Читать книгу Wickford Point - John P. Marquand - Страница 18

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From the head of the stairs I could see Mary running down the side entry past the row of wooden pegs where our coats used to be hung and past the table where they used to keep the candles ready for bedtime. Before I could call after her she had slammed the door and was streaking across the lawn with the stockings and brassiere billowing behind her. She ran through the old garden, past the asparagus bed and past the ice house. I was afraid that she was going to step into what had once been a row of cold frames, but she avoided them and ran into the empty hay barn.

The pastureland at Wickford Point had been sold thirty years before to Mr. Casey on the main road, who kept a milk route and sold manure. There had been no cattle at Wickford Point since that time, but it still smelt of cattle around the barns. There was an odor of stale hayseed, which was combined with all those other musty odors, the sort which a realistic writer who deals with nature and the soil loves to describe in unpicturesque detail. The shingles were rotting badly, allowing ribbons of dusty sunlight to come through the roof, so that the long wooden building was not dark. Mary was standing in the center of the floor between the empty lofts where the hay wagons had once stood and the shafts of sunlight fell upon her thick yellow hair. She whirled about when she heard my step.

"I wish you'd go away," she said. "Why can't anybody leave me alone?"

It was my observation, based upon a certain amount of experience, that most women were attractive when they wept; at least there was a sense of helplessness and an appeal to the protective instinct that made one want to do something about it. Mary, on the contrary, was not attractive, for when she cried, she cried without repression and without regard to the artistic decencies. The floodgates of her soul poured from her patient eyes and caused her cheeks to swell and redden until she looked more like a hay fever sufferer than a damsel in distress. I hesitated to come too near her in case she might weep upon my shoulder and infect me with some of her sodden hopelessness, and there was not much use in saying anything to her, although I could understand a good deal of what was passing in her mind.

I thought of how she looked when she laughed. At such times I liked her better than all the others. She had more of her mother's kindness than the rest of them.

"You ought not to do that," I said. "You look like hell when you cry, Mary."

Her answer had an irrefutable sort of logic. "Nobody cares how I look," she said.

She always reacted that way when she was with the family.

"Well, it doesn't do any good to pity yourself," I told her. "If you haven't a handkerchief, wipe your face on one of those stockings. Your mother didn't mean to hurt your feelings. You know you shouldn't jump at her with a lot of practical questions."

Mary rubbed a stocking across her broad, blunt nose.

"It doesn't do any good not to pity myself," she said.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

She did not know what she meant very clearly, but she stuck to the point. "I'm sick and tired of waiting on everybody," she said and wiped her nose. "Somebody's got to wash Clothilde's stockings sometime. Somebody's got to do something. Josie can't do everything."

We were repeating an age-old conversation which would lead nowhere.

"But nobody asks you to do anything," I said, as I tried to express a logical but useless fact. "Don't you see that everyone had much rather that you didn't try to do anything? It makes people nervous and then they get cross, and it makes you tired and then you cry. Nobody wants anything done around here. You ought to try to adjust yourself to it."

"I can't," said Mary, "when everything's all so mixed up." She broke into a fresh spasm of sobs. "Sid wouldn't even let me pick up his room. Do you know what Sid does?"

"No," I said. It was better when her mind was off herself. She rubbed another stocking, a flesh-colored one with a run in it, over her eyes.

"He doesn't use his bureau drawers," she said.

The remark was confusing and I asked her what she meant.

"He doesn't bother to put his clothes in them," she said. "He just leaves them all over the floor, all his clean ones and all his dirty ones, and most of his suits, all on the floor. He says it's easier to find them. When he wants a shirt or a pair of socks, he takes one of those old canes that were in the hall closet and he just pokes around until he finds it. He doesn't even bother to stoop down. He just hooks it up with the cane and puts it on. It isn't funny either."

"I didn't say it was," I said. "But why does it matter to you? You can't do anything about it."

Mary looked at the hayseed on the old barn floor. She kicked at it with the toe of a high-heeled slipper.

"You don't understand," she said. "Nobody understands. I just want to be happy."

"Oh, is that all you want?" I asked.

Mary looked sullen and she looked puzzled too.

"That isn't asking much, is it?" she inquired. "I have a right to be happy, haven't I? Hasn't everyone a right to be happy?"

There was no telling where she had gathered the idea, whether from some boy friend or from some loose snatches of an evening's talk, but it reminded me of a Fourth of July phrase—"the pursuit of happiness." Everyone had a right to the pursuit of happiness, and how hard we chased it now! My thoughts didn't make much sense.

"You can't be happy if you're thinking about it," I said. "You're only happy when your mind is on something else, Mary. Then occasionally happiness comes over you when you don't notice it. Even so, it only lasts for a few moments. I shouldn't let it worry me if I were you."

"That's the way you always talk," said Mary. "If you'd ever been happy you wouldn't talk that way."

"Well," I said, "don't let it worry you."

