A Charmed Life (18 page)

She jumped up and lit a match to the fire laid in the fireplace. He turned to watch her, crouching at the hearth. “How old are you?” he said abruptly. Dolly told him her age. “Are you a virgin?” he demanded. Dolly’s spine stiffened; she rose, slowly, and backed up against the fireplace wall. Nobody had asked her this question since she had been in college. She had often yearned to discuss what was the central fact in her life, but everybody steered shy of it, even her closest friends. Yet now that she had been asked, finally, her tongue remained paralyzed. She stared at him speechlessly, trying to feel indignation.

“Well?” he said. “Are you or aren’t you?” Dolly looked at him in anguish. “Don’t you know?” he said, ironically. This, in literal fact, was the case. She had had a single experience, five years before, on a boat, at night, on the deck, behind a stack of steamer chairs. A sailor had interrupted them, and she had fled in shame to her cabin, not sure whether or not the act, as the books said, had been completed. The next morning they had landed, and she had never seen her partner, a young student, again. Since that time, men had made love to her, and she had responded, even while resisting. But they got discouraged too easily; they gave up, like her painting teachers, just when she might have let herself go. Several times, she had nearly made the plunge. She had permitted what her aunts used to call liberties and was ready to give the final favor, though she still weakly pushed and struggled, when the man, straightening his necktie, would get up and say he was sorry.
“Don’t
be sorry,” she had several times cried out, but they took this as mere courtesy on her part. The older she got, the more men hesitated to tamper with her, because they thought she was a virgin, and she could not correct this impression, because she was not sure.

As she stood gazing at Sandy Gray, she felt the gates of her speech miraculously unlocking. She was going to tell; his wish to know was impersonal. After all, she reminded herself, he was in love with another woman. Recklessly, she opened her mouth and took a deep breath, but at that moment he got up and yawned, stretching his long arms. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Don’t tell me.” He picked up his cap from the studio couch. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” he observed thoughtfully. “You’ve never been in love.”

Dolly’s rueful gaze rested, startled, on him. It was true, but how did he know it? Her stubborn nature had known many passionate attachments—to animals, to her teachers, to her friends. But she had never loved a man, in the sense that he meant, except in daydreams. “How do you know?” she said. He shrugged. “I see it everywhere,” he replied, gesturing with his cap. “In your work. In the way you stand, backed up against the wall. In your books.
Noli me tangere.”
Tears came to Dolly’s eyes for the second time that day. “Don’t cry,” he said. “I like you. You’re a good little child in your pinafore. You love Mummy and Daddy and Nanny and little brother and sister and your teddy bear. Some day you may grow up to be a woman.”

He put on his cap. “Drop over to see me,” he said. “I live on the other side of the pond, behind that pine grove.” Dolly stood watching him go, the way he had come, striking with his knife at the pickerel weed. She felt shattered. A long-sought opportunity had been missed. Another time, if she saw him, everything would be different: she would know him too well to speak openly. It was because he had come to her as a stranger, out of the pond, like a water god, that she had nearly confessed herself. She was tempted to run after him, but another feeling, a sense of proud umbrage, held her where she was. He was wrong about her, she said to herself triumphantly. He had missed the point altogether. She had no Mummy or Daddy or brother or sister. She was an orphan. He was stupid not to have seen that. And John and Martha were right. Thanks to him, she had lost a day’s painting. Perplexity smote her. She struck herself a violent blow on the forehead. “Oh damn,” she cried. “Damn, damn, damn!”

