Home from the Hill (36 page)

She started down the steps and was suddenly startled, terrified by the silence of the house. It was as if deserted. Her own noiselessness frightened her, and yet in fear of it she increased her stealth. She could not hear her own footsteps, her breath. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs she was ready to cry out, to Melba, Wade, anybody. She did not; a sight stopped her.

Dressed to go out, waiting for Opal and minding Brucie while she dressed, Theron sat in the drawing room with the baby on his knee. He had not heard her, and suddenly she was glad of her stealth. The opportunity she had wished for had come, and more. She peered at them. But at once she ceased to see the baby. Her gaze was absorbed by Theron alone. Perhaps it was because he had turned against her, that he had so cruelly shown her his incorrigible loyalty to his father, but never had his resemblance to Wade seemed so close. It was startling, almost eerie. It brought her to sense as never before the necessity of accepting Wade's part in him if she was to have any part of him herself.

The baby suddenly pulled its bonnet off and she saw it revealed. She saw Theron's face juxtaposed against his as he tried to put the bonnet back on, and she knew she had been wrong. Loyalty to her old self made her say that it was the first time she had ever been wrong, that it was the only thing he was ever innocent of; but she knew that in it she found hope. She would tell Theron she had been wrong, confess her reason for taking Opal in, and say she was wrong, and beg his forgiveness. She would, if he insisted, confess to Wade, beg his pardon. Anything. She could not say she had lied about his past, but she could say she had been hasty, unjust, wrong in this, and perhaps not at once, but in time, surely, he would take her back. She looked sharp again. No mistaking it. Wade was not to be discovered in that pudgy little face. Wasn't the hair just beginning to down his scalp going to be tow? Wasn't it time for the eyes to change color if they were going to?

She heard a door open upstairs. It would be Opal coming down. There was no time to go to him now. Besides, suddenly she found she needed more courage. She would speak to him when he returned. Suddenly then she realized where he was going, what was afoot. Opal was going to the courthouse—that was what had come: a letter. Mrs. Hannah offered a prayer for Opal, that she would get her precious decree. But whether she did or not, there was no reason for her to stay in the house any longer. Mrs. Hannah's heart fluttered with the first joy she had known in weeks. She would send Opal packing this very day, and then she would speak to Theron. She could, then. That would fortify her.

Noon approached, and she began to wonder whether Wade would be coming home for lunch. She began to hope he would. She was eager now to humble herself to him. He must know what her suspicions about Opal had been, and she was ready now to credit him with having suffered those suspicions in silence because of his own sense that though he was innocent, it was the first time he ever deserved to be thought so. She contemplated telling him first, Theron later; perhaps telling only him and letting Theron hear her confession and apology from him. Vaguely she heard in this an echo of her old self that had taken positive pleasure in such self-punishment. But the humiliation in this case was too real. She did not have to suspect herself.

She had not counted on a number of things, however; the first of which was that the sight of him terrified her. Perhaps she would tell Theron first, after all. Perhaps, after all, she would tell only Theron. Perhaps (oh, irony!) he was guilty, after all. She found that she could not now believe this, could not allow herself even to contemplate it. Still, she was afraid of him. Need she tell him? But she could predict that Theron would exact it of her, and she believed now that he would have the right. He would demand, at least, that for her suspicions of Opal she apologize to his father. If she was going to have to do it sooner or later, would it not be better to have done it before? Theron would be more patient with her then, surely, if she could say she had already made her peace with his father. “Wade,” she said, “may I speak to you, please?”

She had followed him upstairs. Knowing his habits, she knew where to find him. On coming home, he always went at once to his bathroom, took off his shirt and undershirt, doused his face and chest with cold water. He stood now naked to the waist while the water ran to cool. She felt a shock and a queer little twinge of guilt on noticing for the first time the gray hairs among the black in the pelt on his chest. He shut off the faucet. It was then in the sudden silence that her fear of him came back.

