Against the Season (2 page)

Amelia could not find the boxes for the years 1933 through 1935, nor those from 1913 through 1915. Mislaid? She doubted it. Destroyed? Perhaps. But if they were around anywhere, hidden, those were the years Sister would want burned, read or unread. Amelia was tired, too tired to imagine where else she might begin to look. She told Cole to carry the sixty-three books she had found down to her room.

“And, Cole, do you see that little chest there? I think Harriet would like that. If you’ll take that down to the front hall, I’ll show it to her. If she does, I’ll call Dina to mend it.”

She followed Cole down the stairs for a rest before lunch. The boxes of diaries, on the floor by her desk, troubled her. Or was it really that she could hear Beatrice say, “Are you going to put Harriet Jameson in your debt? If so, why?” “Oh, why not, Sister, why not? They’re only things, after all.” And if anyone was in debt to anyone, it was Amelia to Harriet, who, Amelia thought with pleasure, would be here tonight for dinner, along with Peter Fallidon.

May, 1899
: Sister falls down and Mama cries. I hurt my own leg and Papa laughs at me.

or

May, 1906:
Sister climbed the apple tree again today and shouted across the hedge, “If I can’t walk, I’ll learn to fly.” Papa spoke to us about thinking and showing off, the good and the bad. “Beatrice fails at the first, and Amelia succeeds at the second.” When he is a hard teacher, I cry. Sister never cries.

or

May, 1912:
Am I the only one in the world who cannot bear roses?

or

May, 1917:
Papa would have loved this day full of gulls.

or

May, 1940:
Sister has argued for the last time about this war. She has such a good nature, I don’t understand her international irritabilities. We don’t read the same books. A pity.

or

May, 1955:
I have grown up and grown old here, hating roses.

Cole opened the door to Harriet Jameson, awkward with umbrella and an armload of library books.

“This rain,” she said.

“I’ll take the books,” Cole offered. “Any for me this week?”

“One. I don’t think you’ll like it much. It looks like a morality tale simply disguised as science fiction. But I thought you’d be studying for exams anyway.”

“Do you want to go upstairs, or shall I take your coat?”

“Thanks. I won’t bother.”

There was a hall mirror, before which Harriet could appraise herself quickly, knowing she was always neat, even in a high wind, never really groomed, which was for horses and women of other sorts of ambition. She resettled her jacket over thin shoulders, long thin arms, and made sure the rather tastelessly old-fashioned pin was fastened and straight. There were specks of rain on her rimless glasses. Whatever prettiness she had was of the sort admired by old ladies—a healthy, shining head of nevertheless very ordinary hair, a clear complexion, really blue eyes, some refinement of feature, not quite sharp. She looked what she was: a thirty-six-year-old spinster librarian.

“Cousin A wanted you to look at this chest,” Cole said, occupying himself with Harriet’s coat and umbrella. “She’s going to get Dina to mend it and wondered if you’d like it.”

“But it’s beautiful,” Harriet said, an opinion she had without discrimination of everything in this house.

They both heard the heavy sound of Amelia coming toward them from somewhere at the back of the house, probably from where she had been speaking to Kathy about dinner.

“So here you are,” Amelia said, in the soft folds of black she had worn since Beatrice died, holding out both strong, old hands, which Harriet took as she leaned forward to kiss Amelia’s cheek. “Isn’t Peter with you?”

“It seemed silly since we’re on opposite sides of town. Anyway, he was afraid of being late at the bank.”

“Did Cole show you the chest?”

“Yes, and it’s beautiful, but…”

“Good, I’ll call Dina in the morning.”

Amelia had released only one of Harriet’s hands. Leading her by the other, not for steadiness but for happy possession, Amelia jarred them off toward the library. There, in the room the sisters always used in preference to the larger drawing room, Harriet still felt the absence of Beatrice, with whom she had never been as much at ease as with Amelia but whom she had loved with uncritical admiration: the image of grand age which no one would ever reach again. The force in Amelia was different, without her sister’s faint, ironic haughtiness, nobility of head, command, Amelia took nothing from the setting, simply inhabited it in abrupt, forthright generosity.

“Kathy’s forgotten the ice,” Amelia said.