SEVEN

I
T WAS FRIDAY MORNING
. Jane Coe had set the alarm clock for eight, so that she would be sure to get hold of the electrician before he went off for the day. The icebox had been on the blink since Tuesday, and every morning she had missed him. It was no good leaving messages with his wife, to give him at lunch-time, for he was a lazy loafer who hated to come all the way out the back roads to the Coes’ house and risk getting stuck in the sand with his new low-slung car. You had to coax him, in person, using all your womanly wiles; if he once promised, he would not go back on it. Jane understood his point of view. Why should he come and waste his time here when he could go bass-fishing instead? He did not need the money; he made his killing on the summer people. Warren begged to differ; he and Jane had had quite a discussion on the subject only the night before. According to Warren, Will Harlow had a duty, as the only electrician in the community, to come when he was called, like a doctor. When Will went off to Florida last winter for a vacation, leaving everybody stranded and children’s milk spoiling in the iceboxes, Warren had seen red. But Jane said that just living was more important than fussing with other people’s electricity if you didn’t have to; Will’s customers could have put the milk out the window and waited calmly till he came back. She did not think it was fair to consider the texture of life the most important thing, for yourself, if you didn’t apply the same standard to poor Will, who came when it suited him or when he needed the money. This debonair statement had made Warren explode. “You mean Will Harlow comes here just for the money?” he had cried, setting down his cup of Sanka with a bang on the table; they did not bother with saucers. “He comes here because we bribe him,” he added, breathing fire.

“Of course,” replied Jane, yawning. This was truer than Warren knew. Jane had made a study of Will Harlow’s psychology, and in the summertime, when everybody was competing for him, she would put something extra out of commission to make it worth his while to come fix the stove or the icebox. She had a defective mixer that could be counted on to blow the electricity in the whole house if necessary. This was one of the little things she hid from Warren, on account of his high principles, but last night she had told him, just to shake him up. She had been reading an article in a medical magazine, explaining that anger was good for you; it kept you from getting cancer. They had had an awful fight, and Jane, sure enough, had slept like a log. She had slept so well that when the alarm clock rang, she had turned it off and burrowed back into her pillow, forgetting why she had set it. At nine o’clock, she had waked up with a start to realize that it was the day of the
Bérénice
reading and that the Hubers and the Murphys were coming for dinner first, and after dinner, the others, Miss Lamb and Paul and the Sinnotts. They would all be awfully put out if there were no ice for their drinks. She plodded out to the telephone, in her furry scuffs and bathrobe, but it was too late: Will Harlow had already left, for his workman’s day.

It was a dark rainy morning. Warren reported, after a look at the weathervane, that they were in for a three-day blow. That was why she had overslept, of course; everybody overslept on overcast mornings. In the bathroom, Jane drew a long face and thrust her lower lip out, staring at herself sternly in the mirror to keep a furtive giggle down. There was a funny side to it, her owlish reflection agreed: John Sinnott would tell her she had missed the electrician from perversity. Every time he and Martha came, something went haywire. Either there was no ice or else there was no soda water, like the last time, or she had forgotten to get salt, for the dinner, or sugar, or there were mouse-droppings in the flour. These things did not matter, Warren assured her, but Jane had felt a little bit embarrassed, a few nights before, when they had had Miss Lamb to dinner, and they had found they were out of paper napkins and paper towels and kleenex, so that they had had to give her toilet paper, folded neatly by Warren, for a napkin. They used to have linen, Warren told Miss Lamb, with a tender glance, like a hug, at his rosy spouse, but Jane had given it all away, except for the sheets and pillow slips, which did not have to be ironed. When they first came up here, they had a whole trunk full of Jane’s grandmother’s beautiful embroidered linen from Germany, stored out in the garage. Jane had never used it, and they needed the storage space for Warren’s pictures. Martha had some of the napkins now; they looked lovely on her table, with the big Ws in heavy scroll embroidery—it was a lucky coincidence that both Martha’s maiden name and Jane’s grandmother’s had begun with W.

Jane did not grudge this gift. She was naturally open-handed, and it also satisfied her thrifty side to see that the things were being used. She thought Martha was crazy to bother with the washing and the ironing and keeping the table polished, and it gave Jane pleasure to think of the hours she herself was saving
not
doing these things. When she looked at her napery gleaming on Martha’s dark table, she felt the same way she felt when she saw their goat munching a tin can in the zoophile lady’s back yard: she was glad she had found it a good home. She had a genius, she admitted, for finding people who would take things she did not want. Last year, she had even discovered a man who was delighted to have their garbage to feed to his pigs—which saved her going to the dump. As it turned out, he insisted on having it sorted and he complained about broken glass and coffee grounds, so that idea had to be chalked up as a failure. But sooner or later, Jane was confident, she would solve the garbage-disposal problem, in a way that would make everybody hold up their hands in astonishment and wonder why they had not thought of it. She and Warren had tried everything: expensive chemical devices buried in the ground; a gas incinerator that functioned in the kitchen; burning the stuff in the fireplace or in Warren’s studio stove. But nothing as yet had worked out to suit her; unless you went to the dump, you always had the labor of sorting.

