"Why, you never told me that," said Hattie.
"You don"t mean to tell me this is the first you heard ol it," said Helen. "You"ve known about it from the first-since Christmas."
It wasn"t easy for Hattie to meet her eyes. She presently put her head down. Her face became very dry, especially the lips. "Well, don"t you worry about me. I"ll be all right here," she said.
"Who"s going to look after you?" said Jerry. He evaded nothing himself and tolerated no evasion in others. Except that, as Hattie knew, he made every possible allowance for her. But who would help her? She couldn"t count on her friend Half Pint, she couldn"t really count on Marian either. She had had only the Rolfes to turn to. Helen, trying to be steady, gazed at her and made sad, involuntary movements with her head, sometimes nodding, sometimes seeming as if she disagreed. Hattie, with her inner voice, swore at her: b.i.t.c.h-eyes. I can"t make it the way she does because I"m old. Is that fair?_ And yet she admired Helen"s eyes. Even the skin about them, slightly wrinkled, heavy underneath, was touching, beautiful. There was a heaviness in her bust that went, as if by attachment, with the heaviness of her eyes. Her head, her hands and feet should have taken a more slender body. Helen, said Hattie, was the nearest thing she had on earth to a sister. But there was no reason to go to Seattle-no genuine business. Why the h.e.l.l Seattle? It was only idleness, only a holiday. The only reason was Hattie herself; this was their way of telling her that there was a limit to what she could expect them to do for her. Helen"s nervous head wavered, but her thoughts were steady. She knew what was pa.s.sing through Hattie"s mind. Like Hattie, she was an idle woman. Why was her right to idleness better?
Because of money? thought Hattie. Because of age? Because she has a husband? Because she had a daughter in Swarthmore College? But an interesting thing occurred to her. Helen disliked being idle, whereas Hattie herself had never made any bones about it: an idle life was all she was good for. But for her it had been uphill all the way, because when Waggoner divorced her she didn"t have a cent. She even had to support Wicks for seven or eight years. Except with horses, Wicks had no sense. And then she had had to take tons of dirt from India. I am the one,_ Hattie a.s.serted to herself. / would know what to do with Helen"s advantages. She only sujfers from them. And if she wants to stop being an idle woman why can"t she start with me, her neighbor?_ Hattie"s skin, for all its puffiness, burned with anger. She said to Rolfe and Helen, "Don"t worry. I"ll make out. But if I have to leave the lake you"ll be ten times more lonely than before. Nowl "m going back to my house."
She lifted up her broad old face, and her lips were childlike with suffering. She would never take back what she had said.
But the trouble was no ordinary trouble. Hattie was herself aware that she rambled, forgot names, and answered when no one spoke.
"We can"t just take charge of her," Rolfe said. "What"s more, she ought to be near a doctor. She keeps her shotgun loaded so she can fire it if anything happens to her in the house. But who knows what she"ll shoot? I don"t believe it was Jacamares who killed that Doberman of hers."
Rolfe drove into the yard the day after she moved back to the yellow house and said, "I"m going into town. I can bring you some chow if you like."
She couldn"t afford to refuse his offer, angry though she was, and she said, "Yes, bring me some stuff from the Mountain Street Market. Charge it." She had only some frozen shrimp and a few cans of beer in the icebox. When Rolfe had gone she put out the package of shrimp to thaw.
People really used to stick by one another in the West. Hattie now saw herself as one of the pioneers. The modern breed had come later. After all, she had lived on the range like an old-timer. Wicks had had to shoot their Christmas dinner and she had cooked it-venison. He killed it on the reservation, and if the Indians had caught them, there would have been h.e.l.l to pay.
The weather was hot, the clouds were heavy and calm in a large sky. The horizon was so huge that in it the lake must have seemed like a saucer of milk. Some milk!_ Hattie thought. Two thousand feet down in the middle, so deep no corpse could ever be recovered. A body, they said, went around with the currents. And there were rocks like eyeteeth, and hot springs, and colorless fish at the bottom which were never caught. Now that the white pelicans were nesting they patrolled the rocks for snakes and other egg thieves. They were so big and flew so slow you might imagine they were angels. Hattie no longer visited the lake sh.o.r.e; the walk exhausted her. She saved her strength to go to Pace"s bar in the afternoon.
She took off her shoes and stockings and walked on bare feet from one end of her house to the other. On the land side she saw Wanda Gingham sitting near the tracks while her great-grandson played in the soft red gravel. Wanda wore a large purple shawl and her black head was bare. All about her was-was nothing, Hattie thought; for she had taken a drink, breaking her rule. Nothing but mountains, thrust out like men"s bodies; the sagebrush was the hair on their chests.
The warm wind blew dust from the marl pit. This white powder made her sky less blue. On the water side were the pelicans, pure as spirits, slow as angels, blessing the air as they flew with great wings.