"But I've been trying to think of something else," Mary said. "I've been trying to do something for other people. That's what I was doing this morning."

"Well," I said, "it doesn't always work. I guess I'd better be going back now."

Mary stared up at the holes in the roof.

"Sid wouldn't let me fix his room," she said, "and he borrowed ten dollars, and now Bella's got it. Bella gets everything, and now she's going to the Jaeckels', and you're going to New York."

"Well," I said, "you're not missing much." Mary sniffed but she was feeling better.

"That's the way you always talk," she said. "Isn't there something I can do about myself? Can't you ever tell me something?"

I reached in my trousers' pocket and drew out a ten-dollar bill.

"There," I said, "don't worry about yourself any more, and don't let anybody get this away from you."

As I watched her holding the currency, the effect was amazing. The sunlight in the barn was suddenly bright. The barnswallows darting through the open door made joyful hurrying sounds.

The sun fell on Mary's yellow hair. The tears on her cheeks had vanished. Her lips moved into a delicately happy curve, and she looked the way she did when all the boys in the room wanted to dance with her. She looked the way she did on the rare times when she made Bella jealous.

"Don't let anyone else know you have it," I said, "until you've spent it. And that means you'd better spend it quick." It was just as though she had never cried.

"I wonder if there's any gas in the car," she said. "There ought to be enough in it to get downtown. Did you hear that Harry is coming up from New York, and Mirabel Steiner? Maybe they'll bring some boys with them. Do you think so? Mirabel's wonderful. Don't you think she is? How long is Bella staying with the Jaeckels? They'll probably ask her to stay for the week end, don't you think?"

"Yes," I said, "probably."

"But you'll be back, won't you?" Mary called. "Be sure to be back. You mustn't stay away."

I had already made up my mind not to be back if I could possibly help it. I wanted to return to some other environment where the strange trivialities of living did not magnify themselves into matters of vital significance; where cigarettes and gin and groceries had a way of appearing without undue effort; where there was something to discuss besides peculiar personalities. In other words, the family and the place were getting, as they always did after a brief sojourn with them, distinctly on my nerves. I wanted to convince myself that what the family did and thought amounted to very little.

By the time I had reached the asparagus bed, Mary caught up with me. I was thinking that the asparagus bed had been planted a hundred and twenty-five years ago, which was too long for a bed to bear asparagus fit to eat. The whole thing should have been turned over and replanted, but then nothing was ever renewed at Wickford Point—paint or shingles or trees or flowers. The whole place was like a clock which was running down, an amazing sort of clock, now devoid of weights or springs or hands yet ticking on through some ancient impetus on its own momentum. Always when you thought it was going to stop, it would continue ticking.

"You're going to see Joe, aren't you?" Mary said. "I don't think you ought to."

"Don't you?" I asked. "Why not?"

Mary had assumed a virtuous expression and a bright sort of superiority that was a good deal worse than tears.

"Of course I don't believe in taking sides," Mary said, "and I don't really feel angry with Joe, but it's just a matter of the family. Of course he's entirely lost his position now."

"What?" I said.

"His position," said Mary, "with everyone who matters. Of course everyone understands it was all his fault. He had his chance and he lost it. He won't get any help from the Brill name any more—and he would come back any minute if Bella would let him. She has only to crook her finger."

She was entirely serious about it. She was simply stating an accepted fact.

"Do you really mean," I asked, "that you think the Brill name means anything? Do you think that anybody remembers—"

Her laugh stopped me. It was an airy, collected laugh.

"Of course you're not a Brill," she said, "but lots of people think you are a Brill. That's why you go everywhere; that's why you know everyone, just the way we do. Harry says so, so does Sid. It doesn't matter whether we have any money or anything, because we're important."

I did not continue the subject with her, because I did not want to make her cry.

"You had better go and wash your face," I said. "Even the Brills wash their faces sometimes."

Mary laughed again, that same light, airy laugh which implied a favorable difference from less privileged human beings. Mary was no longer suffering from melancholia; she was now Miss Brill, the eldest daughter of that interesting family steeped in the best literary tradition, the granddaughter of John Brill, whose works were now out of print, but who in some odd manner had succeeded in elbowing himself into a place among the gods and half-gods of the Emersonian tradition. Mary had never seen him—but now she was Miss Brill. Mary had not read his works, but they were the keystone in her arch, and perhaps it was better to let it go at that.

I walked over toward the riverbank, and I realized that I had nearly lost my temper. It did not seem possible that I should have been disturbed by a harmless old man with a long white beard slightly stained by tobacco juice. That beard had been so dense and luxuriant that he had never needed a necktie, if he had ever worn one. I was angry at an old man a long time dead, who had done nothing more hostile to me than to pat my head when I was eight years old—as angry as though he were still living. Actually his demise had never been wholly accepted at Wickford Point. He was always being dished up at convenient moments; being wheeled out at teatime; cropping up in conversation. People kept asking if I were not in some way or other related to old Brill. It did no good to explain very carefully that I was not, nor to explain further that his verses were atrocious and that he was nothing but an overrated fraud who had battened on his acquaintance with the great figures of his time. No one in the present day had ever read or wished to read anything he had written, and yet he was a good deal more of a figure now than he had been while alive, when he was only an ungifted Boswell with a death grip on the coattails of his betters.