Labor-saving schemes of one kind or another played a large part in Jane’s thoughts. It was something she had inherited, probably, from her inventor-grandfather; Warren said that her bump of inventiveness was very much enlarged. Recently, she had been pondering putting in some sheep to act as lawn mowers around the house and fertilize the ground with their droppings, so that some time she could have a vegetable garden—according to the latest theories, it was better not to weed. And she had heard of a place where you sent the sheep’s wool, which came back woven into blankets. That was what had got her started: she and Warren needed some new blankets; the moths had got into their spare ones. Last fall, when John and Martha were staying with them, John had said, “What is this, Jane—a blanket for an octopus?” Warren had agreed that they needed blankets, but he wanted to just buy them in a store, like other people. The sheep, he pointed out, would have to have cover, in the wintertime, and be fed, the same as the goat. And if he and Jane wanted to go away some time, during the winter months, to see some exhibitions and picture galleries, they would be stuck here, because of the sheep. Sheep lived outdoors, Jane argued; all they needed was a little sheepfold that they could huddle in, during a storm; you could just put some oats or whatever they ate out for them. But Warren was too tenderhearted. In the summer, yes, he conceded; but he would not take responsibility in the winter. “If you can find somebody who will have them for the winter, dear,” remained his last word.

Jane was very foresighted when she had her mind set on something. She would not get the sheep until spring, when she could buy them cheap, as lambs, but she had already sounded out the goat-lady and the butcher at the First National. They had both turned her down, as she had feared. And yet she still felt that there must be somebody in the community who would be glad to take care of the sheep for her. There was a balance in human psychology, she had always reasoned, like the balance of Nature; and just as snakes were useful to kill rodents and weeds to put vitamins in the soil, so there had to be somebody who would find a use for those sheep during the winter months. She had been turning over the problem every night before going to sleep, visualizing the lambs, one black, one white, and the blankets she would have woven to her own design, in a modern zigzag pattern. She had read about mathematicians who put their unconscious to work on a difficult equation and woke up with the solution. And this morning, as a matter of fact, as she was dialing a number where his wife thought she might reach Will Harlow, inspiration smote her. The public high school, she exclaimed to herself, widening her eyes. In a modern school like that, they must have a course in zoology or natural science, for which a pair of sheep would be perfect. And the school year exactly coincided with the months Warren did not want the sheep.

“Wonderful, dear,” agreed Warren, somewhat absently, from the kitchen, where he was coddling some eggs for his breakfast. He had slipped out of bed ahead of her, as he sometimes did when he wanted to start painting early. “Did you get Will?” he added, gazing sadly at the toaster, which did not seem to be working. In the doorway, Jane shook her head, recalled to the day’s agenda. “They didn’t answer,” she said. “I’ll have to try and find him. He can’t be fishing in this storm. I’ll bet he’s down at Snow’s Bungalows; all his cronies are working there, putting up some new cabins. …” She added some water to last night’s coffee and turned the heat on high. “Say,” she said, thinking, “maybe I could get a piece of ice from the iceman and we could put it in the guest-room bathtub.” Warren’s face brightened obediently, and then a shadow fell on it. “There’s wood there, dear. Remember?” Jane frowned; the bathtub was full of driftwood that they had carried up from the beach. It had seemed to her an excellent storage bin for keeping the wood dry; last year, they had left their wood outside, under a tarpaulin, but it had always got damp. “We could put the ice in
our
tub,” she proposed. “You don’t need a bath.” Warren apologetically opened the dark icebox; there was a smell of mold and spoilage. “Don’t you think it would be better to try to get Will?” he queried. “That’s just penicillin,” said Jane briskly, but after a moment’s thought she acquiesced. It would be less work, she calculated, to find Will Harlow than to go to the iceman and have to lug the ice out of the station wagon, dump it in the bathtub, and then chop it, by hand.