Should she or should she not have Sam do something about the vine on the chimney? Sparrows nested in it, and she was glad of that. But all summer long the king snakes were after them and she was afraid to walk in the garden. When the sparrows scratched the ground for seed they took a funny bound; they held their legs stiff and flung back the dust with both feet. Hattie sat down at her old Spanish monastery table, watching them in the cloudy warmth of the day, clasping her hands, chuckling and sad. The bushes were crowded with yellow roses, half of them now rotted. The lizards scrambled from shadow to shadow. The water was smooth as air, gaudy as silk. The mountains succ.u.mbed, falling asleep in the heat. Drowsy, Hattie lay down on her sofa, its pads to her always like dogs" paws. She gave in to sleep and when she woke it was midnight; she did not want to alarm the Rolfes by putting on her lights, so she took advantage of the moon to eat a few thawed shrimps and go to the bathroom. She undressed and lifted herself into bed and lay there feeling her sore arm. Now she knew how much she missed her dog. The whole matter of the dog weighed heavily on her soul. She came close to tears, thinking about him, and she went to sleep oppressed by her secret.
suppose I had better try to pull myself together a little,_ thought Hattie nervously in the morning. can"t just sleep my way through._ She knew what her difficulty was. Before any serious question her mind gave way. It scattered or diffused. She said to herself, / can see bright, but I feel dim. I guess I"m not so lively anymore. Maybe I"m becoming a little touched in the head, as Mother was._ But she was not so old as her mother was when she did those strange things. At eighty-five, her mother had to be kept from going naked in the street. I"m not as bad as that yet. Thank G.o.d! Yes, I walked into the men"s wards, but that was when I had a fever, and my nightie was on._ She drank a cup of Nescafe and it strengthened her determination to do something for herself. In all the world she had only her brother Angus to go to. Her brother Will had led a rough life; he was an old h.e.l.ler, and now he drove everyone away. He was too crabby, thought Hattie. Besides he was angry because she had lived so long with Wicks. Angus would forgive her. But then he and his wife were not her kind. With them she couldn"t drink, she couldn"t smoke, she had to make herself small-mouthed, and she would have to wait while they read a chapter of the Bible before breakfast. Hattie could not bear to sit at table waiting for meals. Besides, she had a house of her own at last. Why should she have to leave it? She had never owned a thing before. And now she was not allowed to enjoy her yellow house. But I"ll keep it,_ she said to herself re -belliously. / swear to G.o.d I"ll keep it. Why, I barely just got it. I haven"t had time._ And she went out on the porch to work the pulley and do something about the adhesions in her arm. She was sure now that they were there. And what will I do?_ she cried to herself. What will I do? Why did I ever go to Rolf"s that night_-_and why did I lose control on the crossing?__ She couldn"t say, now, "I sneezed." She couldn"t even remember what had happened, except that she saw the boulders and the twisting blue rails and Darly. It was Darly"s fault. He was sick and old himself. He_ couldn"t make it. He envied her the house, and her woman"s peaceful life. Since she returned from the hospital he hadn"t even come to visit her. He only said, "h.e.l.l, I"m sorry for her, but it was her fault." What hurt him most was that she had said he couldn"t hold his liquor.
Fierceness, swearing to G.o.d did no good. She was still the same procrastinating old woman. She had a letter to answer from Hotchkiss Insurance and it drifted out of sight. She was going to phone Claiborne the lawyer, but it slipped her mind. One morning she announced to Helen that she believed she would apply to an inst.i.tution in Los Angeles that took over the property of old people and managed it for them. They gave you an apartment right on the ocean, and your meals and medical care. You had to sign over half of your estate. "It"s fair enough," said Hattie. "They take a gamble. I may live to be a hundred."
"I wouldn"t be surprised," said Helen.
However, Hattie never got around to sending to Los Angeles for the brochure. But Jerry Rolfe took it on himself to write a letter to her brother Angus about her condition. And he drove over also to have a talk with Amy Walters, the gold miner"s widow at Fort Walters-as the ancient woman called it. The fort was an old tar-paper building over the mine. The shaft made a cesspool unnecessary. Since the death of her second husband no one had dug for gold. On a heap of stones near the road a crimson sign FORT WALTERS was placed. Behind it was a flagpole. The American flag was raised every day.
Amy was working in the garden in one of dead Bill"s shirts. Bill had brought water down from the mountains for her in a homemade aqueduct so she could raise her own peaches and vegetables.
"Amy," Rolfe said, "Hattie"s back from the hospital and living all alone. You have no folks and neither has she. Not to beat around the bush about it, why don"t you live together?"
Amy"s face had great delicacy. Her winter baths in the lake, her vegetable soups, the waltzes she played for herself alone on the grand piano that stood beside her woodstove, the murder stories she read till darkness obliged her to close the book-this life of hers had made her remote. She looked delicate, yet there was no way to affect her composure, she couldn"t be touched. It was very strange.
"Hattie and me have different habits, Jerry," said Amy. "And Hattie wouldn"t like my company. I can"t drink with her. I"m a teetotaler."
