Chapter I: Part 1

With the One Coin for Fee

Helen R. Hull

Experiment: Four short stories. Coward-McCann, New York (1940), pp.
1-67.

Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee.

Perhaps to understand the story, you need to understand the setting. Certainly it contained, in concrete and tangible shape, the forces which worked to produce the beginning of the story. And without this particular setting, there never could have been this ending. Perhaps the extraordinary, sweet, concentrated air which runs under the great dark wings of a hurricane is in part responsible for the ending; at the very heart of darkness and destruction is this breath of concentrated life, burning out too rapidly sluggish blood, toxins of habit and hate and age. It is exhilarating as any great fear may be, it gives a kind of intoxication unlike the ordinary earthly forms in that the feeling of release, of freedom and power, is not an illusion. It may be temporary, but it is real while it lasts. And one good whiff may well make a man believe, as it penetrates to cells which had never breathed before, that the trouble with this world may be that it is keyed down to thin, dull air.

All that is surmise, but the setting itself is real enough. Some changes occurred on that day in late September, but up to that day not much had changed for more than a hundred years. A town in southern New England, touching the coast and stretching inland a few miles; the town itself centered about the river, before it spread out to make the head of the bay, bridges with turntables and draws for the vessels that came up to the docks, with warehouses and ships’ chandlers’ shops along the docks, with business streets, a few, at the foot of the hills, and residence streets climbing the hills; with a mill or two, and factories farther inland, along the river banks. North of the town lay farming country, and south of it the widening bay and ocean. Out of the town ran the shore road, and here macadam had replaced the original road where white sand poured from the turning rims of wheels; some of the estates had been cut into building lots for summer cottages; the tip of the western side of the bay was Grady’s Amusement Park, with bathing pavilions, a skating rink, a Ferris wheel, and concession stands around the parking place for the cars which had produced this development.

A few miles out from town, where the shore thrust a finger into the bay, so that you had the last of the river on one side, and what seemed to be real ocean on the other, stood the old Lathrop place. The shore drive cuts across the base of the finger, ceasing to be a shore drive for several miles. When the drive was put through, there had been some dickering through an agent with Mrs. Susan Lathrop Field, the last of the Lathrops, who was abroad at the time, in London, on the Riviera, in Cairo. She had no sentiment against selling the shore land for the drive; on the contrary, she had a desire to make good money (which she no doubt needed!) at the town’s expense. Finally the town council overrode the one elderly alderman who still felt that the town owed a great deal to the Lathrop family, and voted to confiscate a right of way in a convenient straight line across the property, behind the barns and stables, and through what had been a small training track old Lathrop had used for his horses. People whizzing past in cars saw only the weathering out-buildings. In the winter the square bulk of the house showed through arching branches of the great elms and oaks, with dark rust stains from hinges of the closed shutters staining the dingy clapboards, and the two great chimneys, one at each end, standing like patient lifted ears.

Across from the barns and sheds, and in its season, the house, lay the rest of the bisected property, fields and woods, and what had originally been the farmer’s house, a sturdy, story-and-a-half building, like those you see in Maine and New Hampshire. It stood on a swelling mound of land, a neat road winding past it to the garage, its paint smooth-white, its opened shutters sleek and green, the meadow tamed into a lawn under its charmingly curtained windows. _They_ said that Mrs. Field had had to come down in her price, when there was no shore land left except that around the old ark that no one wanted, and almost no one remembered that Margaret Turner’s father had been the farmer on the Lathrop place. For Margaret had bought the little house, and she was there, that fall of nineteen hundred and thirty-eight.

She had spent her summer holidays there even before she bought the house, and although she had never lied outright about the matter, she had somehow created for her occasional guest the impression that these were ancestral acres about her, their original glory damaged by the wanton stroke of the road through them, by the change in the quality of the residents along the western shore of the bay. Margaret had not set about creating this impression. She had said, and it was true, “When my father set out those trees,” and, “Once the lawns ran to the very edge of the beach, you can’t imagine how beautiful it was then!” and, “It would have broken my father’s heart if he had seen what changes—” Her guests, a girl from the private school where Margaret taught mathematics, motoring with her mother to their summer place on the Cape, or two or three of her fellow teachers, skipping about the country in a polished Ford, stopped on their journey to have tea in Margaret’s charming living room, with its English chintzes, hooked rugs, pieces of old mahogany and pine. As they drove away, the girl’s mother might say, “You can tell that Miss Turner comes from a good family, I’m glad there’s someone like that in your school,” and the girl might answer, “Well, I sort of like her, although most of the girls are just paralyzed! She’s terribly sarcastic.” And the teachers, some of the younger members of the faculty, who had stopped to boast about their trip around the Gaspé, would say, “Of course, if you had a place like that, that had been in your family for generations, you would rather spend your summer that way. She didn’t seem the least bit stuck up or cold, did she, when you see her in her own setting?” And when Margaret sighed as she said, “It would cost too much to put the big house in shape, or to run it,” she was sighing in all sincerity at a dream of her young girlhood; she didn’t intend to suggest a picture of herself as brave and wise, settling into the cottage, earning the money for its shingles and paint and a part-time handyman and gardener, never complaining at lost elegance and leisure.

