Heart Troubles (19 page)

“Never mind, Mother,” Ellen said. “It was nothing at all.”

It was several days before Mrs. Carmichael mentioned her husband or her past again. Then one afternoon, meeting Ellen in the usual place at the end of her walk, she said, her eyes twinkling, “Well, how are you today? Have you forgotten? Is it yes or no today?”

“It's no today, I'm afraid,” Ellen said.

“Any more letters from him?”

“Yes, one.”

“Have you answered it?”

“No.”

“You're a namby-pamby!”

Ellen laughed. “Are you trying to play Cupid?” she asked.

“Don't be silly. I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. Everyone must work out his own salvation.” Then she switched the subject abruptly. “That was Edward's great fault,” she said.

“What was?”

“He let others make his decisions for him.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. He had a certain amount of courage but no grit, if you see the difference. When he died he died courageously. But it was without grit.”

“I don't believe you told me how he died,” Ellen said.

“Of course I didn't, I'm quite aware of that. Do you think I'd tell you everything about myself in one breath? You'd soon find me very uninteresting if I didn't hold out a little something. You wouldn't join me on my walks.”

“That's not true,” Ellen said. “I walk with you because I like you.”

“Say what you may,” Mrs. Carmichael said. “Well, Edward. Edward died in a duel.”

“A duel!”

“Yes.” She smiled slyly. “I thought you'd like that! Well, it's quite true. Poor man, he was shot in a duel.”

“How terrible!”

“It was long ago,” said Mrs. Carmichael. “And it was a foolish way to die. No grit. They both died. Edward was only twenty-nine, one of the youngest captains to sail out of Newburyport.”

“Who was the other man?”

“The Frenchman. A Frenchman who came here to the island.”

“What was the reason for it?” Ellen asked.

“Well,” Mrs. Carmichael said, “when I was a girl I was considered a beauty. Why beat around the bush? I was. Edward and I had been married only a little while, and the Frenchman came. I caught his eye …”

“Oh, I see,” said Ellen softly.

“The Frenchman. He was very headstrong—the French are a headstrong race. But it was not his idea to duel. Whose fault was it? I don't know. Some might say it was my fault—but I have my own reasons for knowing that it wasn't.”

“What did your father say?”

“Father? Mercy me, he was all for it! He gave them the pistols. He was right in the middle of it. He was in his glory!”

“And what did you do? Couldn't you stop them?”

“No. They made me stay out of it. I waited on the veranda. It was early in the morning. I waited. I heard the shots. Then Father came riding back on his horse to give me the news. Both of them. Each man killed with the other's first shot.”

“How dreadful for you!”

“Yes, I won't deny it was. Dreadful. But, then, the Almighty gives us years to forget how dreadful things are. Gracious, it was sixty years ago.”

Ellen put her arm around the old lady's shoulders. “My poor dear,” she said. “That's why you come back, then. The snows of youth …”

Mrs. Carmichael suddenly looked up at the sky. “Do you notice any difference?” she asked. “No? I do. In two weeks, maybe three, the hurricanes will be here. I can smell it. I can see it by the way the sky looks. The natives can tell it too. Have you noticed? They're bringing out the storm shutters for the hotel. It doses in another week, and I'll go back to Newburyport. Where will you go?”

“Home,” said Ellen sadly. “I don't want to go.”

“Afraid to see him again?”

“Yes.”

“Take what comes,” Mrs. Carmichael said. And then she added cryptically, “Take what comes—up to a certain point. Come along.”

And now, lying in her bed in that crystalline morning, thinking about it, Ellen tried to picture the long-ago scene. The young and beautiful Mrs. Carmichael on the veranda, in white (surely it must have been white), standing erect to hear the dreadful news as her father, the Danish planter, rode up, tall and dashing, on his horse. The scene was like watching an old-fashioned pantomime. From the open window she tried to hear the echo of pistol shots—two shots fired so close together they were almost one, but not quite.

Yesterday afternoon, right after lunch, there had been a knock on her door as Ellen was dressing for the beach. She threw a robe over her bathing suit and went to the door. Mrs. Carmichael was standing there. She had never come to Ellen's room before.