“I’ll get it,” Cole volunteered.

“He’s a good boy,” Harriet commented as he left the room.

“And it’s too bad in a way, isn’t it?” Amelia said. “For him, I mean. It’s nice for the rest of us, of course.”

“You probably would have said that of me at his age,” Harriet decided.

“No, even then you would have been brighter than you were prissy.”

“I was very prissy,” Harriet laughed.

“Do you keep a diary?”

“A diary? Not exactly,” Harriet said. “I did when I was younger.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. Literary pretensions maybe, or a way to declare I was lonely in a very noisy world. Being the odd one of five children.”

“The odd one?”

“Otherwise there would have been four children,” Harriet said. “Why do you ask?”

“Sister kept a diary religiously from the time she was six years old.”

“Have you got them?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Burn them.”

“Should you?”

“Yes, I should. Do I have to read them first?”

“Don’t you want to?”

“I loved my sister,” Amelia said. “I don’t know whether I can.”

“Do you want someone else… do you want me…?”

“What would anyone be looking for, Harriet?”

“In a diary? Well, greater understanding, maybe, or information or simple curiosity.”

“Would you be curious?”

“If I were you?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe not,” Harriet said.

“I’m not frightened. It isn’t that.” Amelia said.

“What kind of diaries are they? Would they have historical importance? I should think they would. Simply the people who came in and out of this house.”

“She asked me to burn them.”

“Oh.”

“I looked at a few of them this afternoon, just glancing at seasons. She turned a nice phrase often.”

“She certainly did,” Harriet said.

The front doorbell sounded, and Cole, just turning in with the ice bucket, ducked out again to answer it, but he paused a moment before the mirror to brush his soft, falling hair off his temple and to see if the jumping nerve in his cheek was as irritating to look at as it was to feel. Then, guilty of the delay, he wrenched the door open and greeted Peter Fallidon with embarrassingly loud cheerfulness.

“You’re in good spirits tonight,” Peter said, offering to shake hands.

“Trying to beat the weather,” Cole said, who never knew quite how to take hold or when to let go.

Peter, for Cole’s sake, wanted to teach him just such simple protections so that the boy wouldn’t suffer the ordinary as much as he did now. But he was aware that Cole was embarrassed in a kind of pleasure, too. It was, therefore, necessary to be casual with him as well as instructive.

“How did the math go?”

“I still have it to write,” Cole said.

“Are you going to be finished by next Thursday?”

“Yes … Monday.”

“Somebody gave me a couple of tickets to the stock car races Thursday night,” Peter said. “I can’t go, but I thought maybe you’d like them.”

“Great!” Cole said.

“Here, they’re in my coat pocket.”

Peter Fallidon, who had not been a friend to the household until after Beatrice was ill, sensed her absence only in Amelia, when he sensed it at all. His concern, from the beginning, was for her. Coming from out of town to be manager of the bank old Mr. Larson had founded, Peter had first called to win the confidence of the Misses Larson. Beatrice well would have required just that of him. Amelia hadn’t either that kind of patience or shrewdness. She had looked at him, then taken his hand in both of hers and said, “Thank God you’ve come, Mr. Fallidon. I need you.” It had been a surprise to Peter and also an unexpected relief to be so immediately welcomed. He knew that he was somehow a little too good-looking, too solid in stature, too unsolicitous, to be most people’s image of a bank manager. In his dark face, his jade and jaded eyes could easily be mistrusted. What he did not know was that the expression in them was one that often moved people—widows in particular. They looked not hurt or sorrowing so much as capable of those emotions, as if he might have been born to be a widower. In the eighteen months he had been in town, it was decided that he was a widower. Then someone suggested that his wife had died in childbirth. The fact that, at forty-three, he hadn’t married simply didn’t suit him. Because he was not in the habit of speaking about his personal life, people accepted the rumor that became him. Even Amelia might have offered it if someone had asked directly about Peter’s life, though his personal history, because it did not seem to interest him, was of no interest to her either. She had liked his eyes, yes, but she had liked even better his confidence. After having been at the mercy of the cretinous incompetence of Peter’s predecessor, a hand-rubbing, how-are-we-today local, she chose to trust what other people—even perhaps Beatrice—would have called arrogance.