Probably Margaret Turner never examined too closely the impression she had established about herself and the old Lathrop place. It mattered little to anyone except herself, and for herself it was like a warm, dark cloak within the folds of which she could hide the emptiness of her hands or her heart, a cloak drawn around a self not quite symmetrical nor firmly fleshed, a trifle warped and withered from meager fare, from thwartings and overstrain. She hadn’t planned to weave a complete garment, she had just sketched a line or two of it, she wasn’t entirely to blame if in mild gossip, casual references, people clothed her thus.

Among the items which no one except Margaret knew were these: she had spent every cent of her savings (they weren’t much, on her small salary) including her one insurance policy which had matured when she was sixty, in buying the house and furnishing it; there was still a small mortgage, which she meant to pay off before she retired. She understood vaguely that the school at which she taught did something for its teachers when they were too old to be of further use. Surely enough to live on—taxes, coal, a little food. But after 1929 there had been uneasiness among the older teachers. The endowment of the school was small, the contributions from alumnae diminished (married women couldn’t expect their husbands to do much for their wives’ old school, not with the market the way it was!) and in the need to reduce expenses, there began a weeding out among the older members of the staff. Margaret Turner held her wiry figure more erect, had her white hair waved more often, tried a little rouge under her handsome dark eyes, and moved with an effect of great vivacity about her work. “You have your own home,” some of them said to her, “you don’t have to worry. Did you hear about poor old Simmsy? The trustees cut her pension in half the other day, they don’t know how long they can continue that pittance, Simmsy isn’t seventy yet and she says all her folks live to be ninety at least.”

The trustees were sorry, but there was nothing in the bond about pensions. In prosperous times they could make generous gestures, but after all, women of intelligence, on regular salaries all those years, should have some foresight about the future, and since retrenchment was necessary, it was only fair to keep the younger teachers at work. There had been a dinner last May, a dinner of farewell to two women who had been longest with the school. They weren’t older than Margaret, but their age was on the record because they had started early, and had been less canny than Margaret. They’d let themselves go a little, too, Margaret thought, as she sat at the dinner listening to pleasant speeches from old girls about how much these women had meant to them. Earmarked as elderly, too comfortable about figure and dress. If she was careful, she might fool them into keeping her on for a few more years. After the dinner, in the teachers’ cloak room, one of them, puffing as she bent to pull on her galoshes, said: “You know, horses have a better deal. They shoot ’em when they’re through with ’em.” The other, who was plump and pink and whose good humor was not yet entirely deflated by the sharp pricking point of fear, said, “There’s one thing sure, we’ll have good company at the poorhouse. All the best people will be there!”

“Haven’t you relatives?” Margaret had asked. “You used to talk about your sister’s children—”

“Distant relatives.” She chuckled. “That’s a good phrase. Very distant. You know, in hard times there’s nothing so distant as a relative. Self-protection, in case you wanted something. Don’t be funny. No, the only useful relatives are the kind you have, nice ones who’ve passed on and left you well fixed.”

She’d like to visit me this summer, thought Margaret; she saw the notion in the change it made as it crossed the woman’s mind. Nothing so harsh as calculation, more a quick child-wish, as if she pressed her face, eyes round, mouth pursed a little, close to a windowpane beyond which was something longed for. I couldn’t, thought Margaret; I couldn’t stand having anyone around all the time, I don’t really know her, anyway I couldn’t afford it, I’ve got to be careful. “Drop in, if you’re in my neighborhood.” That was it, turn away quickly, you haven’t seen the entreaty. “I’d be delighted to give you a cup of tea.”

“Well, I don’t know just where—” The porter had knocked on the door then. Mrs. Montagu, one of the old girls, was waiting; she had her car, she’d be glad to drive them home, it was raining. Margaret had bade them good night, good-by, she wasn’t quite ready to go. She wasn’t ready to be one of the elderly, discarded figures, with Mrs. Montagu, no doubt, feeling a pleasant glow at her thoughtful kindness to them.

The first of June, Margaret had packed her trunk, and filled a box with books and pictures, emptying the room in the residence hotel for women of every sign of her tenancy. Usually she stored the box in the basement until fall, but this year she sent it by express to her house at the shore. No one noticed; there was a new management, and the chipper desk clerk didn’t realize that Miss Turner had lived in the hotel since it opened. He didn’t even ask if she wished the same room in the fall. At least, thought Margaret, she wouldn’t regret leaving; the building had run down. And she didn’t have to explain that she meant to look for a cheaper room, one where she could prepare her own breakfast, and perhaps supper. The lunches served at the school were really dinners. If she could save a little more, if she could count on two more years—if only they didn’t pare the salaries another ten per cent—

