Home from the Hill (37 page)

They climbed the creaky stairs and went down the dark, narrow, creaky old hallway. He put the key in the lock and opened the door and stood aside to let her enter. She thought he had just forgotten. Verne had not carried her over the threshold, but she had thought Theron would. But Theron did not; disappointed and hurt, she walked in.

On the bed lay two packages, a large one and a small one. She opened them now. The small one yielded a bar of soap, a lipstick, a comb and a bottle of
Evening in Paris
. From the large one she brought out and held up against herself a sheer blue rayon nightgown. This was her trousseau. She spread the nightgown on the bed and stood back to admire it, and undid the top button of her blouse.

He made a move, and she remembered herself and blushed. She picked up the nightgown and hugged it to her, picked up the soap and the lipstick and the perfume and went to the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

She dallied, changing her clothes and scrubbing and making up her face and scenting herself to give him time. When she came back to the bedroom, he was gone. She was confounded only for a moment, then she was touched. He had gone into the baby's room. He was so refined, such a gentleman, and treated her so ladylike. How different from that low Verne!

She looked into the vanity mirror and blushed. The nightgown was so thin! Her mother, she thought, would not have let such a thing stay in the house.

On the vanity stood a tumbler. She picked it up and looking at the door to the other room, set it down with a delicate clink. She coughed a delicate cough.

She went to the bed, switched on the bedlamp, crossed the room and switched off the overhead light, returned to the bed, folded back the counterpane, lay down and spread the skirts of her gown out on both sides.

Five minutes passed without a sound. She began to be tickled. Five minutes more passed, and she could hardly help snickering. Yet she was not laughing at him. His timidity endeared him to her, and again she thought, how different from Verne!

After five minutes more, however, she began to pity him. She got out of bed and went to his door. She hoped he would not think she was vulgar, country, but she felt she really must help him. She grasped the doorknob, not with intent to open it, but to give it what she judged to be a demure jiggle, and laying her cheek against the door, whispered, “Ready!”

She listened. There was no sound. She pressed her cheek against the panel again, this time the better to hear. Not a sound. Well, really! she said to herself. She grasped the handle more firmly and turned it. It was locked.

She felt rise in her throat a howl of outrage, but no sound emerged. Outrage discovered places in her pride she had not suspected she had, yet mortification silenced her. She stepped backward and looked down at herself. She could see her body through the gown, and the blue gauze made it seem distant and vague. And it was as if she had left her body as she lay far into the night, with the bedlamp burning, staring at the door.

51

With much difficulty, for most of the men he approached were uneasy or afraid, Theron found a job at the cottonseed mill, and two days later, the marriage still not consummated and Opal now more cowed and lifeless with stultification and dismay than any taunt or blow of Verne's had ever made her, they moved out of the hotel and into a little furnished house that Theron found on the edge of town, and in which at once it was established that there would be separate bedrooms.

Shortly she decided that he was not right that way. As a country girl, she could not help remembering all the jokes and despising any man who was lacking in that fashion. But as a lover of life, Opal could pity anyone denied its major pleasure.

And no question, he was easy to get along with. He gave her all his pay envelope. It was not much, but Opal was not used to much. Besides, she was sustained by the thought of what she was to come into in time. As things had so disappointingly turned out, she felt she deserved to come into some of that money now, and when no communication came from his parents, which meant at least no hostilities, she decided that knowing their son's infirmity they had not dared object to her and that she would not have long to wait before there was a turn in her fortunes.

Most important to the smooth running of their odd union was the fact that Theron was the best step-father to her child she could have hoped to find. For Opal did not see that Theron's interest in the child had decidedly declined. Stepfathers, in Opal's sphere of life, were ogres, and this was no bad fairy tale: she had seen them. Theron could hardly have loved Brucie more if he had been his own, she said to herself, and having said that, understood something about it that had been mysterious before. He loved the baby because he could have none and, perhaps, being lacking that way, loved it with something of a mother's love. He was gentle with it in a way that she had seen only mothers, not even doting fathers, gentle with children. Like all country women, Opal was grateful for negative virtues in a man; the husband she had got did not drink, did not gamble, and to this traditional list she had a big addition: if he was not sharing her bed, neither was he sharing any other woman's. On Saturday nights it was some consolation, if he did not take her out dancing, that he was not out dancing himself, that on Sundays when he was off from work, if he was not much company to her, at least he was not off in the woods hunting.

52

Fred Shumway, with his ambition and enterprise, was the sort of fellow whom everyone could despise a little; consequently he was universally tolerated and even liked. The desire to get on, and the necessity this put him under of overlooking slights and sarcasms, was combined in Fred with a quivering sense of social place.

In the acquisition of his wife he thought he had risen so high as to silence comment on that rise. His air, however, was modest. He began to exude a sense of familial responsibility. Not that he had been a gay bachelor; but he made a very sober and heavy young husband. He felt that a chasm had opened between him and all single men. Towards those contemporaries of his with whom short months ago he had graduated from high school, he now adopted a faintly paternal manner, and was ready to offer them advice. He let it out that he might soon be in need of a partner, and though he did not say so, his tone conveyed “junior” partner, in the new line of business he had taken up. He had acquired the local dealership in a new make, off-brand car and had made a showroom of sorts in a disused livery stable on the south edge of town. Now he was to be found on Saturday afternoons lounging heavily alongside the cotton-buyers and wholesalers and bottling-plant owners, and occasionally he would try out on one of them a casual and hearty “Well, B.J.” or “Tim” or “Harry.”

