The Wintering (41 page)

“Because,” he said, “someone your age couldn't want physically someone mine? If that's the reason, you should have told me before. I've never wanted to disgust you. And I hate this stinking humility, too.”

“You've never disgusted me. I couldn't have stayed if you had.”

“Then it's a young man. You should have told me. I think you're not sure you love him, but you want to marry him. And don't want to hurt me by saying so. You have always been tender.”

He veered away, too intent on finding a taxi. They stared in frustration at those passing, which appeared empty, and then had passengers on closer view. “You must have known,” he said, from a short distance along the curb, “that knowing you the way I do, I'd suspect. It only seems to me, Amy, you wanted me to know, without having to tell me.”

He had found an excuse for her. Billy Walter was a way out of things she did not want to do. She silently thanked Jeff for never thinking no young man had asked her to marry him.

He said, “You're still running, damn it. But it makes a lot that was confusing understandable. Some of your silences, for instance.”

Fear, mostly, had made her silent, and he ought to know that. Wind came in a strong gust around a corner bringing random things, a blown-off man's hat, a sheet of newspaper, a candy wrapper. Stonily, Amy watched them fritter themselves to a stop against a building.

“Maybe you're never going to grow up,” he had said brusquely.

She was angrier about that. “There's a taxi, at last,” she said, and opened the door before Jeff could. She stared out the opposite window, while he got in behind her. Her legs were stretched toward the heater's comfort, a warm gust of air blowing from beneath the front seat. Other pedestrians stared at her from the sidewalk. “We were lucky,” she said.

“We were lucky,” he said, “to have had all we had.” He put his hands toward her lap. “Now, I've mislaid my gloves. Maybe you'll warm my hands.”

She covered both with her own. “You'll have to get some more gloves,” she said. “You are cold.”

He said then, wryly, “I wouldn't have any reason, then, to expect a young woman to hold my hands, would I?”

“Of course,” she said shortly. As if it were a magnet, the back of the driver's neck held her attention. Jeff sat glumly, too. The day was the color of ashes, mist like their fine sift falling. When they arrived, the tailor's shop was inexplicably closed, and in darkness seemed firegutted, ruined. Already despondent, she felt responsible for whatever had happened; this too was her fault somehow, she felt, guilty over treating Jeff badly. Solitude seemed safety. She watched unhappily the taxi go off. “I wish you had kept it,” she said. “Though maybe you'll find one easier here. But as I said, I really have to wash my hair.”

Jeff reached out and pulled her coat collar tighter against the drizzle. She said, barely audible, “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You were generous, Amy. I didn't give you enough credit. You did give and when you didn't want to. In time, something will come back. Never be sorry, or ashamed, you accepted an old man into your experience. Someday, it'll all be a memory. As fine a one for you as for me, I hope.”

“I never wanted to look back and be sorry I'd been afraid to know you,” she said. “But I want to see you, still.”

He said, “I'm never going to believe there was too much distaste. Afterward, you'd hold my hand. The countryside will have memories of you as long as I live. A beer can tossed away under a tree will make me think of our woods.”

“And butterflies will,” she said, dreamy and enumerative and singsong as a recitative child. At a sudden intenser shower of rain, she thrust her hands into a hoop over her head and might have been a child about to begin some inept ballet.

He made signs of leaving. “I've known all along I'd have to suffer. It doesn't make it any easier.” His voice was jerky. “I won't keep on like this, though. If you want to see me again, it'll be on my terms.”

At a point when Amy avoided looking at him, he had signalled a cab, meandering on the avenue. It came with funereal slowness down the block. Amy tried to think of some restraining remark but, as if suddenly, he had disappeared. She stared in an amazed way before darting upstairs, like a scared animal. When she entered the soundless, and even odorless, house, the landlord, having seen her come in, opened his door. He thrust toward her a letter so abruptly, it seemed to hang midair before Amy touched it. “Special came,” he said, and went back in his room.