She spent June setting her house in order, waxing each piece of furniture, watching the warm color, the subtle texture of wood shine out as the bluish film of wax disappeared under her slow patient rubbing, polishing the silver, cleaning the rugs. She no longer did much with gardens, except for weeding around the few perennials. When she stooped over, black spots moved crazily across her eyes, and the hollows in her temples throbbed. For a few years after she bought the place, she had hired a man to help her, but fifty cents an hour was much more than she needed for her own living. She had a boy from the village come once a week to cut the grass, and on pleasant days she attacked with clippers the tufts he had left along the edge of the walk and drive, around the trees, close to the granite blocks that made the foundation of the house. In the long June evenings she crossed the highway, looking carefully in each direction to make sure no car was about to rush at her, with young voices shrieking or horns screaming; she walked past the old Lathrop house, looking up at the discolored shutters, she looked under the pines for lilies of the valley, she had picked them there when she was a child, they still grew, small sheaths of green enclosing the staff of tiny, cream bells. She kicked her toe against the unkempt grass which thrust itself through the old graveled path, she frowned at the lilac bushes with the straggle of dead branches at the center, with a few brownish spikes among the heart-shaped leaves where blossoms had grown neglected in May. It just shows, she said. It just shows! They had everything to start with, everything, and I had nothing. Now Susan Lathrop is a ruined old woman with no one to say a good word for her, and I—her face set in bleak pride—no one has ever had a word to breathe against me. No hint of the slightest scandal. Although it wasn’t easy, always—

The grounds in front of the house looked green in the soft twilight, with the pointed blades of June grass, but as she crossed them, her feet sank into the matted grayish tangle of old, uncut growth. As Margaret went toward the shore she thought, I’d like to see Susan Lathrop face to face, I’d like to ask her—I’d say, how could you do this to yourself, how could you fall so far? Look at the two of us now, think what you had then, money, beauty, position, safety, love, oh, most of all, love! Because of you my brother ran away, and died. He was going to make a fortune for you in the copper mines, you couldn’t wait! And Lester Field had begun to love me, when you came home that summer. I was nobody, and you—you were Susan Lathrop. And now, people respect me! But they snicker when they speak your name.

Sometime, surely, they would meet, and Margaret would speak out. She could scarcely have bought her house for this one purpose, she could not have said why she had such satisfaction in the small perfection of her own place and the steady disintegration of the large house and its grounds, but as she thought of Susan she drew in her full upper lip so that her mouth was thin and hard, and her eyes, under the deep arched lids, were black-brown, pupil and iris merged in hatred. When she reached the edge of the land, she would shake herself, thrusting her hands into the pockets of the leather jacket she wore against the evening air, she would say, why do I bother with thoughts of her, here’s this nice sea air to breathe, and even a little sunset left. Sometimes she sat on the rickety steps of the old bath-house, watching the flat sand run with opalescence as the tide came slowly, spreading the curving edge of thin advancing water, withdrawing it, in rhythm which seemed so hesitant that she was astonished when at last there was water at her feet. The tide eddied in lines of color about the irregular dark piles which marked the line of the long pier; the pier itself had cracked up in winter ice, had been carried away piece by piece. Beyond the tip of land the water of the outer bay was already darker, its movement shaking off the reflection of lingering sunset color. Sometimes Margaret walked through the stiff grass to the outer shore, but not often; the rocks there scuffed her shoes, the air was colder, and well down the bay the lights of the amusement park twinkled crazily, like a dissipated, earthbound constellation. Always when she turned away from the water she was surprised to find the land so dark, evening already caught around the old house, under the trees. She would walk more quickly, feeling dew from the long grass on her ankles, looking to right and left before she crossed the highway, and sometimes as she waited, while a car roared past, the glare of the headlights briefly on the great barn, on a bit of broken paddock fence, she could see, before the thicker darkness settled again, her brother standing there, his hand on the shining neck of a restless mare, and beside him Susan Lathrop, her figure like an hourglass in the dark riding habit of the early nineties, her reddish gold hair curling under the stiff brim of her hat, her face vivid with laughter. She was more alive than anyone I ever knew, thought Margaret. Now she’s a raddled old woman. They say she dyes her hair and paints her face. After all, I don’t want to see her. It’s been years—

But in July, when Margaret just missed seeing her, she was conscious for days of her disappointment. It gnawed at her when she woke up at night, when she lay waiting for seven o’clock to come, so that she had a reason for getting up. If only she hadn’t been pampering herself, if she had gone in to the village shopping, if she had been working around the place, instead of staying in bed! She had caught cold, it had rained so many days in July that she had grown careless about keeping her feet dry, she had felt feverish, she had put herself to bed in a small panic. She couldn’t afford to be sick, she had to keep herself well, she had to go back to school in the fall. She had, from her ground-floor rear bedroom, not heard any car drive along the grass-grown gravel road to the Lathrop house. When her own doorbell had rung, she had lain very still, waiting for whoever it was to go away. The next day the boy came to cut the grass; the steady rains made it grow almost faster than he could run the lawn mower. She listened to him for a while, following him about the familiar ground by the variations in the noise he made. When he reached the final square of grass behind the house, she got up, feeling exactly like an old dishrag; she meant to dress, but the labor seemed stupendous. She guessed it wouldn’t hurt the boy to see her in a bathrobe, not after some of the sights he saw at Grady’s beach. But she took off the net she had tied over her hair, and combed the waves carefully into place. Even her hair looked sick, limp, flattened to her small head. She made herself tea and toast, she wrote a list of supplies for the chain grocery store in the village, they wouldn’t deliver unless she ordered two dollars worth, but perhaps Sam could bring the things out for her. Then, with her purse, she went to the kitchen door as Sam ran the lawn mower into the shed.

