A Charmed Life (26 page)

She reflected. Actually, there was an old suit of John’s in the wardrobe, a dark gray, almost black, which he had never worn up here because it was too formal. The trousers were frayed at the bottom, but that would not matter, for Warren, since they could be turned up. She went to the bedroom and came back with the suit on a hanger. “Will this do?” she asked. Jane could not hide her delight. It was perfect, she declared, examining it as it lay draped over a kitchen chair on its hanger. There would just be the sleeves and trousers to fix. “Take it then,” said Martha, wiping her eyes with a paper napkin. It occurred to her that she was a monster to be lending John’s suit this morning, but she could find no reason not to, except a superstition, and the idea, too horribly practical to contemplate, that he might need it to be buried in himself. The gruesomeness of this interview was making Jane uncomfortable, and it was not Jane’s fault, Martha pointed out to herself, that John had not come home. “Go on, take it,” she said. Jane hesitated. “He’ll be all right, Martha,” she said, with real kindness, patting Martha’s shoulder. “I know,” lied Martha. She took a sip of coffee to show how brave she was going to be. “I ought to come and help you,” she added, uncertainly. This feeling was partly sincere. Jane needed somebody to help her get the suit ready; one person could work on the trousers and one on the sleeves. But she had expressed the wish aloud to show Jane that even
in extremis
she was capable of disinterestedness. If John were here, he would scold her for this.

She could not help feeling that Jane was being selfish, as she watched her hurry down the hill with the suit over her arm. It never occurred to Jane, apparently, to offer to go and get Dolly, so that Martha would not be alone. Martha closed her eyes, waiting for Jane to be gone. She knew she was going to scream again, as soon as the station-wagon drove off. When she opened them, she saw their convertible. “JOHN!” she heard Jane yell, and in a second there he was, climbing out of the car, smiling imperturbably as he always did after an absence; the knowledge that he was lovingly awaited made him matter of fact—he looked away, so to speak, from his arrival, as if it were a present he was bringing.

He had spent the night, he told them, by the side of the road, in the car. The driving had been terrible, and he had been sleepy. He had not called Martha because every place along the road was closed. He had not expected her to be silly and fearful, he added, tipping her chin. If he had known that, he would not have brought her a present—a white rose tree he had found for her at a nursery garden, next to the place where he had had breakfast. Martha studied him. He seemed rather strange and artificial, as he produced the rose tree from the car. If she had not herself had a bad conscience, she would have suspected him of being unfaithful. His story sounded very odd (though like him in a
way)
and she had good reason to be annoyed for the horrid suspense he had caused her. Yet it was lucky (if he only knew) that he had not come home last night and found the mess in the parlor. Everything, indeed, about his return was fortunate, even the fact that Warren’s mother had died, for they all went off at once, with the suit, to the Coes’ house, where Warren was packing and putting away his painting things. John did not ask her about last night; they were all too busy concentrating on getting Warren off on time. They tried the suit on him, and Martha shortened the sleeves and moved the buttons, while Jane did the trousers, which John then pressed with the steam-iron; he did it better than either of the girls. With all these hands working, the suit was ready in an hour, which left fifteen minutes for Warren to stop in Digby and pick up some black shoes. They did not talk much, out of respect for Warren’s mother; even Jane was quiet. It was Warren himself, finally, who brought up the subject of the play-reading. He asked Martha whether she and Miles had had a chance to go on with the discussion. “No,” said Martha, shortly, busy with her needle. She heard the iron pause. “Miles took you home?” John, in his shirtsleeves, his head bent over the ironing board, dropped the question casually. Martha, on the telephone, had promised him to go home with Dolly. Yes, she now acknowledged, in a slightly defiant voice; and she had asked him in for a drink. “You asked him
in?”
cried Jane, opening her mouth wide. “Why, you’re a nut, Martha. What happened? Did he make a pass at you?” They all turned their heads. Martha took her courage in her hands. “Of course not,” she said, smiling broadly. She held up the suit-coat and blushed. “Look at her,” said Jane. “Of course, he did. Confess, Martha.” Martha shook her head, stoutly. She put on a merry expression. “My lips are sealed,” she proclaimed. Warren, who was standing in his underclothes waiting to put on the trousers, had a grave, concerned look—what Martha called his jury face. But John let the matter drop lightly. “She doesn’t want to tell,” he said. “Martha is a gentleman.”

