After the Fire (14 page)

“I know,” Red agreed. “But I can’t get off island to take the written test until things quiet down a bit: Mrs. Forbes just home from the hospital and Mrs. Hawkins too out of it even to help her son plan a memorial service and Miss James in bed with a cold. I’m running from one to another with no time in between.”

“Should I do something?” Karen asked.

“Miss James is the only one who maybe just needs company. But you have to remember to shout or it’s no good.”

“I know,” Karen said, “and I’m not very good at that.”

“Practice,” Red ordered as she negotiated one of the island’s worst curves with relaxed skill.

“Don’t think you’re good enough at it until you can outguess cars all around you,” Karen warned her.

“I don’t know whether I’m going to like that or not.”

“You probably will,” Karen said. “Why not try turning around here? It’s safe but nasty.”

Karen watched her pupil with some pride. Even her very limited experience in teaching anyone anything had led her to expect odd resistances. In Red there were none. She wasn’t reckless. She trusted Karen’s judgment both to set and to stretch limits. Perhaps more rare was the relationship between them. They seemed to have no hidden agendas.

“I can’t stay for coffee today,” Red said. “I promised Mrs. Forbes’ daughter I’d go over there.”

“What’s she like?”

“She paints herself up just the way her mother does. They seem to get along.”

“That’s hard to imagine,” Karen said.

“I know. She’s never had a good word to say about her kids, and this one turns up to help like she really wanted to.”

“There’s no justice in the world,” Karen grumbled.

The renewed friendliness in the store also irritated her, and she barely responded to greetings that weren’t forthcoming when Red was with her. The lunch soup was mushroom and nearly ready. Karen ordered two servings to go while she drank her coffee. Then she drove over to see Miss James.

Hers was one of the older cottages on the island, most of which had been built by their owners with varying degrees of success. The site for this one was its best feature, up on a knoll on the land side of the road, high enough to catch glimpses of the sea in the winter months yet sheltered by an even higher hill to the weather side of it. Few earlier inhabitants of the island had chosen to settle right by the sea, and having lived at its restless edge for a year, Karen understood the desire to be a little removed from it. Here in Miss James’ wild little garden nothing tugged at your attention. It was a peaceful pocket of sunlight in which fragrances lingered free of brine, a place where someone should sit writing poems. But it was empty, and the cottage had the closed-up look of drawn curtains and firmly shut doors.

Karen banged loudly on the back door and then opened it into a long narrow kitchen that had probably been a back porch before it was incorporated into the house. An unwashed cup sat on the counter by the sink next to a small bowl of withering fruit. The small living room was orderly, dark and dusty. But a modestly promising light shone from the bedroom beyond.

“Miss James?” Karen shouted as she neared the bedroom door.

“Who is it?” Miss James called, her voice resonant with cold.

“Karen,” she answered as she entered the doorway. “I brought you some soup from the store. I wondered if you’d like company for lunch.”

Miss James was sitting up against a wealth of pillows, her shoulders covered with a densely embroidered shawl. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright with fever.

“How nice,” Miss James said. “I do get bored being put to bed like this. The doctor seems to think a sneeze could break a rib, the slightest chill bring on pneumonia. I could as easily die of the doldrums. Red put you up to this, didn’t she?”

“She said you might like company.”

“She has too many of us on her hands this week. At least the others have children helping out.”

Karen liked the mix of irritation and approval in Miss James’ tone. She wanted to be more possessive of Red than she knew she had any right to be.

Karen went back to the kitchen to reheat the soup. While she waited, she opened a cupboard to find bowls. The china, though in frugal supply, was nevertheless good. She wondered if it was remnants of family belongings or things Miss James had collected with a fine eye in rummage sales and secondhand shops. The soup bowls were translucent Japanese china, three of them. Into such bowls Karen should be pouring a thin broth with a fine piece of seaweed, a square of bean curd, a little green onion—not this hearty homemade cream of mushroom. Well, she could do that another time. The well-traveled Miss James would not turn up her nose at things foreign the way Milly Forbes did.