“I thought I better cut it today,” he said, “looks like more rain.” Sure, he’d bring out the groceries, he was going to the rink tonight anyways. Then he added, “Too bad you wasn’t home yesterday. You sure missed a treat.” He put the list in the pocket of his blue shirt, and slid the four quarters into a trouser pocket. “I was at the garage when she came back, see? They stopped for gas.”

“Who did?” (I’m glad I didn’t answer that doorbell, it must have been one of the girls from the school.)

“Old Mrs. Field, you know, the one used to live out here. She asked Bill did he know where you were, and he said he guessed you were home, you always was. She said you must be dead if you was here, not to hear her ring. She’s kinda deaf, you have to holler at her, or mebbe it’s her earrings, they’re big as a traffic light. ‘Who’s living in the farmhouse?’ she said, ‘and where are they?’ Bill said Miss Turner, and I guess she’s home. She said, ‘Turner? Turner? I’ve heard that name somewhere.’ She was sitting up front with the chauffeur, he was a dark looking fellow, like a dago—”

“Is that all she said? What did she want?”

“The chauffeur said, we can’t hang around here any longer, and he let the clutch in so hard the old dame bounced back with her hat over one eye. Honest, Miss Turner, you oughta see her! Dolled up like a mo’om picture star.”

“What did she want of me?” Margaret’s throat was dry.

“Gee, I don’t know. Bill says just as well you wasn’t home, you wouldn’t want any truck with that piece of goods.” The boy was grinning a little, his sandy, immature face touched with slyness, at the recollection of some male ribaldry he wouldn’t repeat. Margaret could see it, in the way he glanced at her under his lids, in the way he rubbed a finger against a spot on his chin. She couldn’t say go on, tell me every word he said, for all she was parched with thirst for more than this sip of news. She nodded, her eagerness burning in her cheeks, her silence coaxed the boy. “It wasn’t even the same fellow she had last time she stopped here. Bill said he was a light-complected fellow, and anyway his picture was in the papers, you know, when his wife chased ’em across the country and was going to shoot him, only Mrs. Field gave her about twenty grand and she divorced him instead. Bill says boy friends come kinda high at her age, and what’s she going to do when her money gives out?”

(You shouldn’t stand here gossiping with a village boy! It’s horrid, undignified.) Margaret could hear the rebuke faintly, as if her usual decent self, the one she offered to public view, had withdrawn almost beyond inner earshot. And then, at the queer smirk the boy’s face wore, she had a quick revulsion, a protest of her sex against the bawdiness at which she could only guess that must have shouted in Bill’s actual remarks.

“She has to have a chauffeur,” she said, crisply. “You don’t know—”

“Huh, if you’d heard the way he spoke to her!” But Sam could take a hint, if Miss Turner didn’t want any more it was okey with him. He stood away from the door against which he had lounged, he said, “I’ll leave the groceries when I come by after supper, you send word by the postman if you want me before next week.” Then he had gone.

Margaret sat down at the table in her quiet kitchen. She poured a cup of tea, but it had grown luke-warm, and she could not anywhere find energy to rise, to light the gas under the kettle. Painted, bedizened Jezebel, she thought. The village loafers making lewd sport of her. Well, Bill and Sam weren’t exactly loafers, but the idea was the same. She thought she’d heard the name Turner! Why, she must have lost her mind. Perhaps that was the explanation. How could she have forgotten—Anger tightened in Margaret. Perhaps Susan Lathrop had never known we had a family name! An anger of her childhood, bitter, seeming when she first knew it entirely futile, and yet serving as a drive through the hard years as she had struggled upward. “It does you no good to kick against the station in life you’re born to,” her father used to say to her. “Even the prayer book tells you that!” Well, she was Miss Turner now to the village, and Susan Lathrop had turned into _that piece of goods_. For all Margaret’s father had been Rob, never Mr. Turner, and her brother had been Bobby as he grew old enough to help his father with the gardens and horses, and she herself had been Maggie, loathing the name. The village men spoke of her with respect, she wouldn’t want any truck with that piece of goods. And Susan, bright, beautiful, vivid Susan—Margaret pushed her hair away from her forehead, she sat very straight in the wooden chair. Susan Lathrop hadn’t lost her mind, she’d lost her character.

