The Wintering (4 page)

“Fine. How's yours?” Quill's face grew redder as he glanced up. Her father's ringed hand pressed against his middle to imply flatness and trim and that he was fit as a fiddle. Those, Amy thought, would be his words if he said any. However, he only held together the flaps of his silk robe and went back inside to shave after calling, “Good to see you, boy.”

She had been aware of Edith's running upstairs; now, she appeared having put on bedroom shoes, softly padding. Amy went quickly toward the car and whispered, “Come on. Let's go. Hurry.”

Quill had to stop. “Fine,” he answered. “How're you, Mrs. Howard?” Weariness overcame Amy as she knew her mother would tell him. Edith touched the neck of her pink robe, and her cheeks flushed the same pale color. She was happy to have conversation with someone, though her eyes stared about wearily at morning, and her hand held without interest the doorknob to her house. “I'm fine,” Edith said weakly, which meant that she was not. But it was not young people's worry, her smile said, bravely. In the car, Amy clenched her fists; her feet pressed against the floorboard hard.

“Does your momma think you're crazy, too?” Edith asked. If only Quill would not answer, Amy thought, saying, “Mother, we have to go.”

“Amy hops around like a flea,” Edith said. “Does your mother think you'll see this man?”

“She said we'd have a pretty drive,” Quill said. Edith's eyes shone and her smile grew. She saw that was a nicer and more subtle way of putting it than she had. Perhaps she was often too blunt; had that made Amy so shy? She said softly, “You won't see him.”

Amy, with an intense look, had urged Quill into the car. He started the motor, and as they backed out of the drive Amy saw Edith watching as if to make the moment of their having been there last. Amy smiled and waved and Edith waved back thinking, My baby. While they were still within hearing distance, she cupped her hands as if to yodel and called, “Don't forget Dea! And have a good time!”

Quill's foot went to the brake. “What did she say?”

“Nothing,” Amy said. “Go on. I heard. I have to stop a minute and speak to my aunt.” She leaned against the seat thinking how irritating it was to be told, like a dog, to Speak! In public places, Edith was always nudging her and saying, “There's so-and-so, don't forget to speak.” If she were playing bridge at home, she would say, “The girls will be here, don't forget to come in and speak.” Otherwise, Edith said, ladies talked about rudeness and the upbringing of someone's child and whether or not they were going to turn out right.

Halting the car at a red light, Quill removed his coat and laid it in careful folds on the back seat. At a filling station, opposite, where her family traded, the proprietor knelt changing a tire but did not recognize Amy in the unfamiliar car. When she waved, he made no sign in return; then she was taken on, melancholy at not being known. Signs above them read
QUILL BLVD.
It was lined with car lots whose shimmery signs and triangular paper announcements rattled in the wind. The galore turned even the fine mist tawdry, Amy thought. Customerless salesmen stood at windows staring out with thoughtless faces, and people leapt gutters full of water to catch busses. Damming up gutters as a child, and sifting through debris, she often had found money and pretty stones, which she called by the names of exotic jewels; luck had been comfort in the loneliness to which she had seemed born. Having aspired then to being grown, she had never suspected that could also mean insecurity and more loneliness. Amy was grateful that Quill did not mind silence; she kept watching life along the street. Women came from cavernous supermarkets, followed by white-aproned clerks obscured by grocery sacks. Once, she had asked her mother why she did not shop for weeks ahead. And Edith had said, “You don't know anything about running a house, and you never will. You'll never have your nose out of a book long enough!” Eventually, Amy had understood. This morning, Edith had announced happily that they were out of coffee. With purpose, she would go out shopping later. Amy felt guilty, staring out at the rain-struck people, having never seen she was not responsible for the emptiness of her mother's days.

Quill's expensive shirt had a smell of being freshly laundered, hand-ironed, making Amy think wistfully of feeling cared for. When the light changed, his face took on a greenish, electrified look. Seeing his profile in repose, she thought for the first time that Quill was handsome. He felt watched. He turned and his eyes expressed, silently and excitedly, “We're going!” She nodded, but kept her true excitement inside. They left the final sign reading
QUILL BLVD.
It was easier to have a freer sense in tangled countryside, too poor even for pastureland. The smell of rained-on ground rushed to the car window when she lowered it; the rain had almost gone.

