struggled upward. “It does you no good to kick against the

station in life you’re born to,” her father used to say to her. “Even

the prayer book tells you that!” Well, she was Miss Turner now to the

village, and Susan Lathrop had turned into _that piece of goods_. For

all Margaret’s father had been Rob, never Mr. Turner, and her brother

had been Bobby as he grew old enough to help his father with the gardens

and horses, and she herself had been Maggie, loathing the name. The

village men spoke of her with respect, she wouldn’t want any truck with

that piece of goods. And Susan, bright, beautiful, vivid Susan—Margaret

pushed her hair away from her forehead, she sat very straight in the

wooden chair. Susan Lathrop hadn’t lost her mind, she’d lost her

character.

Had she thought, because she moved so much about the earth, never

staying long in any place, never in any way settling down, that rumors

of her affairs would never reach as far as her home town? Or hadn’t she

cared, the headstrong, willful pride of the young Susan changed into the

base alloy of arrogance and indifference? But there was no safety in

distance any more, there was no distance any more. Any criminal must

have a harder time now, thought Margaret. Why, when I was a girl, Boston

seemed a long journey from here, or New York, people went there and the

miles between were a cloak behind which they could hide. No one knew

you. Rumor went on foot then, now it leaps at the turn of a dial, it

shouts from the front page of a tabloid almost before the deed shouted

has taken place. Margaret had saved the papers—more than a year ago, it

was—although she meant to burn them. Deserted wife pursues mate across

country, charges alienation of affection, says Mrs. Susan Lathrop Field

made gifts of jewelry and money to handsome young Bullett, tempted him.

Pictures of Susan, of Bullett, of deserted wife, of tiny tots weeping

for father to come home. “She lured him by luxury,” says wife, “until he

was no longer content with our humble home.” Pictures of Mrs. Field’s

villa at Cannes, of her twenty-two-room cottage at Bar Harbor. And

later, picture of injured wife, handkerchief to her eyes, check in her

hand. Fifty-thousand-dollar balm, said the headline. “Money does not

replace him, but I must think of my kiddies,” says wife. Twenty

thousand, they said in the village. Whatever it was, before the end of

the summer the village had the end of that story. George Carter, who ran

the village barber shop, and his wife Ella, who had the beauty parlor in

the room back of the barber shop, took a two weeks’ vacation touring the

East; George wanted to borrow his brother’s trailer, but Ella said no,

she wanted a real vacation, and they had stopped at over-night camps all

the way to Canada and back. Since George’s father and his grandfather

before him had worked in the Lathrop factory, where Susan’s money came

from, it was only natural for the Carters to make Bar Harbor one of

their stops. They drove past the twenty-two-room cottage, and Ella asked

which was the most exclusive beauty shop, and went there for a manicure.

She felt she owed it to her customers to pick up what hints about the

trade she could. She didn’t have her hair done, as they wouldn’t give

her a trade discount, even when she showed them one of her printed

cards. But a manicure gives a better chance for looking around and

talking. As soon as the operator found out she was from Eastbourne, she

opened right up. (Ella herself had opened up as she set the wave in

Margaret’s hair.) Susan Field was one of their steady customers.

Facials, mudpacks, henna rinses, everything! And next to her Maker, if

Miss Turner would pardon Ella for speaking right out, who knew more

about a woman than the operators in her beauty parlor? Ella always said

maybe the Lord made them, but she knew who made them over. And from what

the Bar Harbor girl said, there wasn’t much left of the original job on

Susan Lathrop Field.

As soon as I’m over this cold, thought Margaret, suddenly, I must make

an appointment with Ella Carter. I ought to get my hair back in shape

before school begins, I put too much blueing in when I wash it myself.

