Against the Season (3 page)

“Which could be made very attractive to industry,” Peter said.

“Where’s the work force?” Amelia asked.

“It would come. The town doesn’t have to die.”

“We’ve survived crucial failures,” Amelia agreed, “but we’ve refused to develop the docks or the dead center of parking lots. This is probably the only town of this size in North America without a parking problem. We haven’t supported education…”

“There’s still wealth here,” Peter said.

“But why have a parking problem?” Cole asked. “Why fill the bay with freighters? I wouldn’t want to go to a huge university—I probably couldn’t even get in. And I don’t want to major in the industrial-military complex and race riots.”

“That’s one answer,” Harriet said. “The people who stay here stay because it isn’t a city, nor even threatening to be a city.”

“Is that why you’ve stayed?” Peter asked.

“In part,” Harriet said.

“And why you won’t, for long,” Amelia said to Peter.

“I’m not sure,” Peter said. “It may be Harriet and Cole who have to move.”

“You should have been my generation. We were all girls or remittance men.”

“The two necessities for building North America,” Peter said, smiling.

“You talk this way,” Harriet said, “but you came here to get away from the city, not to build one.”

“Only in a way,” Peter said. “With planning, we could come into the seventies and eighties with responsible industry, a balanced population. Oh, with problems of course, but healthy problems, not the terminal disease of either big cities now or this town now.”

Cole fidgeted with pieces of silver he had forgotten to use.

“Are you going out tonight?” Amelia asked him.

“Some of us were thinking of meeting at Nick’s for a while, but no special time,” he said.

“Let’s go to coffee. Kathy shouldn’t be on her feet too long. Cole, you run along.”

Amelia was never sure whether he went away because he wanted to or because he felt he should. His nervous boredom was no measure. She knew he took that with him to Nick’s or the movies or his room. But, though Peter was good for him and Harriet affectionate with him, it was probably better that he spend time with his own friends. And Amelia, tonight, had things on her mind that she could not discuss in front of Cole.

They had finished coffee and Kathy had come in for the last time to get the tray before Amelia took the random conversation up into her hands and stopped it.

“Kathy won’t be here more than another three weeks,” Amelia said. “My old and dear friends think it’s time for me to have permanent help. They seem to feel, among other things, that the moral influence on Cole couldn’t be a good one. I don’t seem to be able to settle my own mind about it.”

“Unmarried, pregnant girls,” Peter said with measured seriousness, “are probably the best moral influence a young man could have.”

“If he needed a moral influence,” Harriet added.

“Now that’s a question I hadn’t put to myself,” Amelia said. “Maybe Kathy is a real discouragement to Cole.”

“Do they have much to do with each other?” Peter asked.

“Not a great deal,” Amelia said. “But we’ve had other girls who would have been much harder to ignore. There have been vixens and charmers.”

“But very pregnant,’ Peter said.

“Yes,” Amelia agreed.

“Still, I suppose he could want to make an honest woman of someone,” Harriet said.

“Cole doesn’t seem to me that romantic,” Peter said. “Or to have that kind of confidence in himself.”

“And, if he did,” Amelia said, “if he could get that involved…”

“You wouldn’t find anything to object to,” Harriet finished.

“Is that rather naïve of me?”

“I don’t suppose his mother would like it,” Peter said.

“No,” Amelia agreed, but in a tone that suggested what Cole’s mother thought was of no great moment to him or anyone else.

“But it’s all very theoretical,” Peter said, “and unlikely.”

“There’s something else,” Amelia said. It’s not often a girl needs as little as Kathy in the way of company or instruction. Am I getting too old? Friends my age don’t hesitate to say, ‘Yes, you are.’ Be frank with me. Are they right?”

“No,” Harriet said, “not unless you’re tired of it, not unless it does begin to seem too much to you.”

“I’ve never been much of a psychologist,” Amelia said.

“That’s probably why you’ve been such a help to so many people,” Peter said.

“Is that flattery?”

“No,” Peter said, “no, I mean it. I’m with Harriet. If you still want to do it, you should do it. I can’t see that it’s any real problem to Cole. And you know that Mrs. Montgomery, whatever she says, would be disappointed to lose any point of moral speculation.”

