know anyone in the village now. When she’d gone away to college, those
long years of hard work, teaching in a country school, a year at a
normal, another year of teaching, steady up-climb, she’d lost touch with
people here. All her friends now were in the city, she told herself, why
should this feeling, like a vague homesickness, pull at her eyelids, at
the corners of her mouth? Just because she had to wait for the bus,
feeling sorry for herself that there was nowhere in the village a door
where she might present herself, where someone would say, “Why, Margaret
Turner, come in! How are you? How nice to see you!” Some of the girls
she had known in school had married and settled here, she wouldn’t know
them if she met them, grandmothers now, or dead, some of them. There
weren’t any of them I cared about, she thought; they were all dull—after
Susan. And my life was different, I made it different. She straightened
her shoulders, she thanked the clerk for the neat heavy paper bag with
string handles into which she could drop all her small purchases. When
he said, “I suppose you won’t be here much longer, Miss Turner? You’ll
be getting back to the city?” she almost thanked him again, he had in a
phrase restored her.
“I’ll be here the rest of August, at least,” she said. “I’m not sure
just when I have to leave. September’s such a lovely month at the
shore.”
He waited politely for her to finish, ignoring for the moment the
Italian woman, her uncovered dark hair in a loose knot in the plump
ridge of her neck, who was shaking a banana at him and saying how mucha,
how mucha; he was a nice young man, thought Margaret, as she stepped
crisply out of the store.
She walked to the garage, to leave word for Sam. Tomorrow was his
regular day, he might have come anyway, but leaving word was one more
errand. Bill, in boots and rubber apron, had a car on the washing stand.
He held the hose away from Margaret, touched his green eye shade with
wet fingers. “You don’t want a taxi yet, Miss Turner?”
“Not just yet.” Bill made it sound like a friendly joke; he drove her to
the station with her trunk and bags, when she left in the fall, he drove
her home again in the spring, but he always mentioned the taxi, quite as
if she might recklessly order one out at any time. She explained about
Sam, and Bill thought he’d probably see the kid, he hung around a lot.
She could see the mouth of the river through the rear door of the
garage, with a coal barge drawn up along the dock. “Nice to see the sun
again,” said Bill, as she walked away. She thought of Susan’s shining
car standing near the red gasoline pump, and Bill beside it, his shrewd,
homely, grimy face puckered with that expression she had seen in Sam’s
eyes. If Susan didn’t know how they—yes, leer was the word for it!—how
they all leered at her very name, it was high time someone told her.
Still an hour to wait before the bus came. Margaret went slowly along
the narrow street which edged the river, the old docks and piers on one
side, a row of one-story wooden buildings on the other, half of them
closed, tattered advertisements of beer or tobacco tacked on the boards
nailed over the old windows. When she was a child, this was the busiest
street in town, with saloons, The Sailors’ Snug Harbor, The Oasis, with
lunch places, shops smelling of tarred rope and metal; no nice girl ever
walked down it alone, even to look at the lumber schooners, the fishing
sloops, which lay along the wharves, the girls who did walk there didn’t
go to look at the ships. Behind one dusty window was a pile of slickers,
straddled by a pair of black fisherman’s boots, farther along a sign
above a door said BEER, but for the most part the street was abandoned,
as were the docks. Almost, thought Margaret, as if the sea had retired
from business. Motor vans boomed along highways with the freight now,
the sons and grandsons of the sailors and fishermen worked in the
factories back from the waterfront, or didn’t work on W.P.A. projects.
She walked, placing her white shoes with caution on worn planks, out to
the end of the longest pier, the one from which the excursion steamer
used to run. When they’d opened Grady’s Amusement Park, they had painted
the little steamer shining white, and advertised moonlight sails to the
Park. But who wanted a slow boat, a crowd of people? Margaret had heard
stories of what went on in the cars parked along the beaches. She looked
at the ticket office, the locked turnstile, the blank window, and then
seated herself on the wooden bench.