She didn’t finish her thought, that Ella might have heard something, or

George, something more than the boy Sam had reported. Instead, her mouth

a thin, scornful line, she turned over in her mind fragments of the

story Ella had repeated. Susan, waiting an hour or more in the beauty

parlor, peering up and down the busy resort street, nowhere among the

tourists’ dusty cars, the varnished station wagons with Maine license

plates, the gay sport cars, nowhere Susan’s imported town car, nowhere

the handsome Bullett. He’d come when he got ready, he’d been dating up

the cashier at the drug store, or a waitress at the café. He never kept

them waiting in the evening! When he did come, finally, Susan never

bawled him out a bit: she’d just say, oh, I got finished early, or did I

make a mistake again, I meant to say twelve o’clock, and he’d grin out

of one corner of his mouth. A terrible picture, of a woman terrified,

jealous, helpless. You couldn’t help liking her, the girl had said, for

all she acted like an old fool. They hadn’t heard about Bullett’s wife

until Ella told them, they thought that explained a good deal. Then

toward the end of the summer, just a year ago, Bullett went off with a

woman, someone who had a sportswear shop in Bar Harbor in the summer, in

Palm Beach winters. He went in a new coupe Susan had bought him, and she

set the police after him. But then Susan collapsed, two nurses, doctors,

and she must have called off the police, for no one heard another word.

“George’s father always said old Mr. Lathrop was a prince,” Ella had

finished. “It seems kinda too bad, doesn’t it, when you think of the

advantages she had and all? George says her father would turn over in

his grave. What I tell George is I can’t understand any woman not

getting her fill of men before she gets to that age! Why, the Bar Harbor

operator told me—” then Ella had stopped, with a clicking of her tongue,

and Margaret understood that her own condition of refined spinsterhood

made it impossible for Ella to tell her all she had heard, even when the

part withheld might well be the most—well, say, revealing. Margaret had

failed to find a phrase which would, with dignity and decorum, release

Ella’s tongue. So she had merely said, “Too bad? It’s horrible. You read

about such things, but you don’t believe them. But to hear them about a

woman you knew—No, I refuse to try to understand it.”

Margaret’s head ached, with her rehearsal of Ella’s story, with the way

her thoughts, like a flock of starlings, rushed at the news Sam had

brought, scattered in a rush at some impulse of her will. Why should she

care so much what Susan Field did? What if she had another—what had Sam

called them—another boy-friend? Grotesque and fascinating. And none of

your business, she told herself, getting to her feet. Only what had

Susan wanted of her, why had she rung her bell?

The rain had started again, making a small pricking noise against the

windowpanes. Margaret thought, I’ll catch more cold sitting here in the

damp, I must go back to bed. She moved softly, not to jar her head, and

shivered as she stretched herself flat and drew a blanket up to her

chin. If ever the sun came out again, she ought to air everything in the

house. For a few moments she kept her mind busy hanging out blankets,

emptying closets, even the cedar closet in the attic where she stored

her winter clothes. You had to watch out for mildew. Then Susan came

back, quite as if she brushed down all the dangling garments and

confronted Margaret. Only Margaret couldn’t see her clearly. The

pictures in the tabloids had been chiefly hat and summer fur, a great

collar of white fox. Not a trace of the Susan Margaret had known. When

she tried to construct an image out of what she had heard, she got the

face of Edna May Oliver. That was Sam’s remark, dolled up like a mo’om

pitcher star. Margaret had a picture of her, a stiff cardboard

photograph, huge puffed sleeves, lace collar wired up under the ears,

round eyes staring with innocence under a frontispiece of frizzed bangs.

It was in the tray of the Saratoga trunk, in the small package of

letters, receipts, account book, which had been sent home from Colorado

when Robert died. I’d like to show it to her, thought Margaret,

fiercely. I’d like to say, Look what you’ve done to yourself! Perhaps it

was as well no one had answered when Susan rang. Too much might have

been said.