“Well, my dear,” the Old lady had said, “do you realize what day it is? This is our last full day here. Hurry up.”

“Where are we going?”

“I promised I'd take you on the beginning of my walk. Come along.”

“All right,” Ellen said. She slipped on a pair of sandals, and still wearing her yellow terry beach robe, followed Mrs. Carmichael along the narrow balcony that skirted the second floor of the hotel and down the broad stone steps that led to the terrace.

They started along a little path that led through a grove of banana trees and up the hill toward the sugar mill. “My father's mill,” Mrs. Carmichael said, pointing with her cane. “The lizards own it now.” They went a little farther. “The house was here,” she, said. “It burned in a great fire a long time ago.”

Then they went down the other side of the hill, through another banana grove, through a broad field where lazy donkeys grubbed in the dried brown grass. “All sugar cane once,” Mrs. Carmichael said. Then they came to a tall tree and Mrs. Carmichael stopped there.

“It was here,” she said. “It was under this very tree they fought.” She prodded the earth with the top of her black cane. “It was on this very patch of ground.” She looked upward. “Under this very sun, I suppose.” Her eyes gleamed brightly, but there were no tears.

“Why do you come here?” Ellen whispered. “Why do you torture yourself like this?”

“You!” Mrs. Carmichael snapped. “You said you came here to forget. I come here to remember!”

“But it was so long ago.”

“It doesn't make any difference,” she said. “I come here because I hope someday to die here, where he died.”

“But you mustn't,” Ellen said. “You mustn't do this to yourself.”

Mrs. Carmichael's voice was far away. “It was right here,” she said. “A duel, What a foolish way to die. I took Edward's body back to Newburyport. It was what he had wanted. It was winter, and everything was frozen. My heart was frozen too.”

“And you stayed in Newburyport to be near him.”

“No. Because I had nowhere else to go. I hated every memory of Newburyport, but I couldn't come back here while my father still lived. And he lived for a long time. I had to wait nearly thirty years for him to die—until, at last—”

“But I don't understand,” Ellen said.

“It was thirty years before I could come back to where he died. His grave is here somewhere. Father never marked it.”

“But who—”

“The Frenchman. I loved the Frenchman. Father made me marry Edward—a business arrangement. He was getting too old to command the lighter fleet himself, he said—though he went on commanding it for thirty years, after Edward. He wanted Edward. They were very much alike, Father and Edward. But Edward hated the tropics, didn't want to stay. But when Father gave me to Edward, he agreed to stay.”

“I see,” said Ellen.

“A duel! Father's idea. Only the Frenchman was supposed to die. But they both died, and—ah, well, that was all right too, I suppose, with Father. I used to see him whip the blacks with the flat side of a machete. Look,” Mrs. Carmichael said, turning suddenly to Ellen, “life is a sort of duel, it seems to me. Not a killing duel, but it is combat. You have to fight. A woman has to fight sometimes for what she wants. I never fought Father until it was too late. But you can fight if you have an ounce of grit. I mean marry that schoolteacher. Your mother is a fool. She's in love with that Kent man. Don't act so shocked. I've watched her. She'd marry him if he'd divorce his wife. But he won't. Go your own way. Marry the schoolteacher. Come on, let's get back. I don't feel like finishing my walk today.”

That night Mrs. Brier had come into Ellen's room. “Aren't you dressed, dear?” she asked. “Tonight's the farewell cocktail party. Everyone's gathering downstairs on the terrace.”

“I don't think I'll go, Mother,” Ellen said.

“Why not, for heaven's sake? Darling, you've been a stick-in-the-mud this whole trip. Won't you at least put in an appearance tonight?”

Ellen crossed the room to the window and looked out. Below, the cocktail party—the last cocktail party of the last night of the season—was under way. Mr. Kent, in Mrs. Carmichael's chair, was doing an imitation of Mrs. Carmichael, pretending to be pounding the stones with a cane. There was a roar of laughter.

“Hurry
up,
dear,” Mrs. Brier said.

“I have things to do tonight,” Ellen said.

“Ellen, what's come over you?” Mrs. Brier asked. “Will you please snap out of it and slip on a dress and come downstairs?”

“I'm going to write Jimmy a letter, for one thing,” she said.

“Ellen!”

