“Almost” was Lucy’s last word on the last night of George’s
vacation—that vital evening which she had half consented to agree
upon for “settling things” between them. “Almost engaged,” she meant.
And George, discontented with the “almost,” but contented that she
seemed glad to wear a sapphire locket with a tiny photograph of George
Amberson Minafer inside it, found himself wonderful in a new world at
the final instant of their parting. For, after declining to let him
kiss her “good-bye,” as if his desire for such a ceremony were the most
preposterous absurdity in the world, she had leaned suddenly close to
him and left upon his cheek the veriest feather from a fairy’s wing.
She wrote him a month later:
No. It must keep on being almost.
Isn’t almost pretty pleasant? You know well enough that I care
for you. I did from the first minute I saw you, and I’m pretty
sure you knew it—I’m afraid you did. I’m afraid you always knew
it. I’m not conventional and cautious about being engaged, as you
say I am, dear. (I always read over the “dears” in your letters
a time or two, as you say you do in mine—only I read all of your
letters a time or two!) But it’s such a solemn thing it scares
me. It means a good deal to a lot of people besides you and me,
and that scares me, too. You write that I take your feeling for
me “too lightly” and that I “take the whole affair too lightly.”
Isn’t that odd! Because to myself I seem to take it as something
so much more solemn than you do. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised
to find myself an old lady, some day, still thinking of you—while
you’d be away and away with somebody else perhaps, and me forgotten
ages ago! “Lucy Morgan,” you’d say, when you saw my obituary. “Lucy
Morgan? Let me see: I seem to remember the name. Didn’t I know some
Lucy Morgan or other, once upon a time?” Then you’d shake your
big white head and stroke your long white beard—you’d have such a
distinguished long white beard! and you’d say, ‘No. I don’t seem to
remember any Lucy Morgan; I wonder what made me think I did?’ And
poor me! I’d be deep in the ground, wondering if you’d heard about
it and what you were saying! Good-bye for to-day. Don’t work too
hard—dear!
George immediately seized pen and paper, plaintively but vigorously
requesting Lucy not to imagine him with a beard, distinguished or
otherwise, even in the extremities of age. Then, after inscribing his
protest in the matter of this visioned beard, he concluded his missive
in a tone mollified to tenderness, and proceeded to read a letter from
his mother which had reached him simultaneously with Lucy’s. Isabel
wrote from Asheville, where she had just arrived with her husband.
I think your father looks better already, darling, though we’ve
been here only a few hours. It may be we’ve found just the place
to build him up. The doctors said they hoped it would prove to be,
and if it is, it would be worth the long struggle we had with him
to get him to give up and come. Poor dear man, he was so blue,
not about his health but about giving up the worries down at his
office and forgetting them for a time—if he only will forget them!
It took the pressure of the family and all his best friends, to
get him to come—but father and brother George and Fanny and Eugene
Morgan all kept at him so constantly that he just had to give in.
I’m afraid that in my anxiety to get him to do what the doctors
wanted him to, I wasn’t able to back up brother George as I should
in his difficulty with Sydney and Amelia. I’m so sorry! George is
more upset than I’ve ever seen him—they’ve got what they wanted,
and they’re sailing before long, I hear, to live in Florence.
Father said he couldn’t stand the constant persuading—I’m afraid
the word he used was “nagging.” I can’t understand people behaving
like that. George says they may be Ambersons, but they’re vulgar!
I’m afraid I almost agree with him. At least, I think they were
inconsiderate. But I don’t see why I’m unburdening myself of all
this to you, poor darling! We’ll have forgotten all about it long
before you come home for the holidays, and it should mean little or
nothing to you, anyway. Forget that I’ve been so foolish!
Your father is waiting for me to take a walk with him—that’s a
splendid sign, because he hasn’t felt he could walk much, at
home, lately. I mustn’t keep him waiting. Be careful to wear your
mackintosh and rubbers in rainy weather, and, as soon as it begins
to get colder, your ulster. Wish you could see your father now.
Looks so much better! We plan to stay six weeks if the place agrees
with him. It does really seem to already! He’s just called in the
door to say he’s waiting. Don’t smoke too much, darling boy.
Devotedly, your mother
Isabel.
But she did not keep her husband there for the six weeks she
anticipated. She did not keep him anywhere that long. Three weeks after
writing this letter, she telegraphed suddenly to George that they were
leaving for home at once; and four days later, when he and a friend
came whistling into his study, from lunch at the club, he found another
telegram upon his desk.
He read it twice before he comprehended its import.
Papa left us at ten this morning, dearest.
Mother.
The friend saw the change in his face. “Not bad news?”
George lifted utterly dumfounded eyes from the yellow paper.
“My father,” he said weakly. “She says—she says he’s dead. I’ve got to
go home.”
His Uncle George and the Major met him at the station when he
arrived—the first time the Major had ever come to meet his grandson.
The old gentleman sat in his closed carriage (which still needed paint)
at the entrance to the station, but he got out and advanced to grasp
George’s hand tremulously, when the latter appeared. “Poor fellow!” he
said, and patted him repeatedly upon the shoulder. “Poor fellow! Poor
Georgie!”
