Desert of the Heart: A Novel (2 page)

“I’ve been there for four years,” Ann answered. “I live here.”

“She could be a dealer,” Walter said, “but she doesn’t want to, the idiot. That’s where all the real money is for the women.”

Evelyn saw her own unconscious assumptions flower and fade in Ann’s eyes like the blooms of transplanted bulbs. If Ann was not here for a divorce, if she lived in Reno, why was she in this house? Was she related to the Packers?

“Here’s Virginia,” Walter said, rising from his chair. “Dr. Hall, this is Mrs. Ritchie.”

Virginia Ritchie was a thin, pretty young woman. She waited at the edge of the room even after the introduction, looking nervously from Evelyn to Ann and back again. It was obvious that she, too, saw a striking resemblance between them, but she could not comment on it. She clutched a hat and gloves, as if they steadied her uncertain balance, and waited for someone to explain.

“Have some sherry with us,” Ann suggested.

“Oh, thank you, but …”

“Come on,” Walter encouraged, almost brusque with awkwardness.

“Frances says dinner’s ready.”

“Come along,” Frances called from the dining room. “If we don’t eat right away, Ann will be late to work and Virginia late to church.”

“Going to evensong?” Ann asked as they moved into the dining room.

“I thought I would,” Virginia answered. “Dr. Hall, perhaps you’d …?”

“Thank you,” Evelyn answered quickly. “I think not tonight. I haven’t had a chance to unpack.”

“No, no, of course. …”

“Mrs. Hall, will you sit here?” Frances Packer indicated the place at Walter’s right. Ann sat to his left, Virginia Ritchie beside her. “You go right ahead and carve, dear. I’ll just get the vegetables and gravy.”

Walter did not carve well. He was awkward and unconsciously brutal.

“Walter, dear, it’s already dead,” Ann said wryly, as she watched him struggle. “Relax.”

Walter sighed, stared for a moment at the leg of lamb, and then continued. In his real irritation, he apparently did not trust himself to answer. Evelyn smiled. She did like him, and she liked Ann with him. They were like brother and sister in a sentimental play, rude and obviously fond.

“How long will you be staying, Dr. Hall?” Virginia Ritchie asked suddenly.

“Why …” Evelyn hesitated. “ … six weeks, I suppose.”

“Oh.” Virginia worked at her napkin furiously with both hands. In the silence Evelyn could hear Frances’ spoon, dragging the gravy pan for foreign bodies. “I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” Walter demanded with bursting irritation, but Virginia had begun to cry.

As Frances came in with the gravy, Virginia got up from the table and left the room to sob, step by step, up the stairs to her bedroom. Frances looked at Walter.

“It wasn’t a deep cut,” he said defensively. “She’s hardly bleeding at all.”

“Walter, you’re old enough to be kind,” Frances said. “Fix me a plate. I’ll take Virginia’s dinner up to her.” She turned to Evelyn. “She isn’t usually like this. Sundays upset her.”

When Frances left the room, Walter began to serve.

“Did I upset her?” Evelyn asked. Surely she was not wrong about Virginia Ritchie, too.

“Everything upsets her,” Walter answered wearily. “If I forget to pee down the side of the pot, she cries herself to sleep.”

“And Walter’s obviously sensitive about being a boy; so you can see how tense and psychological the whole situation is,” Ann said.

“Two helpings of stringed beans for you, girl Childs, and no dessert.”

“Careful,” Ann warned. “You have a date tonight.”

“Blackmailing capitalist! One of these days I won’t need your car. If I weren’t a poor, struggling young man, working my way through college …”

“You’re breaking my heart,” Ann cried.

“I hoped I was.”

Their teasing was routine enough to be mindless, and they used it now with a tired nervous energy to cover the awkwardness of Virginia’s departure, Evelyn watched and smiled and wished she could think of something to say. She felt both curiously exposed and unknown.

“I hope you’re not waiting for me,” Frances said, as she hurried back into the room. “Have you had the gravy, Mrs. Hall?”

“Thank you.”

The phone rang.

“I’ll get it,” Walter said, as Frances started up from her chair. “Sit down and eat your dinner.”

“I feel we shouldn’t try to eat on Sundays at all,” Frances said. “Walter says I’m a compulsive eater, but when I suggest …”

“It’s a long distance for Virginia. Shall I call her?” Walter looked into the room from the hall.

