The Dawning of the Day (17 page)

“Well, I'll get back to the harbor.” He picked up his sou'wester. “I'll call for you about eight Wednesday night.”

When he opened the door, Ralph and Rob fell in through it, locked in an extremely original wrestling hold. “Break it up!” one of them exploded. They got up, Ralph rubbing his ear and blushing. Rob looked quickly from Philippa to Steve.

“Hey, what are
you
doing here, Uncle Steve?” he asked. Ralph snickered, and Rob whirled on him, punching. Their laughter went rapidly from hysteria to idiocy. Philippa said, “No roughhouse in the schoolroom, boys.”

They fell apart, wet-eyed and panting. Steve said, “When I was that age my father said I should be kept in a barrel and fed through the bunghole.”

“That's a good idea,” said Philippa. “Or the sort of zoo with no fences but nice deep moats they couldn't possibly cross.”

The boys, trailing odd wheezes and gurgles and clumping unnecessarily in their rubber boots, hung up their damp jackets. Ralph sat down at his desk and became deeply involved with his English grammar. Rob squeezed by his uncle without looking at him and went out into the entry to ring the bell.

“I'll get out of here before anyone else has the high fantod at sight of me,” said Steve. Over Ralph's head they exchanged faint smiles that couldn't escape a tinge of intimacy. Steve went out and Philippa walked back to her desk. In the brief hiatus before the others came, she tried to think objectively of the sensation she had experienced when she came from the lane and saw Steve standing by the schoolhouse, and of her more frightening reaction to the dark entry. She had been like someone blindfolded and spun around three times and then told to find the doorknob. For a matter of seconds her world had gone off its axis.

If it had happened to someone else who told her about it afterward, she would have said with some amusement, “You didn't want to find your way out of the dark entry. You knew where the knob was, but you wouldn't let yourself find it.”

She felt a wash of heat rising over her body. You deserve to be uncomfortable, she told herself ruthlessly. You have read too much sensational drivel and taken it seriously.

She saw herself sitting at the desk in her russet dress, gracefully erect, her hands folded before her, her face serene, the events of the past until this moment wiped from it as if they had never taken place. This was the way to begin the afternoon, to begin a lifetime. Never carry into the next hour what should be left in the last.

Rob Salminen's view of fractions was hazy in the extreme. But his candor about his limitations as a scholar charmed Philippa while she deplored it. He was not ashamed of being in the third-grade arithmetic class while Schuyler Campion did knotty problems with the eighth grade. While the rest of the school worked, Rob dreamed, his round face with its tilted Tartar eyes and snub nose rapt with the visions that passed gloriously across his mind. Whenever he became conscious of Philippa's glance, he grinned, scratched his head, and shrugged, as if the whole question of study were a quaint fable which neither he nor Philippa believed. It was a pity to recall him to base reality. But there was the matter of his pass from the sixth grade to the seventh. She had until June to get him through three years of arithmetic. Studying his papers, which showed great ingenuity in getting nine-eighths or five-fourths out of a whole, she wondered what Mrs. Gerrish had done with her time.

Rob had agreed with Philippa from the first that something must be done about his work, if only to please her. Kathie had agreed to supervise his homework. “Helmi was going to help him once,” she said, “but Mark nearly blew his top listening. He said he didn't believe Rob could be so stupid. So he took it over. And then he said to keep Rob out of his reach after that because he couldn't be responsible for his own actions. But I won't have any trouble. I'm younger so I can stand more of him.” She went back to her seat, too sure of herself to swagger.

On this afternoon of the northeaster, Philippa kept Rob in. Clare Percy stayed to wash blackboards. She switched importantly about the room, doing her chores with elegant flourishes of elbows and wrists. The swing of her red bob and the firm clatter of her shoes expressed her efficiency. Sometimes she allowed herself a cynical smile at Rob's struggle. Philippa sat beside him, unveiling the arcanum of fractions by the most elemental means. The rain still rattled at the windows, but the fire mulled comfortably and the clock ticked with a sleepy beat. A sort of coziness settled over the room.