From where I stood by the riverbank I could see on the opposite shore the white house in which John Brill had lived. The literary shrine was now frequented by motorists from the Middle West who paid fifty cents to enter. A motor travel association had even published a page in their "Tours through Old New England" entitled "A Glimpse into the Brill Country." When you paid your fifty cents, a hostess would show you around the house. You could see the study, furnished with very bad Victorian furniture, exactly as Mr. Brill had left it, except that they had removed his plug of tobacco and his cuspidor. There were a number of framed autographed letters upon the wall from personal friends of Mr. Brill, which had not been there in his lifetime. The old gentleman had always kept them in an album to show to callers. Even the hostess didn't know exactly who Mr. Brill was, nor was this entirely the point. The point was the Spartan simplicity of those surroundings. Mr. Brill had loved to roam the hills. He had been on many walks with Thoreau. There was a dusty case in the hall containing birds that he had stuffed himself. Up in the bedroom you could see his walking boots, out in the woodshed was his ax. He had loved the dignity of manual toil, and even when he was eighty-five years old he could be found in the wood lot up the hill—if he knew in advance that friends were coming. He also loved to whittle. There was a maple bowl in the dining room which he had made himself, and out of which he ate his porridge—when there were guests at dinner. Perhaps I might have liked him if I had been his contemporary, but now that he was dead he was not likeable. From my point of view he had even done a good deal to spoil the river, for things which he had written about it lingered poisonously in my memory. Even now I could not get some lines of his out of my mind:—

O river, mighty river,

How often have I rowed on thee,

Seen the wild duck thy waters shiver,

In thy course pellucid to the sea.

May our souls move on as tranquil

As thy waters past the bank,

Like the birds of Wickford, thankful

To the Maker they must thank.

Surely I was right in allowing these lines to fill me with a definite and abiding horror. Certainly he had done better than that, but it was the worst I always remembered. Sometimes at night I would lie awake, conjuring up lines old Brill had written, and yet when I quoted them no one would believe they were his.

The river must have been wonderful when he was young. The shad would run up it in the spring and there was a run of salmon also. Now it had an oily odor from the cotton mills upstream. Down by the old landing where they used to tie the salt hay barges, the tide was going out leaving an expanse of thick black mud. The shore was covered with unsightly bits of driftwood. In spite of the farms along its edge the Wickford River gave the appearance of having been entirely forgotten. Its shores had a neglected look and our bank was no exception. Every afternoon, in the old days, my grandmother and her sisters had walked along a little path beneath the birches and the oaks to a grove of white pines on our point. There they would sit and read and sew with all the ordered industry of their generation. When my great-aunt Sarah was still alive, she would put on her bonnet and her shawl at least once a day to walk out there. I had used the path a good deal myself when I was young enough to wander about the place playing games of imagination, but that was all quite a while ago, and since then no one went there very often. Cousin Clothilde was never much at walking. She once said the point was a wonderful place to go when you were in love, yet as far as I could gather neither Bella nor Mary felt that way. I don't think Bella had gone as far as that even with Mr. Berg, and now the path was nearly grown over and no one had bothered to clear it out. Earle started to do it once, but it took him all morning to find something to clear it with; and then, when he did find the ax where it had been buried in the coalbin, the handle came off and he bruised his finger.

As far as I could tell, I was the only one now who went to the point. The jungle was creeping over it, laying a blanket of unkempt wildness beneath the straight trunks of the tall white pines. All the strange growth of unused places was rising among fallen branches, which snapped beneath one's steps, but once you were among the pines there was a solemn, restful silence. Even the noises in their tops were discreet and careful like repressed rustlings in church. I used to think when I was a boy that the pines were whispering of Wickford Point, and they were at their old game of gossip when I stood among them that morning. First there would be a whisper and then the breeze would blow them into a staid and melancholy sort of laughter.

"My dear," they were saying, "don't tell me you've never heard ... the most amazing thing, I hardly venture to repeat it ... as long as you understand that it's to be kept inside the family ... it is so reminiscent of the others ... and will you only look who's out here now—Jim Calder! He thinks he's changed, but he hasn't. It's hardly polite to laugh too loud, and it's not polite to whisper. He's going away. He's going to see Joe Stowe again. He will try to forget about us, but he won't forget. It doesn't matter where he goes, he's out here half the time, even when he's away. He's always here, because we caught him as a boy. It doesn't matter where he dies, he'll be back here. Don't laugh too loud. It's rude to laugh when they think they can get away."

The whole place was queer. I could never remember even as a child being afraid at Wickford Point, but the whole place was queer. There had been too many people there. It was like a crowded room when I stood beneath the trees.