Had she thought, because she moved so much about the earth, never staying long in any place, never in any way settling down, that rumors of her affairs would never reach as far as her home town? Or hadn’t she cared, the headstrong, willful pride of the young Susan changed into the base alloy of arrogance and indifference? But there was no safety in distance any more, there was no distance any more. Any criminal must have a harder time now, thought Margaret. Why, when I was a girl, Boston seemed a long journey from here, or New York, people went there and the miles between were a cloak behind which they could hide. No one knew you. Rumor went on foot then, now it leaps at the turn of a dial, it shouts from the front page of a tabloid almost before the deed shouted has taken place. Margaret had saved the papers—more than a year ago, it was—although she meant to burn them. Deserted wife pursues mate across country, charges alienation of affection, says Mrs. Susan Lathrop Field made gifts of jewelry and money to handsome young Bullett, tempted him. Pictures of Susan, of Bullett, of deserted wife, of tiny tots weeping for father to come home. “She lured him by luxury,” says wife, “until he was no longer content with our humble home.” Pictures of Mrs. Field’s villa at Cannes, of her twenty-two-room cottage at Bar Harbor. And later, picture of injured wife, handkerchief to her eyes, check in her hand. Fifty-thousand-dollar balm, said the headline. “Money does not replace him, but I must think of my kiddies,” says wife. Twenty thousand, they said in the village. Whatever it was, before the end of the summer the village had the end of that story. George Carter, who ran the village barber shop, and his wife Ella, who had the beauty parlor in the room back of the barber shop, took a two weeks’ vacation touring the East; George wanted to borrow his brother’s trailer, but Ella said no, she wanted a real vacation, and they had stopped at over-night camps all the way to Canada and back. Since George’s father and his grandfather before him had worked in the Lathrop factory, where Susan’s money came from, it was only natural for the Carters to make Bar Harbor one of their stops. They drove past the twenty-two-room cottage, and Ella asked which was the most exclusive beauty shop, and went there for a manicure. She felt she owed it to her customers to pick up what hints about the trade she could. She didn’t have her hair done, as they wouldn’t give her a trade discount, even when she showed them one of her printed cards. But a manicure gives a better chance for looking around and talking. As soon as the operator found out she was from Eastbourne, she opened right up. (Ella herself had opened up as she set the wave in Margaret’s hair.) Susan Field was one of their steady customers. Facials, mudpacks, henna rinses, everything! And next to her Maker, if Miss Turner would pardon Ella for speaking right out, who knew more about a woman than the operators in her beauty parlor? Ella always said maybe the Lord made them, but she knew who made them over. And from what the Bar Harbor girl said, there wasn’t much left of the original job on Susan Lathrop Field.

As soon as I’m over this cold, thought Margaret, suddenly, I must make an appointment with Ella Carter. I ought to get my hair back in shape before school begins, I put too much blueing in when I wash it myself. She didn’t finish her thought, that Ella might have heard something, or George, something more than the boy Sam had reported. Instead, her mouth a thin, scornful line, she turned over in her mind fragments of the story Ella had repeated. Susan, waiting an hour or more in the beauty parlor, peering up and down the busy resort street, nowhere among the tourists’ dusty cars, the varnished station wagons with Maine license plates, the gay sport cars, nowhere Susan’s imported town car, nowhere the handsome Bullett. He’d come when he got ready, he’d been dating up the cashier at the drug store, or a waitress at the café. He never kept them waiting in the evening! When he did come, finally, Susan never bawled him out a bit: she’d just say, oh, I got finished early, or did I make a mistake again, I meant to say twelve o’clock, and he’d grin out of one corner of his mouth. A terrible picture, of a woman terrified, jealous, helpless. You couldn’t help liking her, the girl had said, for all she acted like an old fool. They hadn’t heard about Bullett’s wife until Ella told them, they thought that explained a good deal. Then toward the end of the summer, just a year ago, Bullett went off with a woman, someone who had a sportswear shop in Bar Harbor in the summer, in Palm Beach winters. He went in a new coupe Susan had bought him, and she set the police after him. But then Susan collapsed, two nurses, doctors, and she must have called off the police, for no one heard another word.

“George’s father always said old Mr. Lathrop was a prince,” Ella had finished. “It seems kinda too bad, doesn’t it, when you think of the advantages she had and all? George says her father would turn over in his grave. What I tell George is I can’t understand any woman not getting her fill of men before she gets to that age! Why, the Bar Harbor operator told me—” then Ella had stopped, with a clicking of her tongue, and Margaret understood that her own condition of refined spinsterhood made it impossible for Ella to tell her all she had heard, even when the part withheld might well be the most—well, say, revealing. Margaret had failed to find a phrase which would, with dignity and decorum, release Ella’s tongue. So she had merely said, “Too bad? It’s horrible. You read about such things, but you don’t believe them. But to hear them about a woman you knew—No, I refuse to try to understand it.”

Margaret’s head ached, with her rehearsal of Ella’s story, with the way her thoughts, like a flock of starlings, rushed at the news Sam had brought, scattered in a rush at some impulse of her will. Why should she care so much what Susan Field did? What if she had another—what had Sam called them—another boy-friend? Grotesque and fascinating. And none of your business, she told herself, getting to her feet. Only what had Susan wanted of her, why had she rung her bell?