“Well, yes, do. I suppose so. But don’t yell. Go up. I must have that phone moved out of the hall. I wish I could think where.”

“How about the bathroom?” Ann suggested.

“I actually considered that, but it’s something about the wires, being near water and all. Can I get you more meat, Mrs. Hall? Ann? No, you won’t. If everyone ate as little as Ann, we could go right ahead and feed China.”

“That’s my theory,” Ann answered.

“Ann has a real Robin Hood complex,” Frances said brightly. “It’s much less complicated and much more subversive than communism. ‘Corrupt the rich to feed the poor.’ Isn’t that it, Ann?”

“Frances doesn’t like gambling,” Ann said.

“Neither do you,” Frances asserted.

This argument, like Ann’s and Walter’s teasing, was a familiar exercise without important malice, but Evelyn was made uncomfortable by it. There was a real tension between Ann and Frances.

Walter came back to the table and confronted the cold remains of his dinner glumly. Out in the hall, Virginia’s tear-stained voice was resonant and clear: “Mummy loves you, darling. It’s only three more weeks now. You be a good boy. Mummy loves you very much.”

“For God’s sake, Mother, talk about something, will you?”

Frances did. She discussed fund raising for the Episcopal Church, legal adoption, the Reno flood. The connection between one subject and another was superficial but skillful. If Frances was extravagant in her subject matter, she was not undisciplined. Ann offered an occasional question or comment while Walter ate his cold potatoes. Evelyn sat silent, trapped between the competing voices, irritated and oddly ashamed. When Virginia finally said goodbye and rushed back upstairs, Frances also stopped talking and got up to clear the dishes to a tea cart, which she then wheeled to the kitchen.

“Thank you,” Walter said. He felt in his shirt pocket with his left hand and took out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”

“No thanks.” Evelyn’s head ached. Her throat was sour with the food she had eaten. She longed to have the meal over.

“What time is it?” Ann asked.

“Six. You’ve got an easy twenty minutes. Relax.”

“Will you leave the car in the lot?”

“Oh, I’ll probably come and pick you up.” Walter rose to take the last of the serving dishes away.

“What time do you get off?” Evelyn asked, forcing a question against the candid look of sympathy Ann gave her as soon as they were alone in the room.

“Three or three thirty. I’ll be off at three tonight. Sunday’s fairly slow.”

“You must have to sleep all day.”

“Oh, no. I’m always up by eleven. These hot days I get up earlier. There’s no point in a night job if you sleep the day away.”

“I suppose not,” Evelyn said. She could not think of anything more to say that was not personal; and, because she herself disliked direct questions, she would not ask any. “I suppose not.”

“It really isn’t usually as bad as this,” Ann said. “I’m sorry about … all that nonsense I was talking.”

“Please …” Evelyn began but was troubled by the urgency in her own voice. What was the matter with her?

“Do you drive?” Ann asked quickly. “Because I really don’t use the car much during the day. Walt takes it to work. Any day you wanted to, you could drop him off and just have the car.”

“That’s very generous of you, but I …”

“Don’t refuse. You’ll need things to do.”

“I have plenty of work to do,” Evelyn answered, her voice quite under control, her eyes consciously and silently reminding Ann of the fifteen years that separated them.

“I’m sorry again,” Ann said, her smile relieved and self-mocking. “It’s just playground tactics: if you won’t be mad at me, I’ll let you play with my car.”

“I shouldn’t suppose anyone stays mad at you for very long,” Evelyn said, her voice still adult, but fond, as if to a child.

Frances came in with a berry pie. Walter followed with the coffee.

“Now you have plenty of time, Ann,” Frances said. “You’re to eat a piece of pie.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t.”

“She never wants dessert,” Frances said to Evelyn. “She never did, not even when she was a little girl.”

Walter imitated an expression of maternal concern. Ann looked down, demure. Frances, unnoticing, cut the pie with haphazard generosity, and they ate.

After Walter and Ann had hurried off, Frances suggested a more peaceful cup of coffee in the living room. Evelyn raised the question of payment almost at once.

“I charge sixty-five dollars a week.”

“Fine,” Evelyn said, a little too quickly. She had not really put her mind to any fixed amount, but her only experience with room and board had been the price set for students in Berkeley. She was, therefore, startled. “Shall I pay you in advance?”

“A week at a time. If you make other plans, just give me a week’s notice.”