Her father had taken them on a Sunday excursion once; she must have been
very young, for she could remember her brother Robby in a round straw
hat and a sailor collar. She had been seasick, she could smell now the
dust-stuffy, pricky smell of the green plush on the seat in the ladies’
cabin where she had lain miserably, her mother sitting beside her. Why,
that was the real reason—She stared at the water, dark, an oily
iridescence in the eddies it made around the end piles of the pier—That
time Lester Field had asked her to go—if she had gone, her whole life
would have been different. She couldn’t exactly see his face, not as he
had been then; superimposed upon the young face was the face of the
older Lester as she had seen him just once, twenty years later, a face
of heavy whitish flesh, like wax, with irresolute mouth and dull eyes,
the underlids sagging. He had been killed hunting, that fall. Drunk,
they said. Well, he married Susan for her money and she gave him a run
for it. The village talked thus about Susan even then, almost thirty
years ago.
All Margaret could catch now of the young face was the heavy stroke the
eyebrows made, the imperious stare of the dark eyes, the assurance of
his smile. He had finished law school, he had come back to town to spend
the summer in his father’s office, he had come out to the farm with some
papers for her father to sign, he had seen Margaret, he had come back,
often. “He’s hanging around too much,” her mother had said. “I don’t
like it. I wouldn’t like him anyway, and you have to face the fact he’s
not the same class, and that just means trouble.” Margaret couldn’t
listen to her. (What a sweet baby you are, Margie! Kiss me! What’s the
harm?) Where, in her staid, neat body lingered the echo of that ecstasy?
Lester had planned the whole thing. A friend of his, and his girl.
Margaret could tell her mother she was spending the night with her—and
now she couldn’t remember the girl’s name! There was a full moon. Lots
of good places on the old boat where no one can see us, just you and me,
Margie, and the moon and the water! Margaret had refused. I couldn’t,
Lester. It wouldn’t be right. She had been faint with longing to go, she
had consoled herself in bitter days afterwards that at least she had
resisted temptation, she had lived up to her standards. A gull circled
over her, so near she saw its round bright eye, and its cry as it
swooped away was like a derisive laugh. _Aorr_, he screamed, that’s how
you kept your virtue, afraid you would be seasick! Had that been the
reason, or was this only an ironic trick of her nerves, this lonely
afternoon? Lester had been angry; before Margaret saw him again, Susan
had come home from abroad. If I had gone with him that night, he was
angry because he thought I did not care enough for him—He had begun to
love me—I could have held him, in spite of Susan.
Margaret got to her feet, her paper bag crackled against her knee, she
set her mouth firmly, what possessed her, harking back to all these old,
long-lived-past moments? She was like those gulls, walking with their
stiff ungraceful balance at the edge of the receding tide, under the
shored-up bank from which the pier ran out, pecking over the marginal
debris. The odor of the water was strong in her nostrils, brackish,
fishy, town-tainted, unlike the clean salt pungency of her own shore.
She wouldn’t come in town again unless she had to; she didn’t like it.
Nor did she care much for the bus ride to her door. She stared out of
the rattling, half-opened window, trying not to be in any way a part of
the company in which she rode, women in flowered beach pajamas, in
slacks, their rotundities bulging comfortably, bandanas, not too clean,
tied under their chins, the ends wagging with gum-chewing and shrill
talk, grubby children scrabbling all over the seats, half naked,
scratches on their sunburned legs. Too early for the night crowd at
Grady’s, these were part of the colony this side of Grady’s Park, summer
cottages to rent by week or month, they rode in to the village movies as
often as the bill changed. Riff-raff. Margaret hadn’t been along the
shore as far as the cottages since they were first built; she’d heard
they were run down, rents had been reduced, the owner couldn’t half fill
the places, families didn’t take vacations any more. A shame they’d let
people like that in, lowering the tone of the place. That was the first
property Susan’s agent had sold, Susan had pocketed the money without
the least concern what happened to the land. There was distance enough
between Margaret’s house and the cottages so that she seldom saw the
inhabitants, except on such a bus ride. But she thought how nice it
would have been to have two or three pleasant summer homes along the
shore, with what she called desirable people; she could have called on
them, they could have dropped in to see her. One of the children stopped
beside her seat, a scrawny little girl, the scanty front of her playsuit
sagging away from her flounder-flat front. She was working on an
ice-cream cone, boring a hole with her tongue in the melting chocolaty
mound, she stared with shrewd, pale eyes under wisps of sun-bleached
hair at Margaret. The bus bounced off the edge of the pavement, passing
a car, and back again, the child fell in against Margaret’s knee,
Margaret’s quick hand pushed child and dripping cone away, they were a
heap at her feet, sticky cone planted on her ankle, a startled _awk_
from the child. Margaret contracted, a violent physical withdrawal, at
this violation of her privacy, her isolation, her very cleanliness.