The rain had started again, making a small pricking noise against the windowpanes. Margaret thought, I’ll catch more cold sitting here in the damp, I must go back to bed. She moved softly, not to jar her head, and shivered as she stretched herself flat and drew a blanket up to her chin. If ever the sun came out again, she ought to air everything in the house. For a few moments she kept her mind busy hanging out blankets, emptying closets, even the cedar closet in the attic where she stored her winter clothes. You had to watch out for mildew. Then Susan came back, quite as if she brushed down all the dangling garments and confronted Margaret. Only Margaret couldn’t see her clearly. The pictures in the tabloids had been chiefly hat and summer fur, a great collar of white fox. Not a trace of the Susan Margaret had known. When she tried to construct an image out of what she had heard, she got the face of Edna May Oliver. That was Sam’s remark, dolled up like a mo’om pitcher star. Margaret had a picture of her, a stiff cardboard photograph, huge puffed sleeves, lace collar wired up under the ears, round eyes staring with innocence under a frontispiece of frizzed bangs. It was in the tray of the Saratoga trunk, in the small package of letters, receipts, account book, which had been sent home from Colorado when Robert died. I’d like to show it to her, thought Margaret, fiercely. I’d like to say, Look what you’ve done to yourself! Perhaps it was as well no one had answered when Susan rang. Too much might have been said.

The gray and rain-drenched twilight deepened until the pattern of the flowered wall paper was lost, until the silver-backed brushes (a gift from a senior class two years ago) ranged on the pine chest had no reflection in the mirror above them, and the landscape painted at the top of the mirror blurred into the rest of the grayness. It was the same room where Margaret had slept as a child, with Robert in the room next, and her father and mother in the front room, which she had made over into her study. The darkness dissolved the pleasant changes she had made, she might have been lying in the narrow iron bed, the painted white commode in the corner, matting tacked over the floor. As a child, excited because Susan Lathrop was coming home from the Select School for Young Ladies, and Margaret, in a clean apron, her face scrubbed, her hair slicked back in two pigtails, could play croquet with her, could follow her about, somewhat dazzled at her bright daring. I’m not sure it’s good for Maggie, she could remember her mother saying. She gets all stirred up, she may get notions—And her father, Maggie’s got sense enough to know she can’t have the things nor do the things Lathrop’s daughter can. Even then Susan wanted Robert to play with them—and then Robert wouldn’t play with girls. Later, excited again because Susan was coming home, but a different Susan when she came, her skirts long, her lovely hair tucked up at the back of her head, a Susan who didn’t want to play with girls now, who wanted Robert to ride with her, who wanted Lester Field! And Margaret had lain sleepless, her young body pressed against the thin mattress so hard the springs of the old iron bed made little ping-sounds all night, her mouth muffled against the pillow. And now Susan had come home again, if only for a moment, and Margaret lay sleepless. What was it like, at Susan’s age, not to be done with—ah, you couldn’t call it love!

I must be feverish. Margaret sat up indignantly, snapped on the light on the night table, shook two tablets from the aspirin bottle, swallowed them with a sip of water, looked about her room, at the prints on the walls, at the ruffled organdy curtains, at every sign of dignified accomplishment which would fix her in the present. She left the light burning, turning her face away from it, and presently slept. When she woke, the lamp was pale in morning light, and she knew she had been dreaming. Bits of the dreams stayed a moment, drifting on the waves of waking before they were submerged and lost, Susan running ahead of her over the rocky shore, laughing at something, Margaret hurrying after her, slipping, falling, and Robert’s voice, or was it her father’s? Then they were gone. Margaret snapped off the light. She couldn’t remember any more of the dream. She could see the sky through the curtains, mother-of-pearl and lustrous, the rain had ended, she felt better. It was queer, how in dreams you never were any age, young, or middle-aged, or old, you were just you, all of you at once, some secret essence of you. Perhaps that was the way you ought to be, awake, only some foolish notion about time and years lived got in between you and yourself; or your waking memory was weak, holding today as the only real thing, while all of you was really there, continuous, and in dreams the whole you pressed through the barriers. But her thought was almost part of the dream, and as she woke fully, sank with the dream under the surface of her waking.

The next few days the sun shone coppery in a glazed sky, the breeze was feather-light and southerly, there seemed no air to breathe, just the warm mist which rose from the drenched earth. Margaret tried sunning her blankets, and found them at the end of the day so damp she could not fold them away. Her shoes, ranged neatly in shoe-rails on her closet door, had a patina of mildew on heels and soles. There was through the house the faint musty smell of fibers playing host to invisible and multiplying fungi, wood, plaster, rugs, everything. Even the books had a taint of this odor, and their covers bulged as if someone had left them in the grass all night. If it’s like this in the tropics, thought Margaret, I’m glad I never went there. She felt a little as if her bones were mildewed, she couldn’t throw off a heaviness of body or of spirit which her cold had left, she fretted against the weather as if it were a private enemy using unfair weapons like poison gas against her and her possessions. If it’s this bad in my house, with everything open to what air there is, she thought, what must it be in the big house, all sealed shut. Someone ought to go in, to see what’s happening. There had been elegant things in that house, Margaret remembered the red velvet portieres of the drawing room, the gold chairs with red velvet cushions, the crystal chandelier. She might write to Susan. Dear Susan, Perhaps you don’t realize this is the worst summer we’ve ever had at the shore, no one ever saw anything like it, I don’t know of course what you’ve left in your house, but it will certainly be ruined—Write her and be laughed at for her trouble. Susan was old enough to look out for her own things. But she never had looked out for things. Careless, generous. Well, she never had to work for anything, why shouldn’t she be careless and generous? Leaving her toys anywhere, tearing her dresses, giving away anything—Margaret had forgotten—