Afterward, in the car, on their way home, he asked her, with his eyes forward, on the road. “My lips are sealed,” she repeated, and added in a more serious tone, “Don’t ask me about it. It was nothing. For a minute, he misunderstood the invitation. One can’t really blame him.” John nodded. They drove on in silence, but she could see that he was satisfied. She put her hand over his on the steering wheel. “Did you spend the night on the road because you wanted to punish me for going to the play-reading?” “Maybe,” he said. “I thought so,” she replied. “But you’re not cross any more?” “No,” he said. “But we can’t have him dropping in all the time,” he added. Martha smiled. “He won’t.” She did not understand why he had decided not to scold her, but she accepted it as final. Men were like that; her father had been the same. They had tact at critical junctures, which was a sort of omniscience. And their mysterious decisions were final; she would not hear any more about the play-reading unless she brought it up herself. She essayed another subject. “Wasn’t it funny—about the suit?” she murmured. John laughed. “It was awful,” she went on, “when Jane came and I thought you were dead and I went and got out the suit anyway. It made me think of that poem of Yeats’s: ‘Twenty-one apparitions have I seen. The worst a coat upon a coathanger.’” She had not meant, by this, to reproach him, but he evidently thought she had, for his hand reached out and gripped hers tightly, in commiseration.

TEN

T
HE FALL DAYS KNOWN
as “glorious” were over. Warren Coe’s mother’s death and the storm that accompanied it marked the annual break in the weather. A black frost followed, putting an end to Martha’s herbs and Dolly’s swamp foliage. There were no more fairy-ring mushrooms on the golf course or boletus in the woods. The sky clouded over by noon every day, and the wind whistled about the boarded-up summer cottages. The borders of the ponds grew sodden, with only a fringe of wild cranberry. The bay was gray and choppy. Blue jays and woodpeckers kept desolate house in the woods. It would be like this, said Martha, until May, though there might be days in late November when you could swim heroically in the ponds, and days, if you were lucky, in January, when you could ice-skate through the dark afternoons, coming home to hot rum toddies and big fires.

But in an ordinary year, there would be only a perpetual March, from the first black frost till the shadbush bloomed in May. Winter here was a limbo—a wind-torn parking area, closed shops and inns, vandalism, and divorces. Nearly everybody who could afford to got away, as the phrase went, after Christmas; the rest stayed on creakily, like a skeleton staff. Already, in early November, the village had a forlorn, rejected look. The last permanent summer people had shut up their houses; the last canned luxury items disappeared from the grocery shelves; the ferry from Trowbridge to the mainland had made its last run for the season—to get off the peninsula, you had to go all the way round. Town boys were breaking into summer houses; police and caretakers made their rounds; mice came in from the fields and big rats from the dump. The fish-man from Digby stopped delivering; the laundromat closed up. The sirens of the ambulance and the fire engine shrieked through the night.

It was the best time of the year, Sandy Gray told Dolly: with the outsiders gone, you finally got the feel of the place. He had been opening scallops, along with the native women, getting $1.50 an hour. Next month, he was going to decorate bureaus for the New Leeds Craftsmen, on a cooperative basis. In January, he would start work at the fish-storage plant, over at North Digby. He was not doing this for the pay check but for the sake of the kids. With the custody case coming up and their whole future at stake, he had pocketed his principles, temporarily, and put himself in the hands of his lawyer, who told him to find a job and make his peace with society. On the advice of his lawyer, too, he had shaved his beard and had his hair cut. First things first, he told Dolly, who regarded these changes with bewilderment. Would you hire a doctor to save your life and then refuse to follow his prescriptions? “But I liked you better the way you were,” she said doubtfully. “That’s because you’re afraid of change,” he explained, in his gentle, gusty voice. “The true individualist has the courage to wear a mask.”