They were startled when the outer door slammed and the inner one flew open. Clare exclaimed dramatically and flapped her hand against her flat gingham chest. Rob and Philippa looked around. Young Charles stood there in his oil clothes, his skin moist and ruddy from the cold rain. He dropped his sou'wester on the floor, and grinned at Clare.

“Hello, Gingertop. You been up to deviltry and got kept in?”

Clare's freckles were orange against her blush. “I'm helping the teacher,” she said with dignity.

“Clare's a real help to me, too,” said Philippa.

“What about this one then?” He moved forward and lifted Rob's head by one long tow-colored lock. Rob said amiably, “I'm stupid.”

Clare stood watching, an eraser in each hand. Charles winked at her and she blushed again.

“I'm not entertaining today,” Philippa said. “Have you come on business?”

“Sure I've got business,” he said. “Real important business. We're going to have a time at the clubhouse Wednesday night. Fort and I got it up. I'll take you.”

Rob whistled. Clare turned her entranced gaze on Philippa, her lips parting over her big front teeth. Philippa stood quickly, gathering up her book and pencil.

“Wait a minute, Charles. . . . You can go now, Rob. Work on the things I've marked. You've done beautifully, Clare. Thank you very much.” She went up the center aisle to her desk. Charles had come in with such a happy assurance. At least she could clear the children out before she answered him.

Rob prepared noisily to leave, giggling when Charles told him he was a proper gorm. But Clare looked about her in a distracted way and then back at Charles as if he were the sun.

“I think you've done everything, Clare,” Philippa said. “I'm leaving in just a few minutes.” To reassure her that she was not being sent out just because Young Charles had come in, Philippa closed up the stove for the night. Clare went sulkily to get her boots and raincoat. It was an existence without a future, to be eleven and so cruelly plain, and to be called Gingertop by anyone as beautiful as Young Charles.

Philippa began to set her desk in order for the night. In a few moments she saw Clare running across the marsh. Rob was already out of sight.

“Now, Charles,” she said briskly. A change from good humor to resentment had come while her back was turned. He walked down the aisle and stood in front of the desk, his thumbs hooked in the bib of his oil pants, looking at her from under the black bar of eyebrows.

“I'm not one of the school kids. So don't talk as if I was.”

“I didn't mean to,” she said, trying to sound remorseful. “I'm sorry. It's just that I've been using that tone all day. Occupational disease, I guess.” She began to straighten the books between the leather-covered book ends that had been Justin's. Now I am being a coward, she thought. And why? He can't have everything he wants in this world; he can't walk in here and tell a woman of thirty what is to be done, and expect to be humored simply because he wants it so much. Her fingers rested on the rough binding of
Leaves of Grass
. If she opened the book, Justin's writing would be inside, but that would be no help to her now.

Charles's hand shot over the books and caught her wrist. For a moment she was too astonished to speak. She gazed quietly at his hand, as if she were making a study of the broad back with the bronze-tipped hairs, the sheen of the tight knuckles, the arrogant thumb. Then she sat back in her chair and looked at him.

“You're stopping the circulation, Charles.”

“Will you listen to me, then?” He dropped her hand and came around the desk. His full lower lip moved out sulkily.

“Do you think I should listen, after that?”

“Then I'll be gettin' out of here!” He turned angrily with a crackle of oilskins.

“Wait,” she said in a low voice. “You came to ask me to go to the dance, and I didn't want to answer in front of the children. You know how they'd love to carry it. I'm sorry, Charles, but I've already accepted another invitation.”

“Fort?” he demanded.

She had to smile. “Not Fort. Your uncle Steve.”

He stared at her in incredulous outrage. “How in Tophet's name did he know about it?” he demanded hoarsely. “We only got it up this morning!” His eyes half shut. “Ayeh. I remember now. We were having a mug-up at Jo's. He was knitting trap heads in by the radio. I thought he was listening to news and weather. Well, I made a horse's—a fool out of myself, didn't I?”

“There'll be other dances, won't there? But if you feel you've been had, I won't go at all.”

He shrugged savagely. “All right, all right. I'll be a good loser. But right here and now I'll put my oar in for the next dance.” He glared at her.

“That's a date then.”