That little gold necklace, like a fine rope, with the locket, its blue enameled flower and a pearl for its center; Margaret had loved it. Susan had let her wear it one day, had said, keep it, you can have it. Margaret’s mother had sent her scampering back with it, crying, her hand clutched over the locket as she climbed the steps to the kitchen door. “They’d think you stole it, a valuable piece of jewelry like that! I don’t care if Susan did give it to you, she shouldn’t have. Hurry up!” The cook had been cross. Miss Susan was having her bath, the cook was busy with dinner, hadn’t Maggie been playing with Miss Susan all day, this was no time to be bothering people. Margaret had marched home, she could keep the necklace over night, she could wear it under her nightgown, she couldn’t see Susan before morning. But her mother had taken it off, it had caught in her hair and tweaked it cruelly; she had wrapped it in a bit of paper and sent Father straight off with it. “If they should think you took it! They’d never let you play with her again, they might not want us to stay here! You ought to know better, in our position.” She had fairly flown at Father when he came back. “Well?” And Father, “I saw Lathrop, he just laughed and said that girl of his would give her head away if it wasn’t riveted on.” Susan had said she didn’t see why Maggie’s mother made such a fuss, but she’d give it back at Christmas. Only she had forgotten, by Christmas she was gone, just where that year Margaret didn’t recall. You’ll learn, Margaret’s mother had said, that it isn’t enough to know you are honest and right yourself, you have to see to it that what you do looks that way to everyone else. You can’t be too careful. Advice, Margaret knew now, wrung from a stem that pricked with poverty and hard work and insecurity. Not that there could have been any real threat that Rob Turner would lose his job; always Lathrop’s projects, and he had new ones steadily, included Rob, no matter how far they reached into the future. But Mary Turner, Margaret’s mother, had gone out to service when she was not yet thirteen, because her own mother had died, and her father, drawn as a vague, good-natured, shiftless figure in the few comments Margaret had ever heard, had taken one way of incompetents, and run away from the problem of his family. Mary Turner had learned early that providence was not to be trusted, and the rest of her life she forestalled any tricks it might play by anticipating the worst. A hard worker, and a harder worrier, Rob Turner used to say. Well, Margaret had remembered her advice; she had been careful, and Susan hadn’t.

It was queer the way things kept coming back. Perhaps because she hadn’t energy enough to stir around filling her hours with small tasks which took the place of thought. She read the Boston paper every day, walking slowly to the postbox for it after the mail truck passed. But China and Spain were shadows into which her imagination did not venture, and labor troubles were men who didn’t have sense enough to stick to jobs when they had them, she might almost have been reading news about another planet, not the one on which she lived. In a way, she was, for all the portents of change had to do with a future world which could not trouble her for long. What she read had less substance than what she remembered. Perhaps the fact that Susan had rung her doorbell and gone away, her errand unexplained, perhaps that ringing of the bell had set in vibration, had waked echoes of Susan. If only I could get in town, thought Margaret, and see Ella; she might have heard more than Sam had reported. While this spell of weather lasted, she couldn’t risk it, waiting at the roadside for a crowded bus, sitting in Ella’s back room with the saturated air weighted still more with scented lotions. She could see her name in the list of heat prostrations.