"That"s true," said Rolfe, recalling that Hattie referred to Amy as if she were a ghost. He couldn"t speak to Amy of the solitary death in store for her. There was not a cloud in the arid sky today, and there was no shadow of death on Amy. She was tranquil, she seemed to be supplied with a sort of pure fluid that would feed her life slowly for years to come.
He said, "All kinds of things could happen to a woman like Hattie in that yellow house, and n.o.body would know."
"That"s a fact. She doesn"t know how to take care of herself."
"She can"t. Her arm hasn"t healed."
Amy didn"t say that she was sorry to hear it. In the place of those words came a silence which might have meant that. Then she said, "I might go over there a few hours a day, but she would have to pay me."
"Now, Amy, you must know as well as I do that Hattie has no money-not much more than her pension. Just the house."
At once Amy said, no pause coming between his words and hers, "I would take care of her if she"d agree to leave the house to me."
"Leave it in your hands, you mean?" said Rolfe. "To manage?"
"In her will. To belong to me."
"Why, Amy, what would you do with Hattie"s house?" he said.
"It would be my property, that"s all. I"d have it."
"Maybe you would leave Fort Walters to her in your will," he said.
"Oh, no," she said. "Why should I? I"m not asking Hattie for her help. I don"t need it. Hattie is a city woman."
Rolfe could not carry this proposal back to Hattie. He was too wise ever to mention her will to her.
But Pace was not so careful of her feelings. By mid-June Hattie had begun to visit his bar regularly. She had so many things to think about she couldn"t stay at home. When Pace came in from the yard one day-he had been packing the wheels of his horse trailer and was wiping grease from his fingers-he said with his usual bluntness, "How would you like it if I paid you fifty bucks a month for the rest of your life, Hat?"
Hattie was holding her second old-fashioned of the day. At the bar she made it appear that she observed the limit; but she had started drinking at home. One before lunch, one during, one after lunch. She began to grin, expecting Pace to make one of his jokes. But he was wearing his scoop-shaped Western hat as level as a Quaker, and he had drawn down his chin, a sign that he was not fooling. She said, "That would be nice, but what"s the catch?"
"No catch," he said. "This is what we"d do. I"d give you five hundred dollars cash, and fifty bucks a month for life, and you let me sleep some dudes in the yellow house, and you"d leave the house to me in your will."
"What kind of a deal is that?" said Hattie, her look changing. "I thought we were friends."
"It"s the best deal you"ll ever get," he said.
The weather was sultry, but Hattie till now had thought that it was nice. She had been dreamy but comfortable, about to begin to enjoy the cool of the day; but now she felt that such cruelty and injustice had been waiting to attack her, that it would have been better to die in the hospital than be so disillusioned.
She cried, "Everybody wants to push me out. You"re a cheater, Pace. G.o.d! I know you. Pick on somebody else. Why do you have to pick on me? Just because I happen to be around?"
Why, no, Hattie," he said, trying now to be careful. "It was just a business offer."
"Why don"t you give me some blood for the bank if you"re such a friend of mine?"
"Well, Hattie, you drink too much and you oughtn"t to have been driving anyway."
"I sneezed, and you know it. The whole thing happened because I sneezed. Everybody knows that. I wouldn"t sell you my house. I"d give it away to the lepers first. You"d let me go away and never send me a cent. You never pay anybody. You can"t even buy wholesale in town anymore because n.o.body trusts you. I"m stuck, that"s all, just stuck. I keep on saying that this is my only home in all the world, this is where my friends are, and the weather is always perfect and the lake is beautiful. But I wish the whole d.a.m.n empty old place were in h.e.l.l. It"s not human and neither are you. But I"ll be here the day the sheriff takes away your horses-you never mind! I"ll be clapping and applauding!"
He told her then that she was drunk again, and so she was, but she was more than that, and though her head was spinning she decided to go back to the house at once and take care of some things she had been putting off. This very day she was going to write to the lawyer, Claiborne, and make sure that Pace never got her property. She wouldn"t put it past him to swear in court that India had promised him the yellow house.
She sat at the table with pen and paper, trying to think how to put it.
"I want this on record," she wrote. "I could kick myself in the head when I think of how he"s led me on. I have been his patsy ten thousand times. As when that drunk crashed his Cub plane on the lake sh.o.r.e. At the coroner"s jury he let me take the whole blame. He said he had instructed me when I was working for him never to take in any drunks. And this flier was drunk. He had nothing on but a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts and he was flying from Sacramento to Salt Lake City. At the inquest Pace said I had disobeyed his instructions. The same was true when the cook went haywire. She was a tramp. He never hires decent help. He cheated her on the bar bill and blamed me and she went after me with a meat cleaver. She disliked me because I criticized her for drinking at the bar in her one-piece white bathing suit with the dude guests. But he turned her loose on me. He hints that he did certain services for India. She would never have let him touch one single finger. He was too common for her. It can never be said about India that she was not a lady in every way. He thinks he is the greatest sack-artist in the world. He only loves horses, as a fact. He has no claims at all, oral or written, on this yellow house. I want you to have this over my signature. He was cruel to Pickle-t.i.ts who was his first wife, and he"s no better to the charming woman who is his present one. I don"t know why she takes it. It must be despair." Hattie said to herself, I don"t suppose I"d better send that._ She was still angry. Her heart was knocking within; the deep pulses, as after a hot bath, beat at the back of her thighs. The air outside was dotted with transparent particles. The mountains were as red as furnace clinkers. The iris leaves were fan sticks-they stuck out like Jiggs"s hair.