The gray and rain-drenched twilight deepened until the pattern of the

flowered wall paper was lost, until the silver-backed brushes (a gift

from a senior class two years ago) ranged on the pine chest had no

reflection in the mirror above them, and the landscape painted at the

top of the mirror blurred into the rest of the grayness. It was the same

room where Margaret had slept as a child, with Robert in the room next,

and her father and mother in the front room, which she had made over

into her study. The darkness dissolved the pleasant changes she had

made, she might have been lying in the narrow iron bed, the painted

white commode in the corner, matting tacked over the floor. As a child,

excited because Susan Lathrop was coming home from the Select School for

Young Ladies, and Margaret, in a clean apron, her face scrubbed, her

hair slicked back in two pigtails, could play croquet with her, could

follow her about, somewhat dazzled at her bright daring. I’m not sure

it’s good for Maggie, she could remember her mother saying. She gets all

stirred up, she may get notions—And her father, Maggie’s got sense

enough to know she can’t have the things nor do the things Lathrop’s

daughter can. Even then Susan wanted Robert to play with them—and then

Robert wouldn’t play with girls. Later, excited again because Susan was

coming home, but a different Susan when she came, her skirts long, her

lovely hair tucked up at the back of her head, a Susan who didn’t want

to play with girls now, who wanted Robert to ride with her, who wanted

Lester Field! And Margaret had lain sleepless, her young body pressed

against the thin mattress so hard the springs of the old iron bed made

little ping-sounds all night, her mouth muffled against the pillow. And

now Susan had come home again, if only for a moment, and Margaret lay

sleepless. What was it like, at Susan’s age, not to be done with—ah, you

couldn’t call it love!

I must be feverish. Margaret sat up indignantly, snapped on the light on

the night table, shook two tablets from the aspirin bottle, swallowed

them with a sip of water, looked about her room, at the prints on the

walls, at the ruffled organdy curtains, at every sign of dignified

accomplishment which would fix her in the present. She left the light

burning, turning her face away from it, and presently slept. When she

woke, the lamp was pale in morning light, and she knew she had been

dreaming. Bits of the dreams stayed a moment, drifting on the waves of

waking before they were submerged and lost, Susan running ahead of her

over the rocky shore, laughing at something, Margaret hurrying after

her, slipping, falling, and Robert’s voice, or was it her father’s? Then

they were gone. Margaret snapped off the light. She couldn’t remember

any more of the dream. She could see the sky through the curtains,

mother-of-pearl and lustrous, the rain had ended, she felt better. It

was queer, how in dreams you never were any age, young, or middle-aged,

or old, you were just you, all of you at once, some secret essence of

you. Perhaps that was the way you ought to be, awake, only some foolish

notion about time and years lived got in between you and yourself; or

your waking memory was weak, holding today as the only real thing, while

all of you was really there, continuous, and in dreams the whole you

pressed through the barriers. But her thought was almost part of the

dream, and as she woke fully, sank with the dream under the surface of

her waking.

The next few days the sun shone coppery in a glazed sky, the breeze was

feather-light and southerly, there seemed no air to breathe, just the

warm mist which rose from the drenched earth. Margaret tried sunning her

blankets, and found them at the end of the day so damp she could not

fold them away. Her shoes, ranged neatly in shoe-rails on her closet

door, had a patina of mildew on heels and soles. There was through the

house the faint musty smell of fibers playing host to invisible and

multiplying fungi, wood, plaster, rugs, everything. Even the books had a

taint of this odor, and their covers bulged as if someone had left them

in the grass all night. If it’s like this in the tropics, thought

Margaret, I’m glad I never went there. She felt a little as if her bones

were mildewed, she couldn’t throw off a heaviness of body or of spirit

which her cold had left, she fretted against the weather as if it were a

private enemy using unfair weapons like poison gas against her and her

possessions. If it’s this bad in my house, with everything open to what

air there is, she thought, what must it be in the big house, all sealed

shut. Someone ought to go in, to see what’s happening. There had been

elegant things in that house, Margaret remembered the red velvet

portieres of the drawing room, the gold chairs with red velvet cushions,

the crystal chandelier. She might write to Susan. Dear Susan, Perhaps

you don’t realize this is the worst summer we’ve ever had at the shore,

no one ever saw anything like it, I don’t know of course what you’ve

left in your house, but it will certainly be ruined—Write her and be

laughed at for her trouble. Susan was old enough to look out for her own

things. But she never had looked out for things. Careless, generous.

Well, she never had to work for anything, why shouldn’t she be careless

and generous? Leaving her toys anywhere, tearing her dresses, giving

away anything—Margaret had forgotten—

That little gold necklace, like a fine rope, with the locket, its blue

enameled flower and a pearl for its center; Margaret had loved it. Susan

had let her wear it one day, had said, keep it, you can have it.

Margaret’s mother had sent her scampering back with it, crying, her hand

clutched over the locket as she climbed the steps to the kitchen door.

“They’d think you stole it, a valuable piece of jewelry like that! I

don’t care if Susan did give it to you, she shouldn’t have. Hurry up!”