“Sorry I mohaggled you,” he muttered.

“I know you won't do it again.”

He said something else she didn't understand and went back to the door. He bent down and picked up his sou'wester; when he straightened up, he smiled at her. The hostility might never have been there at all.

“Always a tomorrow, anyway. Huh?”

“Always a tomorrow,” she repeated, and smiled too. If there was a tenderness about her, it was because at the moment when he left he seemed hardly older than Eric.

T
he weather turned fair and seasonably cool after the storm. Fresh breezes blew across the island, not enough to keep the men from hauling but sufficient to keep the water in a continual diamond sparkle. At recess the children kept warm by practicing square dances in the schoolyard. Everyone who knew the figures would be sure of partners on Wednesday night.

Sky Campion brought his harmonica to school. He sat on the steps, tapping his foot and playing “The Irish Washerwoman” over and over while the others clapped, swung, and promenaded through the dances. Sometimes Rob played so that Sky could take his turn at practicing. He danced with the preoccupied expression of a young scientist, even while he was swinging one of the Percys so fast she whitened under her freckles. Nobody was too self-conscious to take part; even the smallest ones were lined up and shunted through the figures. Entirely engrossed, the most gangling of the boys moved with the innocent grace of all young creatures. Kathie responded fluidly to the rhythm, even when she wasn't dancing. Peggy Campion moved through “Hull's Victory” with the proud, somber detachment of an Infanta performing a court pavane.

Everybody talked about the dance in one way or another. Helen Campion had come in after supper the night before. “My Lord, if they had a dance twice a week, 'twould suit me fine! We haven't had a thing in that clubhouse since Labor Day. Herring! That's all I've heard for weeks. I told Foss that if any man on this island comes in tomorrow night and says there's herring in the harbor, I'll shoot him myself,
personally
!”

She stamped her foot and flung herself back in the chair, shaking with laughter. Philippa laughed too, it was impossible to resist. She imagined Helen as a girl, strapping and handsome, going to dances and flinging herself headlong into the music and noise as a swimmer dives into the sea. She wondered if Helen were ever intimidated by the poise of her blasé daughter, Peggy.

Suze twisted her forehead and blinked at her knitting as if their laughter interfered with the counting of stitches. Asanath said, “I b'lieve you
would
shoot him, Helen. I b'lieve you would. I never saw anybody so set on dancing as you.”

“And light on my feet, Asa! Light as goosedown, for all my size!” Her eyes flashed. She rocked back again, triumphant.

Viola Goward had come in quietly, and now she stood in the kitchen doorway. “You'll be all worn out before you get there,” she said dryly. “Shouting like you'd been in a rumshop.” Smiling mysteriously, she came into the room. She dropped her coat and adjusted a loose pin in her knot of sandy hair. Her gaze flashed around the kitchen, probing even the shadows outside the lamplight, and came back to Philippa.

“Got you a beau for tomorrow night?”

“Of course,” said Philippa, laughing.

Asanath pulled on his pipe. “Shouldn't think you'd ask such personal questions, Vi. Why don't you wait and see?”

“Oh, I'll know who it is before the time comes! Likely I know now.” Her air of omniscience was cheerfully arrogant. “But I'll keep my mouth shut about it.”

“For once,” Asanath murmured. Vi pretended not to hear. Helen said gayly, as if she were trying to regain her mood of anticipation, “If it's a clear night, there'll be a crowd over from Brigport. I like plenty of couples on the floor for ‘Lady of the Lake.'”

“Be plenty of cuddling going on outside too,” said Vi. “At the last dance you couldn't go out back without seeing nature in the raw under every spruce tree.”

Helen said, “Oh, Vi, it wasn't
that
bad! What'll Philippa think of us?”

“What indeed?” Viola's eyes challenged Philippa with a spirited cynicism. “She's human, isn't she? She's young. She knows what happens at dances, whether it's our kind or the fancy ones she's used to. Liquor is liquor, and people are people.”

“That's an incontestable point, Mrs. Goward,” Philippa said, smiling. “People are people, all right. But I can't tell you much about dances these days because I haven't been to one for years.”