“Look what you’ve done, you bad little girl!” she said, fiercely. The
child was hoisting her pointed stern, a gurgle of despair coming from
near the dirty bus floor. She couldn’t make it, what with the narrow
space, the jerking of the bus. Margaret leaned forward, she had to do
something, she slid her hands along the thin, smooth back, she pulled
the child up. Amazingly, the child settled on the seat beside her,
leaning against Margaret’s arm, wedging what was left of the ice cream
into the cone again with dirty fingers, proceeding solemnly to lap it
with her pointed tongue. I had forgotten how small a child’s arm feels,
how small and hard a child’s body, light, warm, like a little
unfeathered bird—
“Ardelia, you come here, stop bothering the lady, you come here, I say!”
Ardelia slid to the floor, her eyes holding to Margaret’s face for a
moment, with that shrewd, unblinking stare, almost as if she measured
the confusion Margaret felt. What nonsense, thought Margaret, dabbing
with a Kleenex at the smudge on her ankle, then jerking at the bell
cord. The bus driver watched her in his mirror, he pulled to a stop, and
she climbed stiffly down, not looking once at anyone in the bus as she
left. She was a dirty little thing, thought Margaret, angrily. Her arm
still kept that pressure, warm, light, those small, smooth bones. Lucky
that mess didn’t land on my dress, I’ll have to change my stockings.
What was the matter today, that loneliness should take so many forms to
trip her? Her house waited for her, charming, quiet, its own shadow from
the low sun stretching dark across the lawn almost to her feet. The tin
flag on her postbox was down, she opened the front and took out not only
the daily paper, but two letters. One had the school address smartly
printed on the flap. She didn’t recognize the writing on the other. As
she fitted her key into the lock, she told herself firmly, your holiday
is almost over, you should be enjoying it instead of having such
megrims. She had heard somewhere that these summer colds left you
depressed, a kind of poison in the system. Maybe she should get a tonic.
She put away her purchases methodically, she set her hat on the padded
hat-tree in the hall closet, and then she went into the living room with
paper and letters. Her reading glasses were in a drawer of the desk; she
seated herself in the armchair near a window, and waited a moment,
hoping for the surge of comfort which homecoming should bring, a moment
to feel that warm recognition that she, Margaret Turner, had done this
for herself, gained for herself this setting, this position. But today
she was uneasy. She turned the letter from the school in her fingers,
she found it lightly sealed, and ran her thumb under the flap. Just a
note, she thought, about which day she should appear for conferences
with parents.
She read the letter twice, with no shock, rather with feeling that she
had read it before, that she had known all day, all summer, that it
would lie in her postbox, awaiting her. The Head Mistress of the school
knew that Margaret would understand, she was sorry to write so late, but
probably Margaret would be relieved that she could now stay in her
charming home, in the spring she had thought the budget for salaries was
properly balanced, but one or two bad investments, if any investments
nowadays were anything but bad, and so forth. The point being, at the
end of the third page, that Lucy Alder, the assistant, could handle all
the classes in mathematics, and Margaret needn’t come back. Be sure to
keep in touch with us, with deep appreciation of your splendid service.
Margaret folded the letter along the creases, but she couldn’t get it to
slide into the envelope, it crackled and would not go in. She laid it
beside her on the table, moving her hand cautiously, as if something
slept here in the house which a sudden movement, a noise, might waken.
Still quietly she opened the second letter, and looked at the printed
circular which the non-revealing envelope contained, her face creasing
wrily. Strictly confidential, to teachers, loans arranged, no other
security required, no signatures except your own, absolute privacy.
Teachers were all hard up, then. Or they were easy marks. But she wasn’t
a teacher any more, didn’t they understand? Then she unfolded the
newspaper, spread it on her knees. The words were there under her eyes,
but they were only marks, signifying nothing. So she sat still, her
hands lying on the paper, open, empty, inert. The light in the room
changed, as the sun dropped under the horizon. A soft afterglow made
amber highlights on polished surfaces of wood, tinted the pale ground of
the chintz curtains, lay for a moment across Margaret’s hands.