She looked up with pleasure now as Peter came into the library and offered up her hands to him, which he had learned to take, just as Harriet had. Then he turned to Harriet, nodded and smiled.

“Are some of those books in the hall for me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I left yours in the back of my car.”

“Peter’s got me tickets to the stock car races next Thursday,” Cole said, holding them up.

“I have a couple of tickets to the chamber music concert next Friday night as well,” Peter said. “Could you use one?”

“Lovely,” Harriet said.

“And for you, Miss Larson, a briefcase full of papers to sign, which I didn’t bring tonight—selfishly. Could I bring them round tomorrow afternoon?”

“Of course,” Amelia said.

“Sherry, Cousin A?”

“Gin and tonic for you, Harriet?” Peter asked, moving over to the drink tray with Cole.

It was a game like bridge, the four of them choosing and changing partners through the half an hour before dinner was served. In the last six months they had met to play it at least once every ten days, sometimes oftener. Peter and Harriet had first met nearly a year ago as if by accident one afternoon when she was on her way out of the Larson house and he on his way in. She had, with quickly controlled embarrassment, agreed to stay for a drink. Soon after that Amelia had asked them both for dinner, but it had been a business meeting, to do with Amelia’s concern about the new wing of the town library and ways of financing it. Still Harriet and Peter understood that they were being encouraged to take an interest in each other. When Peter telephoned to ask Harriet to a concert, she had said, “That’s kind of you, Peter, but I…” He interrupted to ask if he could come round for coffee at once. Then he made the speech that he had made to a number of women before. He was neither interested in nor capable of marriage. He did not want an affair. If “no intention” could be considered honorable, he would like to take Harriet out occasionally, but, particularly at their age, it might be misinterpreted by other people as a courtship. That would, if anything, be a convenience for him, but it might be a limitation for her.

“I’m no more interested than you are,” Harriet said.

“Then could I be some sort of relief to you?” he asked. “You would be for me.”

Harriet considered objecting to it and saw no real reason to. Only, increasingly, she would have liked to say to Amelia, “Peter and I have no interest in each other,” and did not know how. For to say so was to give some importance to what she intended to deny. Only by their behavior—usually arriving and leaving separately and speaking to each other as if they had not, as indeed they often hadn’t, talked with each other recently—they tried to indicate to Amelia how casual a relationship it was. But, if Amelia noticed such things, she received them as facts rather than social messages.

“Dinner’s served,” Kathy said, large in the doorway of the library.

“How are you tonight, Kathy?” Harriet asked.

“Fine, Miss Jameson.”

“There are some books for you in the front hall.”

“Thank you.”

Because of the peculiar domestic arrangements, food at the Larson house was, at stretches, either very good or very bad. Amelia did supervise, but the four months she had a girl were not a time for demanding standards. Amelia had to identify the standard she could expect and then accept it. Kathy, a country girl, was a good cook for anyone who did not suffer from gall bladder attacks. And, fortunately, none of these four did. Amelia’s older friends, after one experience, suggested evenings of bridge after dinner until Kathy was delivered. Tonight there was rich cream of chicken soup before the pork roast, and there would be cream again for dessert, which would cover the biscuits they had been eating throughout the meal with sweet butter.

Amelia was gradually aware that, during these meals with Peter and Harriet, conversation shifted from the light gossip and sharp wit Beatrice had always sponsored and encouraged to sets of earnest topics of the sort their father had required: local politics, agricultural information, the war, computerized business. If it was a bit heavy, like the food, she couldn’t help it. Harriet, argumentative, could prime Peter into sharp assertions. Cole’s interest flickered, brightened, died again.

“But, if what turns a town into a city is greed and vanity, then …” Harriet began to protest.

“Ah, but what keeps a town a town is also greed and vanity,” Peter said.

“Does a place have to grow or die?” Cole asked.

“First one, then the other,” Amelia said. “Here, at any rate. The growth was very fast; the dying very slow. Giving us time to pay for our sins, my father would have said. His father helped to figure out how to drive out all the cheap Chinese labor, not just from the town, from the whole county. To this day, we have no Orientals, no blacks, no race problems.”