She always ended by looking out of the window at the desert and lake. They drew you from yourself. But after they had drawn you, what did they do with you? It was too late to find out. I"ll never know. I wasn"t meant to. I"m not the type,_ Hattie reflected. Maybe something too cruel for women, young or old._ So she stood up and, rising, she had the sensation that she had gradually become a container for herself. You get old, your heart, your liver, your lungs seem to expand in size, and the walls of the body give way outward, swelling, she thought, and you take the shape of an old jug, wider and wider toward the top. You swell up with tears and fat. She no longer even smelled to herself like a woman. Her face with its much-slept-upon skin was only faintly like her own-like a cloud that has changed. It was a face. It became a ball of yarn. It had drifted open. It had scattered.
/ was never one single thing anyway,_ she thought. Never my own. I was only loaned to myself._ But the thing wasn"t over yet. And in fact she didn"t know for certain that it was ever going to be over. You only had other people"s word for it that death was such-and-such. How do I know? she asked herself challengingly. Her anger had sobered her for a little while. Now she was again drunk. ... It was strange. It is strange. It may continue being strange._ She further thought, / used to wish for death more than I do now. Because I didn"t have anything at all. I changed when I got a roof of my own over me. And now? Do I have to go? I thought Marian loved me, but she already has a sister. And I thought Helen and Jerry would never desert me, but they"ve beat it. And now Pace has insulted me. They think I"m not going to make it._ She went to the cupboard-she kept the bourbon bottle there; she drank less if each time she had to rise and open the cupboard door. And, as if she were being watched, she poured a drink and swallowed it.
The notion that in this emptiness someone saw her was connected with the other notion that she was being filmed from birth to death. That this was done for everyone. And afterward you could view your life. A hereafter movie.
Hattie wanted to see some of it now, and she sat down on the dogs"-paw cushions of her sofa and, with her knees far apart and a smile of yearning and of fright, she bent her round back, burned a cigarette at the corner of her mouth and saw-the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris where her organ teacher used to bring her. It looked like country walls of stone, but rising high and leaning outward were towers. She was very young. She knew music. How she could ever have been so clever was beyond her. But she did know it. She could read all those notes. The sky was gray. After this she saw some entertaining things she liked to tell people about. She was a young wife. She was in Aix-les-Bains with her motherin-law, and they played bridge in a mud bath with a British general and his aide. There were artificial waves in the swimming pool. She lost her bathing suit because it was a size too big. How did she get out? Ah, you got out of everything.
She saw her husband, James John Waggoner IV. They were s...o...b..und together in New Hampshire. "Jimmy, Jimmy, how can you fling a wife away?" she asked him. "Have you forgotten love? Did I drink too much-did I bore you?" He had married again and had two children. He had gotten tired of her. And though he was a vain man with nothing to be vain about-no looks, not too much intelligence, nothing but an old Philadelphia family-she had loved him. She too had been a sn.o.b about her Philadelphia connections. Give up the name of Waggoner? How could she? For this reason she had never married Wicks. "How dare you," she had said to Wicks, "come without a shave in a dirty shirt and muck on you, come and ask me to marry! If you want to propose, go and clean up first." But his dirt was only a pretext.
Trade Waggoner for Wicks?_ she asked herself again with a swing of her shoulders. She wouldn"t think of it. Wicks was an excellent man. But he was a cowboy. Socially nothing. He couldn"t even read. But she saw this on her film. They were in Athens Canyon, in a cratelike house, and she was reading aloud to him from The Count of Monte Cristo._ He wouldn"t let her stop. While walking to stretch her legs, she read, and he followed her about to catch each word. After all, he was very dear to her. Such a man! Now she saw him jump from his horse. They were living on the range, trapping coyotes. It was just the second gray of evening, cloudy, moments after the sun had gone down. There was an animal in the trap, and he went toward it to kill it. He wouldn"t waste a bullet on the creatures but killed them with a kick, with his boot. And then Hattie saw that this coyote was all white-snarling teeth, white scruff. "Wicks, he"s white! White as a polar bear. You"re not going to kill him, are you?" The animal flattened to the ground. He snarled and cried. He couldn"t pull away because of the heavy trap. And Wicks killed him. What else could he have done? The white beast lay dead. The dust of Wicks"s boots hardly showed on its head and jaws. Blood ran from the muzzle.