“I’m sure I’ll be quite comfortable here,” Evelyn said.

“I’m glad. But sometimes … well … people change their minds.”

“Do they?” Evelyn asked. “Well, yes, I suppose they might.”

“Yes.”

The silence invited Evelyn to say something about herself, her own situation and intention.

“Let me get my checkbook,” she said abruptly.

“That’s not necessary. Tomorrow’s plenty of time.”

“I mustn’t keep you then, Mrs. Packer.” Evelyn got up.

“Do call me Frances…. Of course, you want to unpack. You run along. If there’s anything you need, just let me know. I usually make tea around ten o’clock. You come down if you’d like to. Or before. I always like company; so don’t ever feel you have to be alone.”

“Have
to be alone,” Evelyn thought as she closed the bedroom door behind her. If she had known how much she would have to pay—it worked out to almost four hundred dollars for six weeks—she could have stayed in a hotel. Three meals a day of the sort she had just survived would drive her mad. The hysteria, the awkwardness, the prying, the solicitude were unbearable. As she looked at her not yet unpacked suitcases, she thought for a moment that she need not stay, that she could simply close them, call a cab, and be gone. But, at the fact of escape, her imagination balked.

“I can’t run away from running away.”

Nothing was wrong, really. It was only Virginia Ritchie, a caricature of the wronged woman, who made the others behave as they did. She would be gone in three weeks’ time, perhaps sooner. Evelyn wondered why it had never occurred to her that, once in Reno, a woman might change her mind. Regret, yes, even terror, but like the suicide falling, no way out. But that was ridiculous. Evelyn herself had waited until there was no choice, but perhaps other people acted on impulse. Virginia Ritchie was, after all, not much older than Ann Childs.

“All right. I admit it,” Evelyn said quietly in answer to a thought she was not allowing herself to have.

Ann was almost young enough to be her own child. But only a parent could be allowed to feel tenderness for his own likeness. In a childless woman such tenderness was at best narcissistic. And Evelyn had learned the even less flattering names applied to the love a childless woman might feel for anything: her dogs, her books, her students … yes, even her husband. She was not afraid of the names themselves, but she was afraid of the truth that might be in them. This resemblance was, she knew, not a trick need had played on her; neither was it a miracle. Ann Childs was an accident; that was all. An accident, an illegitimate child, “sprung full grown and female out of our All Father’s racked brain.” Evelyn smiled.

“And I shall feel tender toward her if I like.”

As she crossed the room to open the drawers of the highboy, she noticed that, instead of the Gideon Bible Walter had promised, there was a small bowl of fresh fruit on the bedside table. Frances Packer was quite a nice woman really. She hadn’t been trying to pry. She had only offered the opportunity for Evelyn to ask for sympathy. And, if many of her guests had been like Virginia Ritchie, Frances’ friendliness was a calculated and saintly risk.

“I must tell her to call me Evelyn,” she decided, as she folded nightgowns into the second drawer, trying to ignore the distaste she felt for such familiarity.

When Evelyn had settled her belongings, it was only seven thirty. She was not used to so early a dinner. All evenings would be long. It was just as well. She had planned to do a lot of work during these six weeks. Already she missed her books. She had only had room for three or four in her luggage. If she had taken the car, she would have everything she needed with her. George would not use it, but she had refused to suggest anything that would threaten or anger him further. There were libraries. Perhaps she would go tomorrow after she had seen the lawyer. Or on Tuesday. That would give her something definite to do on Tuesday.

Sitting down at the secretary, Evelyn made a list of the notes she should write. Evelyn’s correspondence, since her sister’s death two years ago, had dwindled to nothing very much more than Christmas letters to half a dozen old friends. Of these, Carol was the only person she wanted to write to, but she must send some word to the others as well. It would hardly do to save the news of her divorce to include in Christmas greetings, Emily Post, or whoever did that sort of thing now, should produce a form letter or at least offer civilized suggestions for the announcement of a divorce. “Mr. and Mrs. George Hall take pleasure in …” Or “Mrs. Evelyn Hall”—that was the right form now, wasn’t it?—but not “takes pleasure.” Did she regret it? “Regrets the divorce of her only husband, George”? “Is ashamed”? “Unhappily admits”? For the contested divorce, the contesting partner could use “Refuses to admit …” Evelyn put her hand up to her eyes, refusing to admit quite sudden tears.