The envelope when she opened it in her room produced a heavy white card with a detachable purple ribbon. It bore the name of her father's dancing school in gilt letters. How sad, she thought, that people would come there to pay more for companionship than for instruction. She pictured the place as ostentatious and full of gilt mirrors, with hostesses wearing dresses tight across the rear. Both her father and Billy Walter would enjoy dancing with them. At the bottom of the card, her father had scrawled that he hoped she would come for the opening.

She went downstairs and telephoned about a plane. Coming back, she knelt and drew from beneath the bed her suitcase, stifling a scream as a pale spider ran toward her. But, steady after a moment, she began to pack. She glanced several times at the scrawl along the bottom of the card. Two to tango and all that, pet! Come if you can. Nicknames were touching; that small one might be sending her home. However, her father was unsure of himself and had added,
Billy Walter
says please come.

The landlord remained silent, after opening his door, and heard without interest that she was leaving. She stood with a scarf over her head, more like some impecunious immigrant who was arriving, bundles and a suitcase and a paper sack at her feet. The flicker of his eyes toward them made Amy look down, to see she had a run in her stocking. Her mother would smile and say it didn't matter, make some excuse about stockings running more easily all the time. Then, she would want to know how, possibly, her baby had managed to get home with all this stuff? Amy, in giving the landlord her forwarding address, wondered if the tailor would ever inquire about her. A taxi drew up with its lights wavery in mist, turning into fog. She piled in her things and, driven away, glanced back once toward the place she had lived. Soon, in the window, where the landlord passed now as a shadow, the Room for Rent sign would reappear.

Later, he thought Amy had been anticipating a call. That would be the reason she had stood so hesitantly, and so long, outside his door, to explain her leaving, why she had looked so expectantly around and back up the stairs. The landlord had supposed her wondering whether she had left anything behind. Customarily curt to late callers, he gave out her address and answered that the caller was welcome. A gentleness in the older man's voice had coaxed his own.

“Have you met anybody?” Edith said. “And what's happened to your coat? And, baby, how did you manage alone with all that stuff?”

“I had to manage,” Amy said flatly. “There was no one else to.”

Staring appraisingly, Edith said, “Your hair's longer.” They exchanged a glance, in silence. “You're thinner,” Amy said. “You must have been sticking to your diet.” What, Edith wondered, if she's grown, is to happen next? Her father had parked the car and came down the airport's ramp with a bright smile, wearing a blue ascot, an addictive color to match his eyes, but they had ashy and noticeable shadows beneath them; Edith had written he had not been well. “Have you grown?” he cried. “You seem taller.”

“You haven't seen me in so long,” she said, “and my skirt's shorter, that makes my legs longer. How about putting me to work in your dancing school?”

“We like 'em a little fatter other places,” he said and stopped his hand from giving her a swat across the rear, which Amy wished he had done. Grown softer, his face seemed to give way when she pressed it with hers and his cheekbone, sharper, left a smarting place, where she raised her hand. Her father. Home. She looked at everything, speculatively. A peach, a swell girl, the icing on the cake, the whole cheese—these were the things her father called her for coming home, and mentioned them all in the short time it took them to reach the car. He said them almost all in one breath. On the front seat they sat, three abreast, a unit formed again. Her father grandly held the steering wheel, with hands whose nails were highly buffed and shone. He mentioned that, incidentally, the dancing school was on the way home. Of course then, they must go by to see it. Hearing her mother's grateful sigh, Amy realized they wanted little from her and expected nothing. How selfish she must have been. Approaching the school, she stared ahead as the road generously widened.

Though possibly the building could have been worse, it was hard to imagine it so. The façade was modern, and the school appeared a tuberous outcropping of light, on a tree-lined street of old houses, which had now a huddled-down and almost embarrassed look. Amy and Edith climbed apprehensively purple-carpeted steps between walls painted geranium pink, and found the ballroom emitted a sensational glitter, a turbulence to shame storms. Spangles shaking as quicksilver on the hostesses' gowns, hanging along a corridor, added to the feeling. Last-minute workmen stored hammers in the kangaroolike pouches of their work clothes and seemed to tiptoe away, as though feeling they did not belong.