And now came something on Hattie"s film she tried to shun. It was she herself who had killed her dog, Richie. Just as Rolfe and Pace had warned her, he was vicious, his brain was turned. She, because she was on the side of all dumb creatures, defended him when he bit the trashy woman Jacamares was living with. Perhaps if she had had Richie from a puppy he wouldn"t have turned on her. When she got him he was already a year and a half old and she couldn"t break him of his habits. But she thought that only she understood him. And Rolfe had warned her, "You"ll be sued, do you know that? The dog will take out after somebody smarter than that Jacamares"s woman, and you"ll be in for it."
Hattie saw herself as she swayed her shoulders and said, "Nonsense."
But what fear she had felt when the dog went for her on the porch. Suddenly she could see, by his skull, by his eyes that he was evil. She screamed at him, "Richie!" And what had she done to him? He had lain under the gas range all day growling and wouldn"t come out. She tried to urge him out with the broom, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed it in his teeth. She pulled him out, and he left the stick and tore at her. Now, as the spectator of this, her eyes opened, beyond the pregnant curtain and the air-wave of marl dust, summer"s snow, drifting over the water. "Oh, my G.o.d! Richie!" Her thigh was s.n.a.t.c.hed by his jaws. His teeth went through her skirt. She felt she would fall. Would she go down? Then the dog would rush at her throat-then black night, bad-odored mouth, the blood pouring from her neck, from torn veins. Her heart shriveled as the teeth went into her thigh, and she couldn"t delay another second but took her kindling hatchet from the nail, strengthened her grip on the smooth wood, and hit the dog. She saw the blow. She saw him die at once. And then in fear and shame she hid the body. And at night she buried him in the yard. Next day she accused Jacamares. On him she laid the blame for the disappearance of her dog.
She stood up; she spoke to herself in silence, as was her habit. G.o.d, what shall I do? I have taken life. I have lied. I have borne false witness. I have stalled. And now what shall I do? n.o.body will help me._ And suddenly she made up her mind that she should go and do what she had been putting off for weeks, namely, test herself with the car, and she slipped on her shoes and went outside. Lizards ran before her in the thirsty dust. She opened the hot, broad door of the car. She lifted her lame hand onto the wheel. With her right hand she reached far to the left and turned the wheel with all her might. Then she started the motor and tried to drive out of the yard. But she could not release the emergency brake with its rasplike rod. She reached with her good hand, the right, under the steering wheel and pressed her bosom on it and strained. No, she could not shift the gears and steer. She couldn"t even reach down to the hand brake. The sweat broke out on her skin. Her efforts were too much. She was deeply wounded by the pain in her arm. The door of the car fell open again and she turned from the wheel and with her stiff legs hanging from the door she wept. What could she do now? And when she had wept over the ruin of her life she got out of the old car and went back to the house. She took the bourbon from the cupboard and picked up the ink bottle and a pad of paper and sat down to write her will.
"My Will," she wrote, and sobbed to herself.
Since the death of India she had numberless times asked the question, To Whom? Who will get this when I die? She had unconsciously put people to the test to find out whether they were worthy. It made her more severe than before.
Now she wrote, "I Harriet Simmons Waggoner, being of sound mind and not knowing what may be in store for me at the age of seventy-two (born 1885), living alone at Sego Desert Lake, instruct my lawyer, Harold Claiborne, Paiute County Court Building, to draw my last will and testament upon the following terms."
She sat perfectly still now to hear from within who would be the lucky one, who would inherit the yellow house. For which she had waited. Yes, waited for India"s death, choking on her bread because she was a rich woman"s servant and whipping girl. But who had done for her, Hattie, what she had done for India? And who, apart from India, had ever held out a hand to her? Kindness, yes. Here and there people had been kind. But the word in her head was not kindness, it was succor. And who had given her that? Succor?_ Only India. If at least, next best after succor, someone had given her a shake and said, "Stop stalling. Don"t be such a slow, old, procrastinating sit-stiller." Again, it was only India who had done her good. She had offered her succor. "Het-tie!" said that drunken mask. "Do you know what sloth is? Demn you! poky old demned thing!"
But I was waiting,_ Hattie realized. / was waiting, thinking, "Youth is terrible, frightening. I will wait it out. And men? Men are cruel and strong. They want things I haven"t got to give. " There were no kids in me,_ thought Hattie. Not that I wouldn"t have loved them, but such my nature was. And who can blame me for having it? My nature?_ She drank from an old-fashioned gla.s.s. There was no orange in it, no ice, no bitters or sugar, only the stinging, clear bourbon.
So then,_ she continued, looking at the dry sun-stamped dust and the last freckled flowers of red wild peach, to live with Angus and his wife? And to have to hear a chapter from the Bible before breakfast? Once more in the house_-_not of a stranger, perhaps, but not far from it either?__ In other houses, in someone else"s house, to wait for mealtimes was her lifelong punishment. She always felt it in the throat and stomach. And so she would again, and to the very end. However, she must think of someone to leave the house to.