George had not yet come to a full realization of his loss: so far, his
condition was merely dazed; and as the Major continued to pat him,
murmuring “Poor fellow!” over and over, George was seized by an almost
irresistible impulse to tell his grandfather that he was not a poodle.
But he said “Thanks,” in a low voice, and got into the carriage, his
two relatives following with deferential sympathy. He noticed that the
Major’s tremulousness did not disappear, as they drove up the street,
and that he seemed much feebler than during the summer. Principally,
however, George was concerned with his own emotion, or rather, with
his lack of emotion; and the anxious sympathy of his grandfather and
his uncle made him feel hypocritical. He was not grief-stricken; but
he felt that he ought to be, and, with a secret shame, concealed his
callousness beneath an affectation of solemnity.
But when he was taken into the room where lay what was left of Wilbur
Minafer, George had no longer to pretend; his grief was sufficient.
It needed only the sight of that forever inert semblance of the quiet
man who had been always so quiet a part of his son’s life—so quiet a
part that George had seldom been consciously aware that his father was
indeed a part of his life. As the figure lay there, its very quietness
was what was most lifelike; and suddenly it struck George hard. And in
that unexpected, racking grief of his son, Wilbur Minafer became more
vividly George’s father than he had ever been in life.
When George left the room, his arm was about his black-robed mother,
his shoulders were still shaken with sobs. He leaned upon his mother;
she gently comforted him; and presently he recovered his composure
and became self-conscious enough to wonder if he had not been making
an unmanly display of himself. “I’m all right again, mother,” he
said awkwardly. “Don’t worry about me: you’d better go lie down, or
something; you look pretty pale.”
Isabel did look pretty pale, but not ghastly pale, as Fanny did.
Fanny’s grief was overwhelming; she stayed in her room, and George
did not see her until the next day, a few minutes before the funeral,
when her haggard face appalled him. But by this time he was quite
himself again, and during the short service in the cemetery his
thoughts even wandered so far as to permit him a feeling of regret
not directly connected with his father. Beyond the open flower-walled
grave was a mound where new grass grew; and here lay his great-uncle,
old John Minafer, who had died the previous autumn; and beyond this
were the graves of George’s grandfather and grandmother Minafer, and
of his grandfather Minafer’s second wife, and her three sons, George’s
half-uncles, who had been drowned together in a canoe accident when
George was a child—Fanny was the last of the family. Next beyond was
the Amberson family lot, where lay the Major’s wife and their sons
Henry and Milton, uncles whom George dimly remembered; and beside
them lay Isabel’s older sister, his Aunt Estelle, who had died, in
her girlhood, long before George was born. The Minafer monument was a
granite block, with the name chiseled upon its one polished side, and
the Amberson monument was a white marble shaft taller than any other
in that neighbourhood. But farther on there was a newer section of the
cemetery, an addition which had been thrown open to occupancy only
a few years before, after dexterous modern treatment by a landscape
specialist. There were some large new mausoleums here, and shafts
taller than the Ambersons’, as well as a number of monuments of some
sculptural pretentiousness; and altogether the new section appeared to
be a more fashionable and important quarter than that older one which
contained the Amberson and Minafer lots. This was what caused George’s
regret, during the moment or two when his mind strayed from his father
and the reading of the service.
On the train, going back to college, ten days later, this regret
(though it was as much an annoyance as a regret) recurred to his mind,
and a feeling developed within him that the new quarter of the cemetery
was in bad taste—not architecturally or sculpturally perhaps, but in
presumption: it seemed to flaunt a kind of parvenu ignorance, as if
it were actually pleased to be unaware that all the aristocratic and
really important families were buried in the old section.
The annoyance gave way before a recollection of the sweet mournfulness
of his mother’s face, as she had said good-bye to him at the station,
and of how lovely she looked in her mourning. He thought of Lucy, whom
he had seen only twice, and he could not help feeling that in these
quiet interviews he had appeared to her as tinged with heroism—she had
shown, rather than said, how brave she thought him in his sorrow. But
what came most vividly to George’s mind, during these retrospections,
was the despairing face of his Aunt Fanny. Again and again he thought
of it; he could not avoid its haunting. And for days, after he got
back to college, the stricken likeness of Fanny would appear before
him unexpectedly, and without a cause that he could trace in his
immediately previous thoughts. Her grief had been so silent, yet it had
so amazed him.
George felt more and more compassion for this ancient antagonist of
his, and he wrote to his mother about her:
I’m afraid poor Aunt Fanny might think now father’s gone we won’t
want her to live with us any longer and because I always teased
her so much she might think I’d be for turning her out. I don’t
know where on earth she’d go or what she could live on if we did do
something like this, and of course we never would do such a thing,
but I’m pretty sure she had something of the kind on her mind. She
didn’t say anything, but the way she looked is what makes me think
so. Honestly, to me she looked just scared sick. You tell her there
isn’t any danger in the world of my treating her like that. Tell
her everything is to go on just as it always has. Tell her to cheer
up!