“I'm going to write Jimmy a letter.”

“Please stop that sort of talk.”

Ellen turned and faced her mother. “I am,” she said. “And I'm going to tell him just what you're afraid I'm going to tell him.”

Mrs. Brier, in her blue silk print, stood there folding and unfolding her hands. Finally she turned on her heel and walked out of the room. “I wash my hands of you!” she said.

For a while Ellen had watched the party on the terrace. Mrs. Arnold arrived, wearing a bright native-print skirt. There was her mother with the Kents. It was growing noisy; voices were pitched higher, full of expectancy for what the evening held. Gathered there, by their very intimacy they seemed to draw a curtain around themselves that excluded everything beyond them. There is only us, they seemed to be saying. There is nothing but this terrace, this evening, these cocktails, this talk.

Standing at her window, Ellen noticed that everyone on the terrace faced inward, toward one another, their backs turned against everything that lay outside.

The sun was going down. No one watched it as it started its swift, spectacular slide into the sea. They were like a herd of pigeons in a park, Ellen thought, all pecking at the scattered kernels of conversation. This conceit pleased her, somehow. It would please Jimmy too. It was strange to think that in the morning they would all have flown away.

WATER WON'T QUENCH FIRE

Dolly looked out the living-room window and said, Now wasn't that the limit? It was going to rain. Wasn't that just like up-North weather? But when no one answered her she turned around and saw that Barbara had stepped into the kitchen and was out of earshot. With great care Dolly took a cigarette out of the silver box on the coffee table, lit it, and inhaled deeply. Then she picked up the box and examined the hallmark on the bottom. “Sterling!” she murmured appreciatively.

“Of course,” said Barbara, coming in again with two bottles of beer and glasses. “Jeff picked it out. Want a beer?”

“Oh, you know I don't drink, dear!” said Dolly.

Barbara set the bottles down. “You don't? Since when?”

“Oh, since a long, long time.”

“Not even a beer? To celebrate your arrival?”

Dolly lifted her left wrist and glanced at the tiny egg-shaped watch that dangled among the bracelets. “W-e-e-ll,” she said, extending the vowel and punctuating it with a sharp stream of smoke, “it
is
three o'clock.” She laughed nervously. “It's
almost
the cocktail hour. I'll have one, just one.”

Barbara emptied the beer into the glasses and handed one to Dolly. Dolly took her glass, and skirted the coffee table to the sofa. Barbara crossed the room to a small, pink velvet chair; with one hand, she fished inside the pocket of her pale-gray shantung shirt. “Got a cigarette?” she asked.

“Why, Barb, there are thousands of them here in this box.” She reached for the box, opened it, and tossed a cigarette to her sister.
“Catch!”
she yelled, and screamed hysterically as Barbara grabbed for it and missed.

Barbara reached down and picked up the cigarette from the floor.

“Hey,” she said, “take it easy.”

Dolly sat back in her chair, her shoulders shaking. “Sorry, Barb,” she said.

“You seem kind of nervous,” Barbara said, looking at her.

“Do I? Maybe I am. Seeing you again and all.”

Barbara picked up one of the table lighters and lit her cigarette. “Stale,” she said. “Jeff likes to keep cigarettes around in boxes. He thinks it's
classy,
or something. He doesn't mind if they get stale. He doesn't smoke.”

For a moment or two the two sisters sat smoking, studying each other, saying nothing. Dolly fidgeted with a silver charm bracelet. She was the older girl, but the soft afternoon light in the living room flattered her and softened her features, so that she might easily have been mistaken for the younger. Her hair, which was not its own color, was drawn back from her face more severely than Barbara's, which fell in natural blonde waves. And her skin, clouded now under makeup, was pale. Her eyes were deepened with mascara. Barbara, who was just twenty-five, had a fuller face and figure. Her mouth was possibly a bit too wide, but she did her best to correct this feature by holding her lips in a manner that might have suggested a pout—a pout on a pretty face. Still, if someone had walked into that room at that moment he would have seen at first glance two emphatic young women. But this impression would not have been final. Dolly's pallor would have emerged later; Barbara's wide, friendly smile would have erased the sulky look and replaced it with a look of unaffected naturalness.