She was so frightened, so distraught, that afterwards she could not remember her own words. Somehow she had found them, dragged them out of herself, somehow confessed, somehow even remembered and managed to suppress all but the most unavoidable essentials. She had never—she hoped he would believe this—breathed a word against him to Theron. But when he told her of having been turned out of a man's house, whose daughter he had come to call for, she had guessed the cause. He had been so bewildered, so humiliated, so humbled. He had come to think there really must be something objectionable about him, and she had not been able to stand that. Only then had she spoken out. He had not believed her. (She saw him wince at that.) When shortly after, Opal had showed up, what could she think? Now she had … changed her mind. She had never actually voiced her suspicions about Opal and him to Theron; but, she would admit, she had said and done things that made it hardly necessary.

When she stopped talking, he said nothing. He stared down at the lavatory. Mechanically he turned the faucet on again and put his hand under the water. The cold seemed to awaken him. He bent and splashed his face and chest and he shivered. A drop splashed in her face and stung her, and she drew back. He finished, straightened, and without drying himself, dripping, the hair on his chest glistening, turned to her and said, “And now he hates you too. Hates us both.”

It was not vindication, not triumph, not malice. There was, on the contrary, pity for her in it. It was insight. He had put himself in Theron's place, as she had not. He had seen what she had not foreseen: that he would hate her for telling as much as he hated him for being what she said. She shrank as from a blow, and then he delivered another:

“I had nothing to do with that girl, you know, Hannah,” he said. His tone was that of a man resigned to being disbelieved, and this disarmed her entirely. Then he hit her again: “—Though I admit that her husband, too, thought I did,” he said.

She said—in a rush, because she wanted to hear no more from him—“I'm only waiting for them to come back. Then I'll tell Theron I was wrong, I'll tell him I—”

She stopped, chilled, frightened by his look. It was a look of pity.

She waited all afternoon. Finally, at five, Theron came home, alone. She had determined to meet him at the door, but the memory of Wade's look took away her courage. Was it too late? She heard him go upstairs, and still she sat. At last she worked herself up to it. She went upstairs and to his room. It was empty. She listened. She heard sounds from Opal's room.

The drawers of the bureau all hung open, and Theron was packing the poor paper dime-store valise that Opal had brought with her. So she was leaving on her own, without waiting to be asked. Apparently Theron had left her in town, and had volunteered, or been persuaded, to come and get her things and bring them to her.

The thought of Opal's going gave Mrs. Hannah the courage she needed. She told him that she had spoken to his father. She confessed that she had been wrong about Opal. She was not now above using a tone that left to him the decision of whether she had been wrong about other things as well concerning his father.

He went on packing. Then he closed the bureau drawers, took a last look around, and shut the suitcase. He picked it up from the bed, and from beside the bed picked up another one, a leather one, one of his own, which Mrs. Hannah had not noticed until then. Then he looked at her, and at last he spoke. “When you told me what you did about Papa that night,” he said, “you took away from me both father and mother. Now what you tell me takes away the brother I thought I'd found.”

He strode rapidly to the door. He turned and said good-bye.

“Where are you going?” she breathed.

He told her that he was going to join his wife and step-son.

50

They took two rooms, adjoining, at the hotel—which Opal thought a needless expense. The Hunnicutt money was a not negligible factor in her acquiescence (she had fears that she herself might make it hard for a while for Theron to lay his hands on much of it, but she had seen how he was spoiled, and did not believe his parents would hold out against her for long), and she was looking forward to a time of taking breakfast in the middle of the day. But there was a bedrock of economic morality in Opal, and she was shocked by waste. Opulence—as she conceived opulence—was one thing, but waste another, and she said to herself unblushingly that after all, even if the baby should wake up, it was too young to know what was going on. She said also, however, that you don't get married every day, either—just, she added a moment later with an inward grin, every other day.

She gave the baby titty, smiling to herself to think of the fresh reason Theron had now for turning his head away. Then she put the baby to bed and they went down to the dining room.

If you didn't get married every day, you didn't eat in a hotel dining room even every other day.