The cook had been cross. Miss Susan was having her bath, the cook was

busy with dinner, hadn’t Maggie been playing with Miss Susan all day,

this was no time to be bothering people. Margaret had marched home, she

could keep the necklace over night, she could wear it under her

nightgown, she couldn’t see Susan before morning. But her mother had

taken it off, it had caught in her hair and tweaked it cruelly; she had

wrapped it in a bit of paper and sent Father straight off with it. “If

they should think you took it! They’d never let you play with her again,

they might not want us to stay here! You ought to know better, in our

position.” She had fairly flown at Father when he came back. “Well?” And

Father, “I saw Lathrop, he just laughed and said that girl of his would

give her head away if it wasn’t riveted on.” Susan had said she didn’t

see why Maggie’s mother made such a fuss, but she’d give it back at

Christmas. Only she had forgotten, by Christmas she was gone, just where

that year Margaret didn’t recall. You’ll learn, Margaret’s mother had

said, that it isn’t enough to know you are honest and right yourself,

you have to see to it that what you do looks that way to everyone else.

You can’t be too careful. Advice, Margaret knew now, wrung from a stem

that pricked with poverty and hard work and insecurity. Not that there

could have been any real threat that Rob Turner would lose his job;

always Lathrop’s projects, and he had new ones steadily, included Rob,

no matter how far they reached into the future. But Mary Turner,

Margaret’s mother, had gone out to service when she was not yet

thirteen, because her own mother had died, and her father, drawn as a

vague, good-natured, shiftless figure in the few comments Margaret had

ever heard, had taken one way of incompetents, and run away from the

problem of his family. Mary Turner had learned early that providence was

not to be trusted, and the rest of her life she forestalled any tricks

it might play by anticipating the worst. A hard worker, and a harder

worrier, Rob Turner used to say. Well, Margaret had remembered her

advice; she had been careful, and Susan hadn’t.

It was queer the way things kept coming back. Perhaps because she hadn’t

energy enough to stir around filling her hours with small tasks which

took the place of thought. She read the Boston paper every day, walking

slowly to the postbox for it after the mail truck passed. But China and

Spain were shadows into which her imagination did not venture, and labor

troubles were men who didn’t have sense enough to stick to jobs when

they had them, she might almost have been reading news about another

planet, not the one on which she lived. In a way, she was, for all the

portents of change had to do with a future world which could not trouble

her for long. What she read had less substance than what she remembered.

Perhaps the fact that Susan had rung her doorbell and gone away, her

errand unexplained, perhaps that ringing of the bell had set in

vibration, had waked echoes of Susan. If only I could get in town,

thought Margaret, and see Ella; she might have heard more than Sam had

reported. While this spell of weather lasted, she couldn’t risk it,

waiting at the roadside for a crowded bus, sitting in Ella’s back room

with the saturated air weighted still more with scented lotions. She

could see her name in the list of heat prostrations.

At the end of the week, at the end of a day which seemed worse than the

preceding days, intolerable because it was another of the same kind, the

wind changed. Margaret was sitting in a canvas chair on the terrace at

the side of her house, head back against the gay green and yellow

stripes, eyes closed, hands listless. She had been thinking, I ought to

go in and get some supper, I can’t lie here forever. She heard the wind

before she felt it, heard it in the treetops between her and the distant

shore. She listened, it was almost like rain, the little swishing noise

of leaves turning quickly against each other. She opened her eyes, the

treetops, maples and oaks, were in motion, clouds had gathered behind

them, the setting sun glinted through clouds, catching the pale under

side of leaves as the wind ruffled them. Then she could smell it, an

east wind strong with the odor of the salty water, the flats over which

it blew. A change of wind, coming in with the tide. She sniffed it

eagerly, she stood up to let it blow her thin silk skirt about her. It

meant rain, but cooler weather, too. She might walk to the shore, it

would be good to see something besides the flat, glassy sea of the past

week. Ordinarily she disliked being blown upon, but this evening she

stretched into the wind, she walked more springily into it, her usual

crisp, rather prim step lengthening. There was no surf as yet, even on

the rocky outer shore of the point; the surface of the bay was in

motion, long ripples across its gray, and the tide spoke in hurried

splashes about the rocks, its usual rhythm of withdrawal and approach

lost in the wind’s drive. Margaret watched, and as the first large drops

of rain fell startling and cold on her head and face, she turned back.