“Have you ever been to Japan?” Karen asked as she brought in the lunch.

“No, I bought those in San Francisco before the Second World War it would have been, before the
disgrace
when all their shops were shut down.”

“They’re beautiful,” Karen said.

“Of what little I have, everything is,” Miss James said, her taste having been her own for so long that it would naturally seem to her universal.

As Karen looked around, she could see that nothing was makeshift. The bureau was an antique without missing brass or a chip, the headboard of the single bed a gleaming backdrop to the remarkably upright old woman. The one chair in the room, on which Karen sat, made her feel more upright than usual, too. It was a tiny bedroom, uncrowded and uncluttered.

“I assume this is good,” Miss James said. “I can’t taste a thing, which gives me only the most basic motive for feeding myself.”

Karen knew what an effort it was for herself, even with a good appetite, to feed herself a decent meal. But she imagined Miss James’ habits of survival were so ingrained that she’d never inadvertently starve herself.

“It is good,” Karen thought to say but not loudly enough, and, when she repeated herself, she knew Miss James wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

“You seem to be very good at living alone,” Karen shouted.

“I’ve had enough practice,” Miss James replied.

“I’m better at it than I was,” Karen said, “but I don’t think I’ll ever really like it.”

“It’s lost some of its appeal by now,” Miss James said. “Nobody seems to disapprove any more. In my day it was quite a balancing act to live alone and stay respectable. Whenever I felt bored or lonely, I could always remind myself how daring I was being. I still do feel daring,” Miss James said, and laughed.

“Well, you are,” Karen said.

“Red doesn’t think so,” Miss James said more thoughtfully. “I used to tell her about all the places I’d been, all the different schools I’d taught in. I wanted to encourage her to think about her own life. Do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘I wouldn’t want to have to keep running away.’ That gave me something to think about. I was a runaway, of course, and that took courage of a kind, but the bravest sort of people may be those who can be themselves wherever they are, even at home.”

“But you probably have to be a certain sort of person from a certain sort of home to be able to do that,” Karen said. “I wonder if Red ever had a nest to be pushed out of or fly from.”

“She won’t say,” Miss James said with mild irritation. “Well, I didn’t say either until there was no chance that somebody would send me back.”

“Would you like a bit of fruit?” Karen asked.

“What’s that?”

“Fruit?”

“No thank you, child. I’ll rest now.”

Old people, like children, could simply say. Karen took the bowls back into the kitchen and washed up. She thought of Miss James taking pleasure in her own things, the choices of a lifetime. For Karen things were either horribly impersonal or belonged to someone else, like the things she used where she lived now. Was one of the secrets of living alone beginning to accumulate around you what suited and pleased you? She had moved from her father’s house to Peggy’s, from Peggy’s to the welcome clutter of the beach cottage. Karen had never bought anything for her own domestic comfort. She hardly knew what her own tastes were. She might be as bad at choosing furniture as she had been at choosing a lover—selecting a handsome chair which would in the long run give her chronic back pain.

Karen sighed as she put the lovely bowls back among the other treasures of the cupboard. She was coming to understand that if she was to have a life, it must be a deliberate one. The exercising of choice at every level still seemed an exhausting and unnatural business, like collecting stage props before a play could begin. But unless she began, she might wait in the wings of her own life forever.

H
ENRIETTA WOKE FROM A
dream in which she had been frantically pushing that demented old man away from her as he rose above her with the eyes of a rearing horse. She was shaken and exhausted. Even the great cedar outside her window had become a menace. She might be losing her mind.

When she saw her navy suit laid out on the chair, she remembered that Georgie had done that for her the night before so that dressing to catch the morning ferry would be less rushed.

“I can’t go,” Henrietta said aloud.

In her own voice she could hear the echo of Sadie’s refusal to go into the room where the coffin was, her refusal to go to the grave. She herself was not being asked to do either of those hard things. Well-supported by son and daughter-in-law, all she had to do was listen to a few people pay tribute to her husband as he had once been. If she wasn’t up to staying for a glass of sherry afterwards, Georgie would take her out to the car, and Hart Jr. would deal with the guests.

