The Progress of Love (5 page)

“Why is it?” I said. “Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words ‘hippie’ or ‘commune’ and all you guys can think about is screwing! As if there wasn’t anything at all behind it but orgies and fancy combinations and non-stop screwing! I get so sick of that—it’s all so stupid it just makes me sick!”

In the car, on the way home from the hotel, we sat as before—the men in the front seat, the women in the back. I was in the middle, Beryl and my mother on either side of me. Their heated bodies
pressed against me, through cloth; their smells crowded out the smells of the cedar bush we passed through, and the pockets of bog, where Beryl exclaimed at the water lilies. Beryl smelled of all those things in pots and bottles. My mother smelled of flour and hard soap and the warm crêpe of her good dress and the kerosene she had used to take the spots off.

“A lovely meal,” my mother said. “Thank you, Beryl. Thank you, Mr. Florence.”

“I don’t know who is going to be fit to do the milking,” my father said. “Now that we’ve all ate in such style.”

“Speaking of money,” said Beryl—though nobody actually had been—“do you mind my asking what you did with yours? I put mine in real estate. Real estate in California—you can’t lose. I was thinking you could get an electric stove, so you wouldn’t have to bother with a fire in summer or fool with that coal-oil thing, either one.”

All the other people in the car laughed, even Mr. Florence.

“That’s a good idea, Beryl,” said my father. “We could use it to set things on till we get the electricity.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Beryl. “How stupid can I
get
?”

“And we don’t actually have the money, either,” my mother said cheerfully, as if she was continuing the joke.

But Beryl spoke sharply. “You wrote me you got it. You got the same as me.”

My father half turned in his seat. “What money are you talking about?” he said. “What’s this money?”

“From Daddy’s will,” Beryl said. “That you got last year. Look, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. If you had to pay something off, that’s still a good use, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter. We’re all family here. Practically.”

“We didn’t have to use it to pay anything off,” my mother said. “I burned it.”

Then she told how she went into town in the truck, one day almost a year ago, and got them to give her the money in a box she had brought along for the purpose. She took it home, and put it in the stove and burned it.

My father turned around and faced the road ahead.

I could feel Beryl twisting beside me while my mother talked. She was twisting, and moaning a little, as if she had a pain she couldn’t suppress. At the end of the story, she let out a sound of astonishment and suffering, an angry groan.

“So you burned up money!” she said. “You burned up money in the stove.”

My mother was still cheerful. “You sound as if I’d burned up one of my children.”

“You burned their chances. You burned up everything the money could have got for them.”

“The last thing my children need is money. None of us need his money.”

“That’s criminal,” Beryl said harshly. She pitched her voice into the front seat: “Why did you let her?”

“He wasn’t there,” my mother said. “Nobody was there.”

My father said, “It was her money, Beryl.”

“Never mind,” Beryl said. “That’s criminal.”

“Criminal is for when you call in the police,” Mr. Florence said. Like other things he had said that day, this created a little island of surprise and a peculiar gratitude.

Gratitude not felt by all.

“Don’t you pretend this isn’t the craziest thing you ever heard of,” Beryl shouted into the front seat. “Don’t you pretend you don’t think so! Because it is, and you do. You think just the same as me!”

My father did not stand in the kitchen watching my mother feed the money into the flames. It wouldn’t appear so. He did not know about it—it seems fairly clear, if I remember everything, that he did not know about it until that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Florence’s Chrysler, when my mother told them all together. Why, then, can I see the scene so clearly, just as I described it to Bob Marks (and to others—he was not the first)? I see my father standing by the table in the middle of the room—the table with the drawer in it for knives and forks, and the scrubbed oilcloth on top—and there
is the box of money on the table. My mother is carefully dropping the bills into the fire. She holds the stove lid by the blackened lifter in one hand. And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be protecting her. A solemn scene, but not crazy. People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.

How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them. I haven’t stopped believing it. But I have stopped telling that story. I never told it to anyone again after telling it to Bob Marks. I don’t think so. I didn’t stop just because it wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. I stopped because I saw that I had to give up expecting people to see it the way I did. I had to give up expecting them to approve of any part of what was done. How could I even say that I approved of it myself? If I had been the sort of person who approved of that, who could do it, I wouldn’t have done all I have done—run away from home to work in a restaurant in town when I was fifteen, gone to night school to learn typing and bookkeeping, got into the real-estate office, and finally become a licensed agent. I wouldn’t be divorced. My father wouldn’t have died in the county home. My hair would be white, as it has been naturally for years, instead of a color called Copper Sunrise. And not one of these things would I change, not really, if I could.

Bob Marks was a decent man—good-hearted, sometimes with imagination. After I had lashed out at him like that, he said, “You don’t need to be so tough on us.” In a moment, he said, “Was this your room when you were a little girl?” He thought that was why the mention of the sexual shenanigans had upset me.

And I thought it would be just as well to let him think that. I said yes, yes, it was my room when I was a little girl. It was just as well to make up right away. Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or
later. I wonder if those moments aren’t more valued, and deliberately gone after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.

Stella’s father built the place as a summer house, on the clay bluffs overlooking Lake Huron. Her family always called it “the summer cottage.” David was surprised when he first saw it, because it had none of the knotty-pine charm, the battened-down coziness, that those words suggested. A city boy, from what Stella’s family called “a different background,” he had no experience of summer places. It was and is a high, bare wooden house, painted gray—a copy of the old farmhouses nearby, though perhaps less substantial. In front of it are the steep bluffs—they are not so substantial, either, but have held so far—and a long flight of steps down to the beach. Behind it is a small fenced garden, where Stella grows vegetables with considerable skill and coaxing, a short sandy lane, and a jungle of wild blackberry bushes.