In its polished loafer, Quill's foot pressed the accelerator harder. Though his hands were pudgy, they were inordinately clean and their nails looked buffed. They held fastidiously the rosewood steering wheel, which had a mellow shine like good furniture, cared for. He gave Amy more of a feeling of being disordered. She moved her own feet farther from that polished shoe on the accelerator. It seemed unfair that all Quill had to worry about was losing weight and admission to a certain club at Princeton. He was telling her now about a new diet, consisting only of grapefruit. She sometimes turned her head, as if listening. As they went through a small town, she was attentive to the clay soil washing redly toward the sidewalks. Wasn't her life passing repetitiously? Years had accumulated in which she had known Quill, and always he had been either gaining or losing weight. But at twelve, when she had been in dancing school, he had been the only boy ever to ask her to dance. She looked at him now, thankfully, remembering her terror. She had never really gotten over it. She thought how even her father had said, in those days, she was cute. But she had never been able to make animated conversation with little boys, as instructed by Edith. Trying to rattle on gaily in conversation, she had failed. After mingling at the punch bowl, she would then not be chosen as a partner; always, she had to dance with another superfluous girl. Feeling guilty about that, she had never told Edith, who had wanted her to be popular and to attend. Keeping unhappiness to herself, Amy had believed strengthened her character; she had been very early concerned about strengthening it. But, at dancing school, something besides shyness had kept boys away, some difference in herself she could not explain. And wishing that it had a name, she turned to Quill with pretended interest and said, “But don't you get tired of nothing but grapefruit?”

“Of course,” he said. “And I cheat.” The diet was his father's idea, who was frantic about Quill's appearance. Quill had to succeed him as president of the bank founded by Grandfather Quill, for whom the boulevard had been named. Once, Quill had confided eagerly that he really wanted to be a painter. “Then aren't you going to?” Amy had said. He had replied in a flat voice, “I have to be a banker instead.” Robust and hearty and wearing slimming dark suits, he would sit in the gilt-laden old foyer greeting depositors, and his soul would be a painter's. Flecks of gold had appeared in his green eyes when he spoke that day of painting. In the light of this rosewood dashboard, he had one night read her
The Prophet
, with the car doors open to night and the aged smell of the Mississippi, a cavern of darkness down the bank from them. Innocently, she had said, “But would your father really care if you didn't become a banker?”

“Care!” Quill had half-screamed, in astonishment. And the word Care! had flown out into the darkness, like a rallying cry. How, she had wondered, did people reconcile themselves to things against their nature, or quell rebellious hearts and manage to laugh, as Quill had. But she had wondered also, shortly, whether people should.

Quill's father had said that fatness might imply sloppiness for depositors, and instability might be implied if Quill bet publicly on games. He could not even play bridge, which he loved, for money. Luckily, his father had been happy with the narrow life to which he had been born, but was it fair to deprive his son? Since she seldom could answer her questions, Amy kept staring silently out at the countryside. Repetitiously, the tires seemed to be crying, You're going! She had thought it good that Quill's father cared about something and that he cared so much, wondering about her own parents' interests. She leaned on the window-sill now, wishing her brain would rest. Always, she had to be wondering about something: God or justice or things like that, without answer. She would like to know, for instance, the reason for suffering: why some people had to and others did not. She wondered that now, watching the landscape go by silently. She had never had anyone to answer her questions, but then she had never had anyone to ask, either. She had been worn out with inconclusiveness when she began to read Almoner's books, and had gotten from them the feeling that everything she had ever asked herself, he had. He would answer all her questions when she saw him, she felt.

Talking about his diet, Quill had said, “I'm starving. You got anything with you to eat?”

She shook her head. “What did your father think about our going today?”

Drawing down his chin into triplicate, Quill intoned several times the words, “Waste of time,” his voice mockingly deep. It was strange, his father thought, that a man would write books which didn't make any money and go on writing them. He had been grave about such queerness, with all the implications that word had. Quill shook his head, imitatively.