How unlike herself she felt, her body forcing her reluctant spirit out of bed when for years she had relied on her spirit to defy her aging slowness. She felt like a tank without a driver lumbering about her room until she happened on her robe hanging from a hook on the door. She put it on, listening to discover whether the bathroom was already occupied.

Hart Jr. was shaving at the kitchen sink, using a mirror still there, put up by his father for just such mornings as this to alleviate traffic in the bathroom. Georgie, whose bones had just begun to define her face, moved around him preparing a breakfast which she’d also set out the night before. There was too much thoughtfulness in Georgie’s efficiency for it to feel intrusive. Henrietta was grateful they’d vetoed breakfast on the ferry in favor of local eggs, soft-boiled, and decent coffee at home.

Neither of them looked around as she went into the bathroom or when she came out of it, leaving her a sense of privacy until she was dressed and in as much possession of herself as she could be.

Inspecting herself in the mirror, she knew she should have washed her hair. She reached into her scarf drawer before she remembered that this was not a day for glowing color, but she must have something to cover her aging throat, something to distract people from the lifeless hair and chalky skin. She had one scarf with only the thinnest border of kelly green. It didn’t do what she needed, but it was an improvement.

Neither Hart Jr. nor Georgie asked her if she’d slept well. Each kissed her on the cheek, and her son held her chair as his father had taught the boys to do when they were still quite small. The flicker of Peter’s boyish presence for a second confused her. Why should it disorient her now when Henrietta alone was used to living in a kaleidoscope of time, her husband and children richly inhabiting her only seemingly solitary life? Hart Jr. and Georgie actually there with her inhibited and distorted her sense of memory, as if it were some demented impropriety she had indulged in. Perhaps it was. Living this day in the shallow present was the only way she could get through it, and they would help her with that.

“These eggs are wonderful,” Georgie said. “I forgot what real eggs taste like.”

Henrietta liked and approved of Georgie though she was part of the fabric of Hart Jr.’s life that made him a stranger. The moment he had told them he wanted to marry, Henrietta felt a door shut. She had never so much as tried the handle since, and she wouldn’t even now when she knew that her son must have a grief of his own for a father who had not been allowed to squander all his paternal love on this remaining son, a son who had taken only what was good for him and no more.

“You must eat your breakfast, Mother,” Hart Jr. said to her.

“Yes,” she agreed, taking up her forgotten spoon. “I don’t seem able to keep my mind on anything.”

Georgie buttered her toast for her, so absent-minded a motherly gesture it did not seem condescending.
Take comfort, take comfort,
a voice urged Henrietta. If she could be a good child through this day, she could manage.

At the dock, Hart Jr. got out of the car and walked over to greet a carload of men, young Riley and Adam among them. Homer was driving. Henrietta hadn’t seen them so dressed up since Dickie’s funeral.

“I wonder where they’re off to,” she said to Georgie.

“The service,” Georgie said.

“For heaven’s sake!” Henrietta exclaimed.

But of course they had known that other Hart who had belonged to the Chamber of Commerce, run the bingo games at the Lions’ Fiesta, raised money to improve the dump. They somehow could remember a man who had become a fiction to her in these last days against the harsh reality of the man who had actually died and now howled and clawed at her consciousness, insisting on being acknowledged and mourned.

On the boat, they all spoke to her, but then they kept a respectful distance. She understood that they simply wanted her to know that they were there. She had helped them bury their dead. They would help her now to bury hers. But they didn’t know, they didn’t know who had died! Then for a moment she remembered Riley’s young unshaven face when she asked him if he might say a few words about Dickie and how bitterly he had answered her at first. Had the drunken self-destructive Dickie been staggering around in his mind blotting out the friend, the hard worker, the hopeful builder of his own house?

They had all seen Hart helpless before she’d finally been forced to give up his care. Hart Jr. and Georgie had dutifully gone to visit him in hospital when he hadn’t the faintest idea who they were. Yet here they all were, ready to mourn his loss without apparent hypocrisy.