I might as well get my supper, she said, presently. I can’t do anything
about it, not tonight, anyway. If she moved softly, she wouldn’t rouse
the thing that slept, she knew its shape, but she could pretend she
didn’t know it was there at all. It stirred as she went into the
kitchen, with her thought: I can make the payment on the mortgage this
fall, the tax bill at the end of September, but then what do I eat, what
do I burn for warmth? Oh, not tonight! I have time enough to plan, to
figure out a way—Time? She stumbled, and her hand clung against the
paneling of the door.
* * * * *
By the middle of September Margaret had reached a cessation of worry. At
least, the part of her mind that tried to look ahead, to plan, had
stopped its endless fumbling search for a way out, after it had worn
smooth the walls of the dark and narrow shaft into which she had been
plunged, and found no crack. She had tried several things. She had made
a package of the few bits of jewelry she owned, an old watch of her
father’s in a hunting case, earrings of her mother’s, a diamond
stick-pin that had come with the letters and photograph from Robert’s
landlady; she had taken the train one wet day early in September to the
city, and after walking past the doorway three times, had forced herself
into the pawnbroker’s shop, past the counters of revolvers, musical
instruments, clocks and candlesticks, to the dusty, railed office at the
rear. The proprietor, like a queer beetle with his magnifying lens for
an eye, offered her four dollars for the lot, and that’s more than
they’re worth. Without a word she had wrapped them again in tissue paper
and walked out. She had then written to Martha Miller, the plump
ex-teacher who had wanted to visit her in the summer, suggesting that if
Martha hadn’t found a place to spend the winter, she might like to stay
with Margaret. If I furnish the house, and you pay for the food—She sent
the letter in care of the school, and two days later it came back, with
a note from the secretary. Dear Miss Turner, No one seems to have Miss
Miller’s address, if I hear I’ll let you know.
She had thought she might get some teaching to do in the village
schools. Not full time, she’d retired because she didn’t wish to go back
to the city, but a class in algebra, perhaps, or tutoring, a few hours a
week. She was sorry she had made the inquiry, she dwindled and aged so
under the apathetic stare of the superintendent, a youngish man with
large hands from which the coat sleeves rode up. “Just a sort of bus
man’s holiday,” she had said, brightly. “After so many years—” They had
a waiting list, girls from Normal School; he didn’t know whether they
could even keep the schools open all winter, he’d heard rumors—
She had finally, with a fluttering desperation which made her talk too
fast and give breathless little laughs, gone to the real estate office
in the village. She had retired, she explained, to the portly man with
ashes on his vest, who had laid down his cigar, taken off his hat, and
tipped his chair forward at her entrance. She thought she might like to
spend the winter in town, at a good boarding house, did he think he
could rent her house, he knew it, very desirable, of course she wouldn’t
want a family, a large family—He had picked up his unlighted cigar,
poked it into a corner of his mouth, and tipped his chair back. How much
did she expect? Nobody would want to go out there for the winter, he
didn’t know as they would even in the summer, he’d put it on the list,
property out that way wasn’t worth much, folks just wanted a bed and a
bath-house. He chewed reflectively, rubbing a finger over the crease in
his bald forehead. “I tell you, Mrs. Turner,” he said, “the trouble is,
they ain’t no money now, folks haven’t found what to use _for_ money.”
When Margaret opened the door of her house that evening, she felt
apologetic; she had offered it to vandals, and even that had been of no
use. When she wrote the check for the mortgage payment, she folded the
checkbook hastily and shut it away in a drawer, before her eye, so used
to figures, could give her the balance left.
The Labor Day week end ended the season for Grady’s Park. The fireworks
woke Margaret from a light, uneasy sleep, she heard cars passing all
night. After that, the families moved away from the shore, driving past
in laden sedans, mattresses rolled and tied on top, baby carriages and
chairs wobbling at the side. School had opened, summer was over,
everyone had a place to go, had to go, except Margaret. She was
restless, the thin, high, valiant call of migrant birds flying under the
night sky, which she heard in her wakeful hours, was like the voice of
her own need to be off, to be fitted again into the routine of work. She
told herself she was glad she didn’t have to walk through those
chattering crowds of girls, to try to keep order in study period, to
explain the square of _a_ plus _b_, or what _x_ equals to young things
for whom _x_ equalled only swing music and a movie hero and love. If she
could remember how wretched she had always been just at this time in
September, when she had set the house in order and closed it for the
winter! For a day or so she waited eagerly for the postman. Perhaps the
Head Mistress would write saying that after all she needed Margaret,
Lucy Alder had been taken sick, or married, or registration was so
heavy. But never did Margaret think of writing to the school, Look, I’ve
worked all these years for you, I don’t know where to turn—She couldn’t
destroy the pleasant picture of Margaret Turner, gentlewoman, with
background, home, enviable, independent. She was detached now, floating
in unreality, but if she destroyed that picture she had allowed them to
construct of her, what would she be? She knew exactly how they would
shove her into oblivion. No one could afford sympathy in these days; if
you seemed an object for—not even sympathy, just reasonable
assistance—the technique was to turn upon you, accusingly. You should
have known better, you should have made provision; they tied the guilt
about your neck like a flat-iron, and pushed you out of sight. That way
you no longer troubled them. Look at Martha Miller, they didn’t even
know where she was! And Simmsy, and the others. At least, thought
Margaret, I can keep my pride.
