The Wintering (7 page)

Amy toyed with her fork, knowing that escaping things was one of her own tendencies. But she did not want to escape life reading books; she wanted to find out about it. What Almoner wrote was a mirror for her soul, Amy felt, and he had touched even corners of darkness which before she had feared.

“Let's don't be depressing!” Mrs. Decker was crying. “Quill, whose debut did you think the prettiest?”

“Lydia Fontaine's,” he said.

“Oh. So did Borden,” she cried, leading Quill from the table.

Coming afterward with Borden, Amy inadvertently brought along her napkin. While waiting for her to return it to the table, Borden seemed to stare at her speculatively and as if also wondering about her clothes. Amy felt her sandals had grown looser and flatter, and they made slapping sounds across the floor. She stood in the living room before the blackened empty fireplace; imaginatively, she warmed her hands, listening to the conversation about Lydia's party, feeling she had no invitation to join in. But neither had Borden been invited. Simply, she did not know how to fit herself into situations, how to belong.

In this room, with its musty odor of wallpaper, while the others talked of the debut, Amy smelled the party's aroma. It had been a satisfactory mingling of carnations and champagne and girlish odors of perfume and the more masculine scents of liquor and cigarettes. Enviously co-ordinated, the decorations all had been pink. Most memorably, Lydia had worn a wreath of rosebuds in her hair.

Amy stepped obediently from the fireplace when Mrs. Decker issued an invitation to “the little girl's room.” They went along a hallway overhung with paintings by Mrs. Decker, all of single magnolia blossoms broadly opened and flat to the canvas and with centers like staring yellow eyes. At night, it would seem cats stared from the walls, Amy thought. Insecurity and a longing to be liked compelled her to say how good the pictures were. In this instance, Mrs. Decker was not pretentious. Looking as if Amy were crazy, Mrs. Decker said, “My dear, they're not good. They're terrible. It's only finger exercise for my arthritis.”

Amy sidled into the bathroom, leaving Mrs. Decker at her dressing table. The day's tenseness led Amy to sit unusually long on the coldish enamel toilet seat. To hide her noise, she thought of turning on the faucet, but was fearful of being chastised by Mrs. Decker for running up the water bill. She knew Mrs. Decker would be careful of hers, as Aunt Dea always had been. Amy emerged blushing. However, Mrs. Decker's face, newly painted, revealed nothing. Passing Amy, she closed the bathroom door. Amy regarded in the dressing-table mirror her own smooth face, which needed no make-up. She stared at a wall holding pictures of Mrs. Decker when she was young. The same sorrowful feeling bore down on her, which she felt at Aunt Dea's house: that time merely passed. Where had it gone? Mrs. Decker might have been asking herself, staring in the dresser mirror. Amy, seeing through a window that all the outdoors was dry, realized she had not imagined the length of the luncheon. For Mrs. Decker, it had been the high point of a day. Amy thought she did not want to live merely to die, and wished upon herself one fantastic adventure after another. She pulled stealthily open a dresser drawer, wishing her tendency were not to peek; even, she looked into other people's medicine cabinets! The drawer contained only a lot of little jars, like Edith's. Many had greasy tops, revealing Mrs. Decker was not thoroughly meticulous. Amy was glad for information about other people's lives. It helped her understand her own.

She was waiting politely near the hallway when Mrs. Decker came from the bathroom. Of necessity, their mouths formed smiles, and they had to say something. Mrs. Decker went out. “So much hot weather.”

“Hasn't it been hot,” Amy said, trailing along.

“And September will be hot, too. It's worse every year.”

That exchange brought them into the living room where, as soon as Amy entered, Borden said, “Sorry, old girl, but you've been shot down in flames. I phoned Almoner. He says he's not going to be home.”

“He really doesn't want to see anyone, I think,” Quill said.

“Did you tell him who you were?” Mrs. Decker cried, astonished.

While the boys nodded, Amy wondered what identification Mrs. Decker considered herself to have. Her own, vague as it was, had fled. She felt like crying.

“Did you tell him you went to Princeton?” Mrs. Decker said.

“Told him everything,” Borden said. “Mentioned Quill's family. That we were Princeton tigers. Everybody's one for always, except him, apparently.”