And first of all she wanted to do right by her family. None of them had ever dreamed that she, Hattie, would ever have something to bequeath. Until a few years ago it had certainly looked as if she would die a pauper. So now she could keep her head up with the proudest of them. And, as this occurred to her, she actually lifted up her face with its broad nose and victorious eyes; if her hair had become shabby as onion roots, if, at the back, her head was round and bald as a newel post, what did that matter? Her heart experienced a childish glory, not yet tired of it after seventy-two years. She, too, had amounted to something. I"ll do some good by going,_ she thought. Now I believe I should leave it to, to..._ She returned to the old point of struggle. She had decided many times and many times changed her mind. She tried to think, Who would get the most out of this_ yellow house?_ It was a tearing thing to go through. If it had not been the house but, instead, some brittle thing she could hold in her hand, then her last action would be to throw and smash it, and so the thing and she herself would be demolished together. But it was vain to think such thoughts. To whom should she leave it? Her brothers? Not they. Nephews? One was a submarine commander. The other was a bachelor in the State Department. Then began the roll call of cousins. Merton? He owned an estate in Connecticut. Anna? She had a face like a hot-water bottle. That left Joyce, the orphaned daughter of her cousin Wilfred. Joyce was the most likely heiress. Hattie had already written to her and had her out to the lake at Thanksgiving, two years ago. But this Joyce was another odd one; over thirty, good, yes, but placid, running to fat, a scholar-ten years in Eugene, Oregon, working for her degree. In Hattie"s opinion this was only another form of sloth. Nevertheless, Joyce yet hoped to marry. Whom? Not Dr. Stroud. He wouldn"t. And still Joyce had vague hopes. Hattie knew how that could be. At least have a man she could argue with.
She was now more drunk than at any time since her accident. Again she filled her gla.s.s. Have ye eyes and see not? Sleepers awake!_ Knees wide apart she sat in the twilight, thinking. Marian? Marian didn"t need another house. Half Pint? She wouldn"t know what to do with it. Brother Louis came up for consideration next. He was an old actor who had a church for the Indians at Athens Canyon. Hollywood stars of the silent days sent him their negligees; he altered them and wore them in the pulpit. The Indians loved his show. But when Billy Shawah blew his brains out after his two-week bender, they still tore his shack down and turned the boards inside out to get rid of his ghost. They had their old religion. No, not Brother Louis. He"d show movies in the yellow house to the tribe or make a nursery out of it for the Indian brats.
And now she began to consider Wicks. When last heard from he was south of Bishop, California, a handyman in a saloon off toward Death Valley. It wasn"t she who heard from him but Pace. Herself, she hadn"t actually seen Wicks since-how low she had sunk then!-she had kept the hamburger stand on Route 158. The little lunchroom had supported them both. Wicks hung around on the end stool, rolling cigarettes (she saw it on the film). Then there was a quarrel. Things had been going from bad to worse. He"d begun to grouse now about this and now about that. He beefed about the food, at last. She saw and heard him. "Hat," he said, "I"m good and tired of hamburger."
"Well, what do you think I eat?" she said with that round, defiant movement of her shoulders which she herself recognized as characteristic {me all over,_ she thought). But he opened the cash register and took out thirty cents and crossed the street to the butcher"s and brought back a steak. He threw it on the griddle. "Fry it," he said. She did, and watched him eat.
And when he was through she could bear her rage no longer. "Now," she said, "you"ve had your meat. Get out. Never come back." She kept a pistol under the counter. She picked it up, c.o.c.ked it, pointed it at his heart. "If you ever come in that door again, I"ll kill you," she said.
She saw it all. I couldn"t bear to fall so low,_ she thought, to be slave to a shifiless cowboy._ Wicks said, "Don"t do that, Hat. Guess I went too far. You"re right."
"You"ll never have a chance to make it up," she cried. "Get out!"
On that cry he disappeared, and since then she had never seen him.
"Wicks, dear," she said. "Please! I"m sorry. Don"t condemn me in your heart. Forgive me. I hurt myself in my evil. I always had a thick idiot head. I was born with a thick head."
Again she wept, for Wicks. She was too proud. A sn.o.b. Now they might have lived together in this house, old friends, simple and plain.
She thought, He really was my good fiend._ But what would Wicks do with a house like this, alone, if he was alive and survived her? He was too wiry for soft beds or easy chairs.
And she was the one who had said stiffly to India, "I"m a Christian person. I do not bear a grudge."
Ah yes,_ she said to herself. / have caught myself out too of en. How long can this go on? And_ she began to think, or try to think, of Joyce, her cousin"s daughter. Joyce was like herself, a woman alone, getting on in years, clumsy. Probably never been laid. Too bad. She would have given much, now, to succor Joyce.
But it seemed to her now that that too, the succor, had been a story. First you heard the pure story. Then you heard the impure story. Both stories. She had paid out years, now to one shadow, now to another shadow.