Amelia smiled at him. Beatrice would have learned to like him.

Harriet was the first to say she must go. Peter, remembering the books she had in the back of the car, got up to leave with her.

“Don’t see us to the door,” Harriet said.

But Amelia did. (“This is not to be a house of people letting themselves in and out”—Beatrice, on Ida Setworth’s once delivering a present, unannounced, in the kitchen.)

When she had shut the door behind them, Amelia put a hand on the small chest she intended to give to Harriet. Then she turned herself to the chair lift. Cole would deal with the lights when he got in. Once in her bedroom at the front of the house, Amelia could still hear Peter’s and Harriet’s voices faintly in the drive. It must have stopped raining. A moment more and the first car door slammed—Harriet’s Volkswagen, then the second, Peter’s, heavier, quieter.

May 1, 1942:
The bulk and vulgarity of our latest charge make us accept dinner invitations more readily than usual. “What I can’t stand most,” she complained at breakfast, “is the way I smell.” “Similar to sweet fish,” Sister said. How I wish I could be protected either from or by her impervious accuracy. To Ida tonight, who has the sense to live among the odorless dead.

May
2,
1942:
We played Mah-Jongg last night. Ida has been archaic since she was seven years old and has that effect on all of us. Sister seemed to me uncomfortable. If she would ever complain, I would not have to be so sensitive—a complaint I must remember to pass on to her if she’s had a troubled night.

May 3, 1942:
We knit for illegitimate children, soldiers, and plant a victory garden. If Sister mentions a cow, I will be gravely disapproving.

May 4, 1942:
There is nothing in the world to do about May but live through it. Today Ida’s nephew is missing in action. She seems to have expected it. There is never any comfort for Ida.

May 5, 1942:
Since Mother died, the morning sounds of this house have been unnatural. Sister, who used to sit at her desk, pursues them all, as a way, I suppose, of hearing none of them. She walks deaf, and we shout at her.

May 6, 1942:
There have been no letters to answer in days. I write to myself without interest.

May 7, 1942:

D
INA PYROS RAN SOMETHING
between an antique and a junk shop called simply George’s, wedged in between Charlie Ries’s drugstore and Cater’s Ice Cream on F Street, which cut wide and uncertainly commercial across the whole of the uncertain city. Dina’s better customers, like Ann and Charlie Hies from next door, Harriet Jameson, the librarian, and Ida Setworth, one of the town’s finest antiques herself, complained about the space she took up with the empty beer bottles and old paperbacks she bought, But her best customers, like Rosemary Hopwood, who was a social worker, and Peter Fallidon, the bank manager, liked the paperbacks as much as they did the stripped-down and refinished tables and chests. Dina’s friends, like Sal and Dolly who ran the corset shop down the block, wouldn’t have an excuse to visit during business hours unless they could bring the bottles Dina had helped to empty over the weekend. Even more important, those people who weren’t exactly friends and certainly not customers could always collect a dozen empties or a handful of old mysteries and have an excuse to pass half an hour or an afternoon by Dina’s old stove with the cats and the radio. They got in the way sometimes and left sometimes with things more valuable than what they had brought in, though they rarely had either the skill or initiative to carry out furniture. Charlie Ries said they all but ruined Dina’s business and too often spilled over into his drugstore. But Dina imagined Rosemary Hopwood sometimes came in because of them, and Dina’s friends didn’t mind as long as there was some place to sit down and a little air coming in from the back door. For Dina herself, the people around the stove were as important as the old pieces of furniture she brought in, collected from fire sales, real junk shops, old ladies’ attics, sometimes even the dump. She knew good wood and good lines. She had an eye for grain and bone structure in a face as well. Not many phonies of any kind came into the shop and stayed. Anyone who asked, “Who’s George?” or, worse, “Where’s George?” didn’t stay long or come back. Nor did anybody who called Dina “George.” Whether the Rieses or Ida Setworth approved of the tone or not, there was one—a kind of hum that came from power tools even after they had been turned off or the old tubes in the radio or the cats—some sort of constant that made the shop seem at the same time drowsy and alive.