When she came in her jeep to pick him up the morning the case was scheduled, he was wearing a leather jacket, a pair of dark trousers, and a white silk evening scarf wrapped about his neck, in lieu of a necktie. His lawyer, he said, had warned him to appear on time at the courthouse in Trowbridge, in conventional dress, and to see that his witnesses did the same. Dolly’s costume Sandy had chosen himself from her closet—an unbecoming gray tweed suit she had had made up in England. But it worried him that she had no hat. All the way down in the jeep, he kept fuming with impatience and cursing the stop lights and the midmorning traffic in the villages. The judge, he reminded her, was a stickler for punctuality, and his case was third on the docket. “We have plenty of time,” she shouted, repeatedly, over the noise of the jeep. His fretfulness alarmed Dolly. This was not the Sandy she knew. The loss of his beard had done something strange to him. Whenever she glanced at him, sideways, she had a sense that she was intruding. At the same time, she could not help noticing that his chin was recessive.

She was going to be a character-witness for him. How this had come about she scarcely knew now. How could she testify to his character when she had been in New Leeds exactly one month? But it was not the length of the association but the frequency that counted, Sandy had assured her. For the past two weeks, she had been with him every day. She had ridden pillion on his motorcycle and washed his hair in her basin and helped him deliver furniture, down the peninsula, for the New Leeds Craftsmen. They had gone to see Miles Murphy, while Dolly had waited outside, in the jeep, because of Martha, and they had taken a bottle to call on Sandy’s fourth wife, to persuade her to testify. They had been sharing a Sunday paper and doing the crosswords together. The fact that she had come here as a stranger, said Sandy, would make her testimony more impressive. She had no axe to grind, and the judge would see at a glance that there was no sexual involvement.

It was true; there was nothing between them. His second wife, Ellen, was coming back in December; he talked about that constantly, when he was not talking about the children and Barney, his lawyer. Her return, he said, could only mean one thing—she wanted him back. Her second husband had finally made a settlement on her, so that she was free now to remarry. Sandy was fixing up his house, to be ready for her; Dolly had been with him to buy curtains and look at some linoleum for the kitchen. He had even had the plumber around, to get an estimate on putting in heat, which he could pay for by selling some pond frontage to a developer. His excitement touched Dolly almost painfully. She had never been so close to a man, on the one hand, or been so disregarded, on the other. After the first day, he never even glanced at her paintings; as soon as he got to know her, his abrupt honest mind had simply dropped the idea that she could ever do anything serious. And after his first enquiries, he paid no heed to her sex. It never occurred to him, apparently, that Dolly could be jealous, or sad that their relationship would end when this “real woman” came back. He never considered her feelings, which made Dolly feel safe with him, though somewhat depreciated, like a thin dime nestling in his pocket, while he reckoned his future in gold. And yet it was wonderful—upsetting and enlightening—to be treated so objectively. Being with him, she had decided, was like posing naked for a life-class: you had to forget the
you.

But now, as she climbed the courthouse steps, looking up at the huge granite columns of the neo-classic front, she felt as if she were awakening from a dream. She had a slight hangover, and her eyes, which had sunk back into her head, had a bleary glazed look; she kept blinking them to focus on her surroundings, as if she had been playing Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. It was the first time she had had any contact with the law, and the courthouse, with its Civil War cannons, inspired her with terror. It belonged in a dark mill town of the nineteenth century—the kind of town she had been born in. Her sense of proportion protested at its presence here, overlooking a village green, a general store, and a double row of clapboard cottages, advertising rooms for tourists, home-made jellies, and sea-captain’s chowder. “Probate court” they were going to, and the very name evoked her childhood, her two aunts, wills, trustees, tombstones, granite faces.

With her coat-collar turned up and her hands thrust in her pockets, she stood under the portico, alone, taking no notice of the other people passing in and out, her eyes smarting with tears from the bitter wind. Sandy had hurried inside, to confer with his lawyer. When he came out and joined her, lighting his pipe, he was in jubilant spirits because his ex-wife, Clover, was late. Everybody else—the two lawyers, the witnesses—was present and accounted for, inside the gray building. Clover’s lawyer was pacing up and down the corridor and telling Sandy’s lawyer that he had half a mind to throw the case up. She had missed the morning bus, it seemed, and somebody had called the clerk of the court to say that she was hitchhiking. Her ex-stepmother—one of the old-timers here—was trying to calm the lawyer down by explaining Clover’s character. Sandy’s lawyer was very hopeful; he had finally got an affidavit from the New Leeds dentist about the state of the kids’ teeth. She had been feeding them on candy bars and cookies—too lazy to open a can.