As David turns the car into the lane, Stella steps out of these bushes, holding a colander full of berries. She is a short, fat, white-haired woman, wearing jeans and a dirty T-shirt. There is nothing underneath these clothes, as far as he can see, to support or restrain any part of her.

“Look what’s happened to Stella,” says David, fuming. “She’s turned into a troll.”

Catherine, who has never met Stella before, says decently, “Well. She’s older.”

“Older than what, Catherine? Older than the house? Older than Lake Huron? Older than the cat?”

There is a cat asleep on the path beside the vegetable garden. A large ginger torn with ears mutilated in battle, and one grayed-over eye. His name is Hercules and he dates from David’s time.

“She’s an older woman,” says Catherine in a flutter of defiance. Even defiant, she’s meek. “You know what I mean.”

David thinks that Stella has done this on purpose. It isn’t just an acceptance of natural deterioration—oh, no, it’s much more. Stella would always dramatize. But it isn’t just Stella. There’s the sort of woman who has to come bursting out of the female envelope at this age, flaunting fat or an indecent scrawniness, sprouting warts and facial hair, refusing to cover pasty veined legs, almost gleeful about it, as if this was what she’d wanted to do all along. Man-haters, from the start. You can’t say a thing like that out loud nowadays.

He has parked too close to the berry bushes—too close for Catherine, who slides out of the car on the passenger side and is immediately in trouble. Catherine is slim enough, but her dress has a full skirt and long, billowy sleeves. It’s a dress of cobwebby cotton, shading from pink to rose, with scores of tiny, irregular pleats that look like wrinkles. A pretty dress but hardly a good choice for Stella’s domain. The blackberry bushes catch it everywhere, and Catherine has to keep picking herself loose.

“David, really, you could have left her some room,” says Stella.

Catherine laughs at her predicament. “I’m all right, I’m okay, really.”

“Stella, Catherine,” says David, introducing.

“Have some berries, Catherine,” says Stella sympathetically. “David?”

David shakes his head, but Catherine takes a couple. “Lovely,” she says. “Warm from the sun.”

“I’m sick of the sight of them,” says Stella.

Close up, Stella looks a bit better—with her smooth, tanned skin, childishly cropped hair, wide brown eyes. Catherine, drooping over her, is a tall, frail, bony woman with fair hair and sensitive
skin. Her skin is so sensitive it won’t stand any makeup at all, and is easily inflamed by colds, foods, emotions. Lately she has taken to wearing blue eye shadow and black mascara, which David thinks is a mistake. Blackening those sparse wisps of lashes emphasizes the watery blue of her eyes, which look as if they couldn’t stand daylight, and the dryness of the skin underneath. When David first met Catherine, about eighteen months ago, he thought she was a little over thirty. He saw many remnants of girlishness; he loved her fairness and tall fragility. She has aged since then. And she was older than he thought to start with—she is nearing forty.

“But what will you do with them?” Catherine says to Stella. “Make jam?”

“I’ve made about five million jars of jam already,” Stella says. “I put them in little jars with those artsy-fartsy gingham tops on them and I give them away to all my neighbors who are too lazy or too smart to pick their own. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t just let Nature’s bounty rot on the vine.”

“It isn’t on the vine,” says David. “It’s on those god-awful thornbushes, which ought to be cleaned out and burned. Then there’d be room to park a car.”

Stella says to Catherine, “Listen to him, still sounding like a husband.”

Stella and David were married for twenty-one years. They have been separated for eight.

“It’s true, David,” says Stella contritely. “I should clean them out. There’s a long list of things I never get around to doing. Come on in and I’ll get changed.”

“We’ll have to stop at the liquor store,” says David. “I didn’t get a chance.”

Once every summer, he makes this visit, timing it as nearly as he can to Stella’s father’s birthday. He always brings the same present—a bottle of Scotch whiskey. This birthday is his father-in-law’s ninety-third. He is in a nursing home a few miles away, where Stella can visit him two or three times a week.

“I just have to wash,” Stella says. “And put on something bright. Not for Daddy, he’s completely blind now. But I think the
others like it, the sight of me dressed in pink or blue or something cheers them up the way a balloon would. You two have time for a quick drink. Actually, you can make me one, too.”

She leads them, single file, up the path to the house. Hercules doesn’t move.

“Lazy beast,” says Stella. “He’s getting about as bad as Daddy. You think the house needs painting, David?”

“Yes.”

“Daddy always said every seven years. I don’t know—I’m considering putting on siding. I’d get more protection from the wind. Even since I winterized, it sometimes feels as if I’m living in an open crate.”

Stella lives here all year round. In the beginning, one or the other of the children would often be with her. But now Paul is studying forestry in Oregon and Deirdre is teaching at an English-language school in Brazil.

“But could you get anything like that color in siding,” says Catherine. “It’s so nice, that lovely weather-beaten color.”

“I was thinking of cream,” says Stella.

Alone in this house, in this community, Stella leads a busy and sometimes chaotic life. Evidence of this is all around them as they progress through the back porch and the kitchen to the living room. Here are some plants she has been potting, and the jam she mentioned—not all given away but waiting, she explains, for bake sales and the fall fair. Here is her winemaking apparatus; then, in the long living room, overlooking the lake, her typewriter, surrounded by stacks of books and papers.

“I’m writing my memoirs,” says Stella. She rolls her eyes at Catherine. “I’ll stop for a cash payment. No, it’s okay, David, I’m writing an article on the old lighthouse.” She points the lighthouse out to Catherine. “You can see it from this window if you squeeze right down to the end. I’m doing a piece for the historical society and the local paper. Quite the budding authoress.”

Besides the historical society, she says, she belongs to a play-reading group, a church choir, the winemakers’ club, and an
informal group in which the members entertain one another weekly at dinner parties that have a fixed (low) cost.