Joyce would come here to the house. She had a little income and could manage. She would live as Hattie had lived, alone. Here she would rot, start to drink, maybe, and day after day read, day after day sleep. See how beautiful it was here? It burned you out. How empty! It turned you into ash.
How can I doom a younger person to the same life? asked Hattie. It"s for somebody like me. When I was younger it wasn"t right. But now it is, exactly. Only I fit in here. It was made for my old age, to spend my last years peacefully. If I hadn"t let Jerry make me drunk that night-if I hadn"t sneezed! Because of this arm, I"ll have to live with Angus. My heart will break there away from my only home.
She was now very drunk, and she said to herself, Take what G.o.d brings. He gives no gifis unmixed. He makes loans._ She resumed her letter of instructions to lawyer Claiborne: "Upon the following terms," she wrote a second time. "Because 1 have suffered much. Because I only lately received what I have to give away, I can"t bear it." The drunken blood was soaring to her head. But her hand was clear enough. She wrote, "It is too soon! Too soon! Because I do not find it in my heart to care for anyone as I would wish. Being cast off and lonely, and doing no harm where I am. Why should it be? This breaks my heart. In addition to everything else, why must I worry about this, which I must leave? I am tormented out of my mind. Even though by my own fault I have put myself into this position. And I am not ready to give up on this. No, not yet. And so I"ll tell you what, I leave this property, land, house, garden, and water rights, to Hattie Simmons Waggoner. Me! I realize this is bad and wrong. Not possible. Yet it is the only thing I really wish to do, so may G.o.d have mercy on my soul."
How could that happen? She studied what she had written (and finally acknowledged there was no alternative). "I"m drunk," she said, "and don"t know what I"m doing. I"ll die, and end. Like India. Dead as that lilac bush."
Then she thought that there was a beginning, and a middle. She shrank from the last term. She began once more-a beginning. After that, there was the early middle, then middle middle, late middle middle, quite late middle. In fact the middle is all I know. The rest is just a rumor.
Only tonight I can"t give the house away. I"m drunk and so I need it. And tomorrow, she promised herself, I"ll think again. I"ll work it out, for sure.
WHAT KIND OF DAY DID YOU HAVE?.
DIZZY WITH PERPLEXITIES, seduced by a restless spirit, Katrina Goliger took a trip she shouldn"t have taken. What was the matter with her, why was she jumping around like this? A divorced suburban matron with two young kids, was she losing ground, were her looks going or her options shrinking so fast that it made her reckless? Looks were not her problem; she was pretty enough, dark hair, nice eyes. She had a full figure, a little on the plump side, but she handled it with some skill. Victor Wulpy, the man in her life, liked her just as she was. The worst you could say of her was that she was clumsy. Clumsiness, however, might come out as girlishness if it was well managed. But there were few things which Trina managed well. The truth, to make a summary of it, was that she was pa.s.sably pretty, she was awkward, and she was wildly restless.
In all fairness, her options were increasingly limited by Wulpy. It wasn"t that he was being capricious. He had very special difficulties to deal with-the state of his health, certain physical disabilities, his advanced age, and, in addition to the rest, his prominence. He was a major figure, a world-cla.s.s intellectual, big in the art world, and he had been a bohemian long before bohemianism was absorbed into everyday life. The civilized world knew very well who Victor Wulpy was. You couldn"t discuss modern painting, poetry-any number of important topics-without referring to him.
Well, then, toward midnight, and in the dead of winter-Evanston, Illinois, where she lives at the bottom of a continental deep freeze-Katrina"s phone rings and Victor asks her-in effect he tells her-"I have to have you here first thing in the morning."
"Here" is Buffalo, New York, where Victor has been lecturing.
And Katrina, setting aside all considerations of common sense or of self-respect, says, "I"ll get an early flight out."
If she had been having an affair with a younger man, Katrina might have pa.s.sed it off with a laugh, saying, "That"s a real brainstorm. It would be a gas, wouldn"t it, and just what this zero weather calls for. But what am I supposed to do with my kids on such short notice?" She might also have mentioned that her divorced husband was suing for custody of the little girls, and that she had a date downtown tomorrow with the court-appointed psychiatrist who was reporting on her fitness. She would have mixed these excuses with banter, and combined them with a come-on: "Let"s do it Thursday. I"ll make it up to you." With Victor refusal was not one of her options. It was almost impossible, nowadays, to say no to him. Poor health was a euphemism. He had nearly died last year.
Various forces-and she wasn"t altogether sorry-robbed her of the strength to resist. Victor was such a monument, and he went back so far in modern cultural history. You had to remember that he had begun to publish in transition,_ an avant-garde magazine, and always in lowercase, and Hound and Horn_ before she was born. He was beginning to have an avant-garde reputation while she was still in her playpen. And if you thought he was not tired out and had no more surprises up his sleeve, you were thinking of the usual threescore and ten, not of Victor Wulpy. Even his bitterest detractors, the diehard grudgers, had to admit that he was still first-rate. And about how many Americans had leaders of thought like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hannah Arendt said, "Chapeau bas!_ This is a man of genius." Merleau-Ponty was especially impressed with Victor"s essays on Karl Marx.