“He only went to Princeton a year,” Amy said.

Nevertheless
, Borden's shrug meant. “And I told him about Quill's thesis.”

“We told him a girl was here who wanted to be a writer,” Quill said.

Amy turned toward him, angry he had said that in front of Mrs. Decker. It was too personal to have revealed to her. Quill gave her an apologetic look. He had told Amy not to be intimidated by the woman. It was not his fault she had been, his arched eyebrows meant. Amy shuddered when Borden suggested they play bridge instead. “I don't play,” she said quickly, not caring about Mrs. Decker's aggravated look.

“If Amy just wants to meet a writer, there's Agnes Jones here in town,” she said.

“Momma! She writes about tuberous begonias,” Borden said. Even his patience had a limit. “We could just drive by and look at Almoner's house.”

That would be like getting out to stare at an automobile accident, Amy thought. Quill had agreed, and she would do anything to leave. She took Mrs. Decker's flaccid hand.

“Do come again, dear,” Mrs. Decker said.

“I'd love to. I had such a nice time,” Amy said, turning up the corners of her mouth.

The porch furniture seemed still in shame, turned toward the house. The day had grown jubilant in the sun; the tall cedars admitted its sparkle. Borden's hair was a fiery gloss atop his head, as he stood asking if he might drive. When he raced the motor boyishly, Amy forgave him everything, seeing that he endured pretense for his mother's sake. That was an admirable quality, and one she might lack, Amy thought. Knowing that she was too quick to judge people, she exclaimed most cordially over the houses Borden pointed out and listened to the repetitious histories of the people who lived in them. Small-town people wanting to drive around and look at houses as an entertainment bored Edith. Often, she had not wanted to come to Dea's for that reason. Amy felt expansive, pretending interest for Borden's sake. Eventually, however, she ran out of platitudes. As if receiving some silent signal, Quill took them up. Amy glanced at him, gratefully.

She was free then to draw inward, which was preferable, and visualized her school, near mountains turned purple at dusk, a cloudlike filminess descending from them. Nearby was a green and placid river, with a tamed quality different from the Mississippi. The first river made her want to dream along its banks. Here she felt torn in many directions like the stronger river on a rampage. Her environment had a hold on her from which she could not divorce herself, any more than the river could separate itself from its levees.

Climbing from the car, being confronted unexpectedly by a breeze, Amy stared round as if this were some foreign land. One after another, the three went down the stony path toward the springs. There, water trickled from a grotto over speckled brown rocks, slickening them. They laughed at paying dimes for dented cups to drink the water, watching old people with angel-white hair seriously lifting theirs. Inside, the cups smelled of mildew. While Quill and Borden walked about exploring, Amy remained in one spot and felt how singularly alone, how small she was in comparison to the gigantic and unhindered sky, going on and on everywhere. Eventually all the old people went away. The Negro attendant sat sleepy and bored. Distantly, Borden and Quill were laughing. Amy kept staring at the thin trickle of water, as if it might grow, knowing she was always waiting for something to happen. While the Negro fell asleep, she stood beneath the expansive sky, thinking restlessly that what she wanted was the future.

“Come on, Amy.”

The others were already at the car and thought she was following, then Quill called. Amy went back reluctantly the way she had come, seeing Borden sitting at the wheel and turning it grandly. “The dreamer,” Quill said, getting out and letting her slide into the front seat.

“I didn't realize you were ready to go,” she said.

“Obviously,” he said. “We wondered how long you were going to stand there.”

Amy settled in dreamily between them, mentally adjusting a long trailing gown: honored for something she did not bother to name; but even Mrs. Decker paid court. She remembered Quill's once saying that she would be all right if only she knew what she wanted. Amy tried to think what he had meant by that remark, feeling she knew exactly what it was she wanted. She wanted to go wherever she had to go to find out whatever it was she had to find out. That made sense to her, though to explain it to Quill, or someone else, she knew it would sound evasive.