Something dangerous, or dangerously comfortable, about George’s or the young woman who ran it, so Rosemary Hopwood had thought when she first discovered it six years ago just after she’d come back to town. The line of an old rocker had clipped her vision at thirty miles an hour so that she slowed, drove round the block, and parked her rather too expensive car for the price she intended to pay right at the front door. Dina Pyros was alone in the shop that morning, crouched at the bottom drawer of an old chest, fixing the last of the brass handles. She went on working while she exchanged looks of appraisal with her customer. Rosemary Hopwood had time, therefore, to consider that face and the price tag on the rocker before she had to speak. There wasn’t, she was interested to discover, much margin for bargaining in either the price or the face, which she regretted briefly, knowing no other way to have a conversation.

“I’d like the rocker,” she said.

Dina stood up, squarely built, solidly balanced, in a heavy, dark sweater, other uncountable layers of clothing visible at the neck, lined jeans, and boots. She must have said something, but Rosemary’s memory of the transaction was that it was nearly wordless. She had the right change. Dina put the rocker in her car. That was all. The radio had been playing, surely. It always was.

The shop had never been empty again when Rosemary came in, once every two or three months, sometimes honestly looking for a piece of furniture, more often simply lingering at the paperbacks, accepting a cigarette or a cup of coffee, strong and bitter, boiled with its grounds in an old tin pot. Occasionally she met someone she knew: old Ida Setworth or Cole Westaway, the boy who had come to live with Amelia Larson. And the faces of those she didn’t know, collected around the stove, became familiar to her. For her, there was no conversation ever, just the hum of the shop, voices somewhere in it, from the radio or the people by the stove, and the owner’s square, drowsy courtesy. Rosemary would stay a little longer than made sense and go before she was ready to.

At first Dina had been no more than surprised by Rosemary Hopwood, who was not a woman one could reasonably expect to drop in at George’s or, for that matter, anywhere else in this bypassed, sea-sided town. That first day she was still dressing as she had in some other world, in black, with something bright and soft at her throat. Her hair was black—and her eyes—and she had a slow, very white smile. Dina was not so much aware of how little had been said as she was of Rosemary’s voice, low, with breakings in it. When Dolly asked Dina to describe Rosemary Hopwood, Dina could only say, “Around forty, about to age.” And Rosemary had aged in those six years, for Dina nearly at once when she discovered Rosemary’s name, which was as old as any name in town, then again when Dina discovered that she was a social worker.

“What if she’s looking for grass?” Dina asked Dolly.

“It’s not as if you were pushing it,” Dolly said.

“No, but you know… the kids.”

“So? They’re better by your stove than down on the docks.”

“Still, you can smell it.”

“Maybe she’s your type, is she?” Dolly asked.

Dina shrugged, as if to say
she
wasn’t particular.

“Sal wonders, are you coming over tonight?”

“Don’t know,” Dina said.

It would depend, as Dolly knew, on whether or not Dina got involved with a piece of furniture or a woman. If a woman, she might bring her along, but if a piece of furniture, she was lost to them. Dina never really planned her involvements, as long as they were in something of a constant rhythm, which somehow usually happened without her ever directly initiating anything.

So, for six years, Rosemary Hopwood had been coming into the shop, along with a number of other people, and Dina had got used to her, though never quite to the sound of her voice. Dina sold her a table or made her a cup of coffee or offered her a cigarette, that was all.

Sal, in the shop just a couple of months ago, saw Rosemary for the first time and said, when she had gone, “I wonder where she buys her underwear.”

Dina turned on the sander.

“I don’t believe a word you say,” Sal shouted uselessly. “You gray-eyed Greek!”

It was not a hard exercise in cynicism, since Dina spoke so few, ever.

Saturday morning was always a bad one for Dina because she drank every Friday night at Nick’s, partly out of family loyalty to her cousin Nick, partly out of immigrant loneliness for a country she didn’t remember, partly out of dull habit. It was a rest at the time, the place full of young men: college students and sailors off the few freighters that still did come in to port here. But she always drank too much. Dolly and Sal didn’t know why she opened up on Saturday, except to provide a place by the stove for the drifting kids. That was why. She seemed to herself, on Saturday morning, one of them. Often she did no work at all, sat on the back step with a bottle of beer, and stared at weed patches in the concrete. Even addressed, she might not respond, but George’s was open. The radio was on. The cats came in and out, over and around her.