Besides, Victor was personally so impressive-he had such a face, such stature; without putting it on, he was so commanding that he often struck people as being a king, of an odd kind. A New York-style king, thoroughly American-good-natured, approachable, but making it plain that he was a sovereign; he took no c.r.a.p from anybody. But last year-it was that time of life for him, the midseventies-he went down with a crash. It happened at Harvard, and he was taken to Ma.s.s. General for surgery. The doctors there had dragged him from the edge of the grave. Or maybe he had spurned the grave himself, wrapped in bandages as he was and with pipes up his nose and drugged to the limit. Seeing him on his back, you would never have believed that he would walk through the door again. But he did just that.
Suppose, however, that Victor had died, what would Katrina have done? To think of it confused her. But Katrina"s sister, Dorothea, who never spared anybody, spelled out the consequences of Victor"s death. Dorothea, in plain truth, couldn"t let the subject alone. "This has been the main event of your life. This time, kid, you really came out swinging." (An odd figure for Katrina, who was pretty and plump and seldom so much as raised her voice.) "You"re going to be up against it when it finally happens. You must have known you could only have a short run." Katrina knew all that Dotey had to say. The resume ran as follows: You dumped your husband to have this unusual affair. s.e.xual excitement and social ambition went together. You aimed to break into high cultural circles. I don"t know what you thought you_ had to offer. If you took Daddy"s word for it, and he"d repeat it from the next world, you"re just an average Dumb Dora from north-suburban Chicagoland.
Quite true, the late Billy Weigal had called his daughters Dumb Dora One and Dumb Dora Two. He sent them down to the state university at Champaign-Urbana, where they joined a sorority and studied Romance languages. The girls wanted French? Good. Theater arts? Sure, why not. Old Doc Weigal pretended to think that it was all jibber-jabber. He had been a politician, mainly a tax fixer with high connections in the Chicago Democratic machine. His wife, too, was a mental lightweight. It was part of the convention that the womenfolk be birdbrains. It pleased his corrupt, protective heart. As Victor pointed out (all higher interpretation came from him), this was plain old middle-cla.s.s ideology, the erotic components of which were easy to make out. Ignorance in women, a strong stimulus for men who considered themselves rough. On an infinitely higher level, Baudelaire had advised staying away from learned ladies. Bluestockings and bourgeois ladies caused s.e.xual paralysis. Artists could trust only women of the people.
Anyway, Katrina had been raised to consider herself a nitwit. That she knew she was not one was an important secret postulate of her feminine science. And she didn"t really object to Dorothea"s way of discussing her intricate and fascinating problem with Victor. Dorothea said, "I want to get you to look at it from every angle." What this really meant was that Dotey would try to shaft her from every side. "Let"s start with the fact that as Mrs. Alfred Goliger n.o.body in Chicago would take notice of you. When Mr. Goliger invited people to look at his wonderful collections of ivory, jade, semiprecious stones, and while he did all the talking, he only wanted you to serve the drinks and eats. And to the people with whom he tried to make time, the Lyric Opera types, the contemporary arts crowd, the academics, and those other s.h.i.ts, you were just a humdrum housewife. Then all of a sudden, through Wulpy, you"re meeting all the Mother-wells and Rauschenbergs and Ashberys and Frankenthalers, and you leave the local culture creeps groveling in the dust. However, when your old wizard dies, what then? Widows are forgotten pretty fast, except those with promotional talent. So what happens to girlfriends?"
Arriving at Northwestern University to give his seminars on American painting, Victor had been lionized by the Goligers. Alfred Goliger, who, flying to Bombay and to Rio, had branched out from gems to antiques and objets d"art and bought estate jewelry and also china, sterling, pottery, statuary in all continents, longed to be a part of the art world. He wasn"t one of your hobbled husbands; he did pretty much as he liked in Brazil and India. He misjudged Katrina if he thought that in her he had a homebody who spent her time choosing wallpapers and attending PTA meetings. Victor, the perfect lion, relaxing among Evanston admirers while he drank martinis and ate hors d"oeuvres, took in the eager husband, aggressively on the make, and then considered the pretty wife-in every sense of the word a dark lady. He perceived that she was darkest where darkness counted most. Circ.u.mstances had made Katrina look commonplace. She did what forceful characters do with such imposed circ.u.mstances; she used them as camouflage. Thus she approached Wulpy like a nearsighted person, one who has to draw close to study you. She drew so near that you could feel her breath. And then her lowering, almost stubborn look rested on you for just that extra beat that carried a s.e.xual message. It was the incompetency with which she presented herself, the nearsighted puzzled frown, that made the final difference. Her first handshake informed him of a disposition, an inclination. He saw that all her preparations had been set. With a kind of engraved silence about the mouth under the wide bar of his mustache, Wulpy registered all this information. All he had to do was give the countersign. He intended to do just that.