At the end of the week, at the end of a day which seemed worse than the preceding days, intolerable because it was another of the same kind, the wind changed. Margaret was sitting in a canvas chair on the terrace at the side of her house, head back against the gay green and yellow stripes, eyes closed, hands listless. She had been thinking, I ought to go in and get some supper, I can’t lie here forever. She heard the wind before she felt it, heard it in the treetops between her and the distant shore. She listened, it was almost like rain, the little swishing noise of leaves turning quickly against each other. She opened her eyes, the treetops, maples and oaks, were in motion, clouds had gathered behind them, the setting sun glinted through clouds, catching the pale under side of leaves as the wind ruffled them. Then she could smell it, an east wind strong with the odor of the salty water, the flats over which it blew. A change of wind, coming in with the tide. She sniffed it eagerly, she stood up to let it blow her thin silk skirt about her. It meant rain, but cooler weather, too. She might walk to the shore, it would be good to see something besides the flat, glassy sea of the past week. Ordinarily she disliked being blown upon, but this evening she stretched into the wind, she walked more springily into it, her usual crisp, rather prim step lengthening. There was no surf as yet, even on the rocky outer shore of the point; the surface of the bay was in motion, long ripples across its gray, and the tide spoke in hurried splashes about the rocks, its usual rhythm of withdrawal and approach lost in the wind’s drive. Margaret watched, and as the first large drops of rain fell startling and cold on her head and face, she turned back. She had to run for her house, past the dark sealed Lathrop house, under the uneasy trees, and as she ran, Susan was running beside her, her flying bright hair darkening as the rain drenched them both. Margaret reached her door, stopped, leaning against it until her heart stopped its thumping; when had she and Susan run through the rain? Susan, with something in her arms, drabbled, dirty-white, blood-smeared, held firmly against Susan’s white dress, a nondescript little dog, its side torn, one leg dangling limp. It tried feebly to lick its side, Susan panted, “I can’t run any more, I jiggle it too much.” Margaret had seen it first, cowering under a rock in the corner of the field, just the briefest glance had shown her its terrified and pain-glazed eyes, she had looked away, hastily, wanting not to see it, not to have to know what it was, and called out to Susan, “I’ll race you to the road.” But Susan had seen it, had flung herself down beside it, dropping the rope of daisies and sweet clover the two of them had braided, had made soft, compassionate noises in her throat, stretching her hands out slowly, and the dog’s lip had curled back from its teeth. “Leave it alone, Susan! He’ll bite you! He’s dreadful, you mustn’t touch him!” Susan had not even heard her, after a moment she had one hand on his head, smoothing the dirty skin over the patient, rounded skull, and then she was hoisting herself to her feet, the animal clasped against her body. “He’s been hurt,” she said, in a whisper, as if she didn’t want the dog to hear. “Oh, let’s hurry! Your father will know what to do, Maggie.” Then the rain, the threat of which had started them homeward, had begun to fall, and they had run, Margaret gulping the bitter lump of shame she would not admit, telling herself, I didn’t know it was hurt, not really, anyway it isn’t safe, he might bite, look at her pretty dress—Susan had never said once, didn’t you see him lying there? Margaret’s father had dressed the wound, had put a splint on the leg. “He must of had a fight, dogs, or maybe a bobcat.” Presently he was hobbling after Susan, his long cur tail flailing the air. He wouldn’t come near Margaret, he rolled his yellowish hound-dog eyes, showing the whites, when he saw her. It was too much as if he said, if Susan knew what I know, she wouldn’t think much of you! After Susan had left that fall, the dog had disappeared. “He had the makings of a good hunting dog,” said Margaret’s father, “but he had a roving foot.”

Margaret hadn’t thought of that dog for years, it couldn’t be guilt now which felt so dry in her throat, she’d just lost her breath, running. She didn’t worry now what Susan Lathrop Field thought of her! She must take off her dress, lucky she’d had on this old wash-silk. She could light a small fire in the fireplace, it would be pleasant with the rain outside.

When, at the end of the next week, Margaret rode in to the village on the bus, she found George Carter’s assistant in charge of the barber shop, and the door to Ella’s beauty parlor closed, with a sign, “Back in two weeks.” “They just jumped in the car the minute they saw the sun,” explained the strange young man.

“I should think Ella might have let her customers know.” Margaret was resentful. “Here I came way in on purpose—”

“She talked some of putting in a girl while she was gone, but she said she just lost money when she did, you ladies wouldn’t have anyone but her. Now with men it’s different, a shave’s a shave and you gotta have it when you gotta have it.” He bulged comfortably under his white cotton jacket, but his enjoyment of his own comment did not soften Margaret’s little scowl of disappointment. “They’ve gone to see her folks,” he added. “Her mother’s poorly, that’s one reason she was in a hustle to get away.”

Then Ella would have no news when she came back. Margaret edged away from the door; she oughtn’t to be standing looking into a men’s barber shop. The young fellow didn’t look after her as she went along the street, stepping precisely in her carefully whitened canvas oxfords, the bright sun bringing out a faint odor of cleaning fluid from the white front of her figured blue silk dress. Two hours until a bus left for Grady’s Amusement Park, the bus which ran past her door. She prolonged her few errands, crossing off each item from her list as she bought it, a spool of darning cotton, toilet soap (she was firm with herself about that, she liked good soap, scented, Yardley’s or Houbigant’s, she mustn’t be extravagant, after all she’d practically wasted her bus fare today). The drugstore clerk said, “Nice to see the sun again,” and she agreed. In the grocery store she removed her white cotton gloves to pinch the lettuce heads, the clerk said, “Nice to see the sun again,” and she agreed, selecting the firmest head.

There were so many strangers in town in the summer, she really didn’t know anyone in the village now. When she’d gone away to college, those long years of hard work, teaching in a country school, a year at a normal, another year of teaching, steady up-climb, she’d lost touch with people here. All her friends now were in the city, she told herself, why should this feeling, like a vague homesickness, pull at her eyelids, at the corners of her mouth? Just because she had to wait for the bus, feeling sorry for herself that there was nowhere in the village a door where she might present herself, where someone would say, “Why, Margaret Turner, come in! How are you? How nice to see you!” Some of the girls she had known in school had married and settled here, she wouldn’t know them if she met them, grandmothers now, or dead, some of them. There weren’t any of them I cared about, she thought; they were all dull—after Susan. And my life was different, I made it different. She straightened her shoulders, she thanked the clerk for the neat heavy paper bag with string handles into which she could drop all her small purchases. When he said, “I suppose you won’t be here much longer, Miss Turner? You’ll be getting back to the city?” she almost thanked him again, he had in a phrase restored her.

“I’ll be here the rest of August, at least,” she said. “I’m not sure just when I have to leave. September’s such a lovely month at the shore.”