“So this is The Norris House!” she whispered. She had gaped at it from outside as a child, sitting with her brothers and sisters like a flock of pullets along the tailgate of the wagon, when, on Saturdays, the family come into town. It had ceiling fans with blades like aeroplane propellers, round tables laid with white linen cloths, diners in suits and ties with town ladies in town clothes, gray-haired colored waiters, napkins big as baby-diapers.

“Henry,” said Theron to the waiter—because he was ashamed of her, and ashamed of himself for being ashamed of her—“I'd like you to know my wife.”

Henry had been apprised by the horrified desk clerk, and now he could just barely stand to look at Opal. “Yessir, Mr. Theron,” he said, and his head shook as he said, “Congratulations.”

There was a champagne bucket stand beside the table to which they had been shown. Now Henry set glasses before them, gave the bottle a professional twirl in the ice, lifted it out, loosened the cork wires, and aimed the bottle at the wall. The Norris House, Opal's impressions notwithstanding, had had its day; in Henry and an antique few of the staff there lingered a faint memory, or a fiction, of grandeur, and they kept up a few of the rituals—such, for example, as this.

He waited, with the bottle aimed at the wall, for the cork to pop. Honeymoon suppers at the Norris were not common nowadays, and the champagne had, in waiting, lost much of its youthful enthusiasm. To Henry this particular bottle seemed to share his own reluctance and disappointment. Its tired pop was to him a sad gratification. He seemed about to shed tears as, pouring the wine, he said, “Compliments of the house, Mr. Theron.”

Under Henry's dampening observation, they touched glasses—a little too hard because of Opal's nervousness, so that some spilled on the cloth—and they drank. Tears came into her eyes and she choked and had to duck her head. “Oooh!” she said when she got her breath, “I like it!” For she was determined to put her past behind her. Then she blushed at the intensity of his gaze. She knew what was on his mind! She started to say, “I know what you're thinking about!” but stopped herself. It might be the wrong thing to say. She had much to learn. She didn't want him to be embarrassed for her.

He saw her watch to see which spoon he chose for the soup, change the direction she dipped it to suit the way he did it, and he was touched by her ignorance and her wish to please him and by her ignorance of his true feelings about her. He saw her pleasure and saw that she thought he shared it, and he wondered where Libby was, whether at this moment she was sitting somewhere across a table from Fred Shumway, her husband, and whether she was thinking of him.

The soup plates were removed and in the interval of waiting for the next course, suddenly he felt her hand upon his. He shivered. He looked at her. Her eyes were glazed with pleasure and she said, “Oh, Theron, honey, I just can't believe it!” Fortunately at that moment Henry came with the entrée. Theron bent over his plate, and he seemed to see in it his future life served up to him. Before him lay nothing but existence. “Ummmmh!” she said, smacking her lips. Even the sense of having righted at least one of his father's wrongs had been taken from him, and suddenly his affection for Brucie was gone.

“Well!” she said, carefully folding her napkin and laying it on the table. It was past nine o'clock, an hour near enough to a country girl's bedtime to bring on blushes. He seemed not to catch her drift. “Well!” she said again, and to underline her meaning, she yawned, carefully patting it down.

He grew flustered. “How about some more ice cream?” he said.

“O Lard, I'm full as a tick!” she said.

“Another cup of coffee?” he said, and his desperation tickled her.

“Too near my bedtime,” she said, and blushed coyly. This, as she had expected, almost panicked him, and she blushed genuinely.

“No, no!” he said. “It's early!”

By way of reply, she yawned again.

Now, but for them, the dining room was deserted. He became aware of that, and she saw his nervousness mount. “Henry!” he called.

Henry came. “Something more, Mr. Theron?” he said.

“Another cup of coffee, please, Henry,” he said.

Henry half turned to Opal and said, “And you, ma'am?”

“Not me,” she said. “I've had a-plenty.”

His coffee came, and he dawdled over it. Her amusement increased, but so did her determination to devil him, and every time she yawned he winced. It was ten o'clock when they got up to go upstairs. By then he could no longer refuse to recognize that wherever Libby was it was bedtime.