Along the roadside were tangled wild-primrose bushes, devoid of blooms since spring. Tumbled among them now were black-eyed Susans, their strong yellow color more appropriate to the blaze of summer. Suddenly, the countryside ended abruptly at high shielding forsythia bushes. Borden, having driven through an opening in them, set up a clatter of metal that rang in the still country air. A dog barked off somewhere. The car seemed to have sunk down into the cattle gap. Silence came after the dog hushed, until Borden said, “This is his driveway.”

Quill breathed one word that was not a question: “Almoner's.”

The three sat woodenly and staring ahead, like children transfixed by fairy stories. That might have been the gingerbread house ahead, with a pinched-looking roof and tall front windows and a narrow porch with an empty hammock. A shout seemed to ring out in the car, startling them.

“There he is!” Borden had whispered.

“Almoner,” Quill said, again hardly breathing.

But feeling they were prying where they did not belong, Amy said, “We ought to go.” Borden had driven hastily off the cattle gap, grinding gears. The three seemed to cling together without touching. They must hear her heart beat, Amy was thinking. “I'm going to ask if he'll just speak to us,” Borden said, climbing out; and too late, Amy reached across the seat for his coattail.

She watched him go down the slope toward the grove of trees where they had glimpsed Almoner, who, by disappearing, seemed to be hiding. Watching Borden's red head recede, she kept thinking how this silence and this waiting and this intrusion all were wrong, and nothing could be done about any of them now. Like a kite or a leaf blown, at the whim of the wind, she went at random anywhere, anywhere at all she was taken, without plans of her own. Then when things went wrong, there was nothing she could say, nothing at all. There was no one she could truthfully blame but herself, she admitted.

Over the car's hood, yellow moths hovered with their wings folded tricornered into sails. Then, like a flotilla of small boats, they floated away, at once, into the day. Amy, watching them, thought that she bore these moments of dread because she had borne silently so many other stresses in her life: not being the way her mother wanted, her father's martinis, being an only child. Inadvertently and through some fault of her own, she had many times been embarrassed. Often she had been lonely or bored or felt forgotten. She had been tearful and had felt a stranger to happiness always. Only at unexpected moments did happiness ever overtake her.

This time Quill's whisper seemed loud inside the car. “He's coming!” But the sound was as full of foreboding, to Amy, as storm wind. Thinking back to all her stresses, she knew she would somehow endure this one.

Almoner came along the incline, brushing pine needles off his shoulders. He was neither as tall as she had imagined nor as elderly. Once he said something to Borden, who bent down to listen attentively. When they arrived at the car, it seemed part of the awryness of the whole afternoon that she could see nothing of Almoner's face but his chin. Leaning down to the window, Borden said that he had apologized for their rudeness, and Mr. Almoner had agreed to speak to them for a moment. As if pulled by a string, bending promptly to the window after Borden's speech, acknowledging their names, Almoner extended his hand past Amy to meet the one Quill stuck toward him.

“This is a great honor, Mr. Almoner,” Quill said.

“Thank you,” Almoner said.

When he stood straight again, Amy could see nothing but his chin. She had neither spoken nor given him her hand. The intrusion made it seem not right to ask even that. With bent shoulders, Almoner was already going back down the incline and toward the sheltering trees.

Amy never moved, though when Borden backed the car his elbow jabbed her uncomfortably. The flowerless tall forsythias gradually shut away the house. The afternoon had begun to darken. Their car wheels, on the gravel, sent startled birds into flight from weeds and left them swaying. Small brown rabbits ran in fear, helter-skelter, out of the way.

Quill's whoop seemed to shatter more than the quiet of the countryside, to ring out over the world. “He touched this!” he cried, raising his hand into the air. “Almoner touched this! I'm never going to wash it!”

Amy, wishing she could close herself into silence, wondered why she had never noticed before how many freckles Borden had. When he leaned past her to speak to Quill, even his lips had an orangish tinge. She heard him in disbelief. “Almoner said he was tired of folks coming here to see if he was a freak,” Borden said. “And what was worse, he was for free. Nobody had offered to pay to look yet!”

Amy kept on staring at Borden's spotted face hanging in air before her, until Quill leaned around to look back at him. Then his face was like a ripe red tomato about to burst and kept growing redder as he laughed. They were laughing helplessly, their hanging mouths exposing fillings. Amy closed her eyes and sank on the seat between them, horrified.