She had to run for her house, past the dark sealed Lathrop house, under

the uneasy trees, and as she ran, Susan was running beside her, her

flying bright hair darkening as the rain drenched them both. Margaret

reached her door, stopped, leaning against it until her heart stopped

its thumping; when had she and Susan run through the rain? Susan, with

something in her arms, drabbled, dirty-white, blood-smeared, held firmly

against Susan’s white dress, a nondescript little dog, its side torn,

one leg dangling limp. It tried feebly to lick its side, Susan panted,

“I can’t run any more, I jiggle it too much.” Margaret had seen it

first, cowering under a rock in the corner of the field, just the

briefest glance had shown her its terrified and pain-glazed eyes, she

had looked away, hastily, wanting not to see it, not to have to know

what it was, and called out to Susan, “I’ll race you to the road.” But

Susan had seen it, had flung herself down beside it, dropping the rope

of daisies and sweet clover the two of them had braided, had made soft,

compassionate noises in her throat, stretching her hands out slowly, and

the dog’s lip had curled back from its teeth. “Leave it alone, Susan!

He’ll bite you! He’s dreadful, you mustn’t touch him!” Susan had not

even heard her, after a moment she had one hand on his head, smoothing

the dirty skin over the patient, rounded skull, and then she was

hoisting herself to her feet, the animal clasped against her body. “He’s

been hurt,” she said, in a whisper, as if she didn’t want the dog to

hear. “Oh, let’s hurry! Your father will know what to do, Maggie.” Then

the rain, the threat of which had started them homeward, had begun to

fall, and they had run, Margaret gulping the bitter lump of shame she

would not admit, telling herself, I didn’t know it was hurt, not really,

anyway it isn’t safe, he might bite, look at her pretty dress—Susan had

never said once, didn’t you see him lying there? Margaret’s father had

dressed the wound, had put a splint on the leg. “He must of had a fight,

dogs, or maybe a bobcat.” Presently he was hobbling after Susan, his

long cur tail flailing the air. He wouldn’t come near Margaret, he

rolled his yellowish hound-dog eyes, showing the whites, when he saw

her. It was too much as if he said, if Susan knew what I know, she

wouldn’t think much of you! After Susan had left that fall, the dog had

disappeared. “He had the makings of a good hunting dog,” said Margaret’s

father, “but he had a roving foot.”

Margaret hadn’t thought of that dog for years, it couldn’t be guilt now

which felt so dry in her throat, she’d just lost her breath, running.

She didn’t worry now what Susan Lathrop Field thought of her! She must

take off her dress, lucky she’d had on this old wash-silk. She could

light a small fire in the fireplace, it would be pleasant with the rain

outside.

When, at the end of the next week, Margaret rode in to the village on

the bus, she found George Carter’s assistant in charge of the barber

shop, and the door to Ella’s beauty parlor closed, with a sign, “Back in

two weeks.” “They just jumped in the car the minute they saw the sun,”

explained the strange young man.

“I should think Ella might have let her customers know.” Margaret was

resentful. “Here I came way in on purpose—”

“She talked some of putting in a girl while she was gone, but she said

she just lost money when she did, you ladies wouldn’t have anyone but

her. Now with men it’s different, a shave’s a shave and you gotta have

it when you gotta have it.” He bulged comfortably under his white cotton

jacket, but his enjoyment of his own comment did not soften Margaret’s

little scowl of disappointment. “They’ve gone to see her folks,” he

added. “Her mother’s poorly, that’s one reason she was in a hustle to

get away.”

Then Ella would have no news when she came back. Margaret edged away

from the door; she oughtn’t to be standing looking into a men’s barber

shop. The young fellow didn’t look after her as she went along the

street, stepping precisely in her carefully whitened canvas oxfords, the

bright sun bringing out a faint odor of cleaning fluid from the white

front of her figured blue silk dress. Two hours until a bus left for

Grady’s Amusement Park, the bus which ran past her door. She prolonged

her few errands, crossing off each item from her list as she bought it,

a spool of darning cotton, toilet soap (she was firm with herself about

that, she liked good soap, scented, Yardley’s or Houbigant’s, she

mustn’t be extravagant, after all she’d practically wasted her bus fare

today). The drugstore clerk said, “Nice to see the sun again,” and she

agreed. In the grocery store she removed her white cotton gloves to

pinch the lettuce heads, the clerk said, “Nice to see the sun again,”

and she agreed, selecting the firmest head.