She found it hard to keep the picture of herself clear. She missed the
casual inquiries, did you have a pleasant summer, you must have, of
course, in that sweet house of yours, I suppose you just hated to come
away, back to the same old grind. She said, I’m just restless because
I’ve had to get to work so many years, when I get used to it—Sometimes
her head felt curiously light, as if indeed she floated, the pull of
gravity gone, as if she were in fact detached from the earth. Perhaps
she wasn’t eating enough, although she thought, I must keep up my
strength, I mustn’t get sick. She told Sam he needn’t come again, grass
didn’t have to be cut in September, and then the persistent rains made
the lawns as lush and green as in June. She pushed the lawn mower
herself, leaning against the wooden handle, her heart whirring like the
blades. The thick foliage of the wet summer still clung green to all the
trees, almost as if the change of season had failed for them as well as
for Margaret. No use worrying, she thought, woman or tree; there is
nothing to be done about it. Nothing.
Her subscription to the newspaper expired on the eighteenth and she
didn’t renew it. Extraordinary, how many things she had spent money for
which she didn’t need. With no paper, she could omit that trip to the
postbox, trailing through the incessant rain, feeling the sodden ground
suck at her feet, the gusty wind pluck at her umbrella. They should have
a spell of bright, warm weather after the deluge. She didn’t like to
start making fires yet, if she was careful, she could get along for
weeks and weeks on the wood stacked in the wood-shed. She could bring up
driftwood for the fireplace, if ever it dried out.
She hadn’t thought of Susan Lathrop Field since the letter from the
school. For one thing, the rain had kept her from walking past the old
house to the shore; for another, the letter had for a time wrenched her
out of the past, even out of the present, had knocked her flat against
the solid, crackless future. But when she woke Wednesday morning, she
knew she had been dreaming again of Susan. A young Susan, saying,
“You’re so smart, Margaret, only you’re scared of things.” Had she ever
said that, or had the dream only remembered some impatient moment when
Susan tried to urge the child Maggie into action? I’m not scared any
more, thought Margaret, surprised. She could move her mind into the
place where fear had dwelt, and feel its emptiness, much as she might
run her tongue into the gap where an aching tooth had been drawn. I wish
I could see Susan, before—She stopped again, not defining that _before_.
There was no rain against the windows, but the light within the room had
an irregular pulsing change, from dull shadow to a quick pearl-gray,
almost a hint of sun, and then to shadow again. Margaret stood at a
window, tying her bathrobe cord. The vault of the sky had an uneasy
counterpoint, high, thin dark clouds sweeping northward, like strokes
from a fine brush, lower, cottony masses of clouds drifting more lazily
toward the south, and from the rocky shore the pounding of waves.
Perhaps the rainy spell was breaking up, she thought, she might walk
down to see the surf.
She bathed and dressed quickly; she couldn’t dally in the morning, she’d
had too many years of training. It seemed warm enough for a summer
frock, recklessly she took from her neat closet a white linen dress,
recklessly because she would have to launder it herself. But she liked
to iron; there was a simple pleasure in subduing wrinkled cloth to
perfect smoothness. The whiff of heated cotton, of starch, of bees-wax
in the scorched pad, was in her nostrils, she remembered it as the smell
of pride itself, the day she had been promoted from sheets and towels,
her mother had allowed her to iron one of Father’s shirts, white, with
tucked bosom, she had stood on a box beside the ironing board, she could
hear the _szz_ with which the iron spat at her moistened finger-tip.
Later moments of achievement had never surpassed that one.