On the following morning, the leaves lay flat in rain puddles, with a look of having drowned. After waking and glancing at the clock, Amy thought how the tailor would be opening his shop and heard reminiscent horns coming up like cries from the Village's streets. Should she have stayed in New York, and had she been short on persistence, and had she given up or given in? Had she waited longer would something have happened, she wondered.

Edith had put bronze chrysanthemums in a copper bowl. Amy, left alone, went about the house, her parents having spared her lunch with city officials. Billy Walter would pick her up for the dancing school's champagne opening, at five. Tugged open, the French doors in the living room revealed violently green winter grass and that raindrops had given to tree bark the texture of frogs' backs. A sluggish wind was inept against matted piles of wet leaves; among them were only a few colorful ones. Along the driveway, oaks stubbornly held all their foliage, which was just beginning to crackle and to brown. Here was conflict and confusion, winter intruding but fall not yielding. All the chrysanthemums in Edith's garden had not dropped their blooms. Violets peeked from beneath leaves yet to be raked. Should she, Amy wondered, standing by Edith's pretty arrangement, have tried another coast, or some more distant place?

Lopsided beneath his pouch's weight, the postman caught sight of her behind the door's glass panes and ceased whistling. “Haven't seen you in a long time,” he said, extending mail, leaving unspoken between them the question, Where had she been?

Wherever Amy went, friends came forward to hug her, asking immediately, Had she met anyone? To marry, they meant. Her smile was always hesitant, which made her look mysterious, and made them less worried. On her first afternoon home, Billy Walter had come in and lifted her off her feet in a hug. This afternoon at the reception, he held her hand. As if painted on with one of Edith's little brushes, Amy's smile was set and represented pleasure—a doll's face, or a puppet's. The corners of her mouth thinned with smiling, her cheeks burned bright red with effort. No one could help thinking she was having a good time. Billy Walter, feeling the trembling in her hand, thinking he caused it, was not surprised later when she threw herself on him rather desperately when they parked.

Soon their dates began to take place in motels. He said once that he put into his love-making all the love he could, and Amy felt grateful. But she had feelings of sadness afterward, while Billy Walter strode about busily, filling the dingy room in which he was dressing, having a drink. She lay inertly asking him questions (to his secret annoyance) about himself: had he had a happy childhood; what were his feelings about his mother and father and all his sisters (she liked the idea of being drawn into a large family), what childhood pets did he most miss; did he believe in God; how had he decided to go into the insurance business? When his answers were short and brusque, she would gaze sorrowfully at him, as he seemed not to worry in the least that one person could never know another fully.

Handling insurance for the dancing school, Billy Walter came by frequently in the late afternoon to see her father. Edith would do crewel work and the men would drink and talk about money, and while blue and orange flames leaped in the gas heater, they were all comfortable together and grew drowsy. Shaking herself from reveries, Amy made herself look wide-eyed, attentive to the stock market's future, knowing she need never worry about it. Her days were a repetitive confrontation of clothes, and not only did she spend time arranging them, she shopped for more. She and Billy Walter were taken as a couple and invited everywhere together. Relieved and hopeful, eventually fairly certain, her friends and Edith's waited for an engagement. They thought Amy wore less an air which always had been to them unsettling, though never had they been able to give it its name: puzzlement. About what could Amy have been puzzled? they would have asked.

After Christmas shopping, Dea stopped by, wearing her perennial nubby navy blue coat. Her hair was greyer, but her face bloomed with information not offered and questions not asked when she met Amy. “You seem to have grown,” she said.

“My skirt's shorter, that's why.”

Dea and Edith closed themselves too obviously into the kitchen to drink coffee, but Amy heard Dea's first whisper, “He's back!” They became busy about the room when Amy swung through the door. Edith had been baking cookies. They all bent to the oven while she drew them out, turning full attention to whether sugar should be sprinkled on when they were cooled, or still hot. Having offered an opinion, Amy pulled on blond pigskin gloves. “The sherry party's from three to five. Then, I'm taking dresses to be shortened,” she said.