“No one would think a thing if we were going to see a movie star,” Amy said. “Everybody went crazy thinking Ava Gardner was coming to Delton.” They were satisfied with themselves, and exchanged smiles. Then Amy turned toward the window to watch a boy straddling a horse, riding across the horizon. She waved at a small Negro boy running alongside the road, with empty pop bottles, toward a general-merchandise store.

Fused behind rain clouds, the sun suddenly appeared as if a curtain had been drawn aside. One might applaud, it shone so well. Feeling warmed, Amy considered confiding to Quill her fear, her loneliness, and that she had a deep need for a lasting friendship. But, holding to reserve, she only gazed out longingly at the passing countryside, conceding all these years later, since dancing school, that silence was still natural to her. Suppose she revealed her innermost thoughts to someone and they did not care! No one else had needs as desperate as her own, she thought. She wondered if people whom they passed on the roadside glimpsed, at the car window, a small face, forlorn and wondering.

The road ahead went straight, without curves; that seemed to be Quill's future, while hers was fraught with danger and unpredictability. Hers was as jumbled as the static Quill got on the radio. Pushing buttons to clear it, he winked, meaning, look at the buttons. They read
BCIKU,
rather than
BUICK.
Baby, Can I Kiss U? Despite his wink, Quill had never had that feeling for her, and Amy wondered why. The buttons changed gave her a sense of belonging, if only to a fad of her generation, for everyone she knew changed the buttons in their families' Buicks. Feeling so often the need to run away in all directions at once, Amy found stability in anything predictable or repetitious. She might at this moment, even, be the daughter her mother wanted: any girl in her crowd out riding and receiving winks. Yet the evasive difference existed. Not having wanted to go to the luncheon, she had not gone, but felt guilty at breaking convention.

Quill interrupted her reverie saying, “I can't wait to ask Almoner about that long passage at the end of
Reconstruction
. Nobody knows what it means, exactly.”

“Something about being glad and hating, too, that the South lost the war, isn't it?” She wondered if that were her own interpretation, or one come back from some forgotten seminar. Her interest in seeing Almoner was not to discuss his books, and she felt disappointed that was Quill's reason, though suddenly, she realized it was the obvious one, that it was why most people would want to see him. Still, she was disappointed it was Quill's reason. Almoner, simply, was to open for her all her locked-in feelings. He would understand her past, as she felt she understood his. Everyone was imprisoned by his past, she had read. One stared out from behind it as from the bars of a cell. It had been a Russian who had said it, she remembered, obviously someone dark and brooding.

“At Princeton,” Quill said, “everyone thought the passage meant more than just that the land was wasted. It has to be symbolic of something bigger.”

“It does?” she said. “Well, I never understand symbols unless they're so obvious, they're awful.” And she did not understand the significance of living, she thought, watching in envy gigantic crows lift themselves from fields of dead corn to fly over treetops into the distance, freely. Compassion in Almoner's books was what mattered to her, and she changed the subject. “Are you sure Borden knows we're coming?”

“Certain,” Quill said. “His momma phoned this morning and wants us for lunch.”

“Lunch,” Amy said. She had not thought they would take time to eat. If it were arranged with Mrs. Decker, then nothing could be done. Even the thought of Borden's mother made her feel ill-at-ease. What had she thought of their going?

“I can't imagine a girl wanting to go out there and see that man!” Quill cried, in imitation of Mrs. Decker's pretentious tones. “Don't let it matter what she said.” He patted Amy's knee, knowing she would worry, anyway.

Amy's voice grew smaller; she pleaded. “Don't let her know the whole thing was my idea!” He was reassuring, but Amy looked terrified staring ahead at the road. He looked down at her legs, which she had stretched out with a weary motion. They were good. He wondered why he had no desire to take her hand resting on the seat near him. She looked pretty and that violet shade was her best color, though her dress was terrible. But why had she worn those shoes? Her intentness made him remember how she had said that, even if it were wrong for his father to want him to be a banker, at least his father cared: implying her own did not, he supposed. But what did she think his father cared about, Quill wondered. Certainly not me, he thought. Not myself.