The dodges of her conscience, that trafficking in half-truths, in lies by omission which is more degrading than outright lies, kept Libby in a state of sullenness towards her husband, but this was lost on him. He was not aware that his bliss was unshared, and this added to her self-reproach and to her contempt for him. Meanwhile days and weeks passed and she postponed her tender tidings. When she could wait no longer, she said in her flat way, not even calling him by name, “I'm going to have a baby,” and the necessity of telling herself afterwards that at least she had not said, “We're going to have a baby,” or anything like, “I'm going to have your baby, our baby,” filled her with loathing of herself.

She was still further shamed by his reaction—though by his painful and undaunted uxoriousness she had known to predict it. He was incredulous with delight. He was overawed. He could not—she winced at the difficulty he had—could not believe he was going to be a father. She was shamed by his complete lack of suspicion. She was shamed by her feeling that his trust in her seemed a kind of self-conceit.

Then he was solicitous—comically so, it would have been, had things been what they seemed—tragically so, unbearably so, things being what they were. He wanted at once to carry her to bed, send for a doctor, hire a housekeeper, tie her shoelaces for her. He carefully avoided touching her. Herself alone was not object enough for the hatred this inspired in her; the excess fell on him.

Then, bursting with paternal pride—though he tried to tell himself it was really a clever stroke of business advertising—Fred ordered five gross of cigars with
It's gonna be a boy!
printed on the band, and the first Saturday after they were delivered, passed them out on the square. Someone said, “Isn't this a little premature? The cigar, I mean.” Fred smiled slyly in reply. He was not displeased to have it thought that he had been able to sample before buying.

Mr. Halstead loathed his son-in-law. What he disliked most about him was the knowledge that Libby had married him for his sake, and the only half-acknowledged supposition as to how she had brought him to his proposal. Fred's obvious—too obvious—delight in his daughter did not raise him in Mr. Halstead's esteem. Or rather, it did and it didn't. For the more Fred did the things that should have pleased a genuine father-in-law, the more he doted on her, the more it gave Mr. Halstead to reproach himself with. Fred's own dazed sense of disbelief in his good fortune helped convince Mr. Halstead how unworthy he was of her. The fact that everybody liked Fred made Mr. Halstead despise him all the more. Shallow, self-satisfied, pushing, he had the soul of a Yankee peddler, Mr. Halstead thought. He was stupidly clever. Mr. Halstead despised him for what had been so easily done to him.

Neither were Mr. Halstead's feelings towards his son-in-law warmed by his recognition that until the recent change in him, the description of the son-in-law of his desire had fitted Fred Shumway very closely. For Fred was steady, he was middle-class and conscious of the need to rise in that class. Fred Shumway, as he himself put it, and as Mr. Halstead too would have put it a short time back, was going to be somebody, to amount to something. Mr. Halstead knew now what life with such a husband was going to be for Libby, especially a life of being guiltily beholden to him. “I would sooner,” he said to himself, “that the baby had had no name, had nothing but my name, than Shumway.” In those days Mr. Halstead was secretly living a heady and reckless life of moral insurgency. It helped a little to ease the pain of his broken heart. Constantly shocked, and even sometimes a little frightened at himself, Mr. Halstead nevertheless had his moments of wicked pleasure. There was, he knew, for the first time in his life, more to him than was apparent. He had become something of a stranger to himself, and he found this stranger much more interesting than the old acquaintance.

Fred's happy vulgarity with those cigars so outraged Mr. Halstead that he barely stopped himself from a terrible indiscretion. Exactly what in those first few crimson moments after he heard of that business he had been about to do, he did not know. But for a time he had forgotten entirely (he always had trouble remembering it at best) that Fred was married to his daughter. It seemed to him that some fellow had been boasting to the town of having had her. Fortunately he did remember … fortunately, for the man Mr. Halstead had been for some unknown number of minutes was so different from himself, a man with a resolve—or rather, one who took no time to make resolutions—so heedless of consequences, so violent, that Mr. Halstead, on regaining his faculties, used them as best he could to ponder an entire evening on the transformation he had undergone so late in life.

53

One night Harvey Brannon had seen something which in the six or eight months since he had not been able to forget.

It was late. Harvey had been kept downtown by a meeting of the officers of his lodge, and Harvey being the outgoing treasurer (it was nearing the end of the year), he had stayed behind, after the meeting broke up and the others went home, to put his books in shape before handing them on to his successor in office. The probability, the near certainty, that he himself would succeed himself (he had served seven consecutive terms as secretary-treasurer—was entirely unaware of the faint contemptibility which attached to that unmanly office and to his acceptance of those seven nominations) did not keep Harvey from what he felt to be the proper way of doing things. Harvey liked things to go by form, smoothly.

Harvey owned no car. Instead of the car which every other Texan felt he had to own, Harvey owned (or owned as nearly as the others “owned” those cars) what none of the others ever would, a home of his own. Harvey's house was one of the first to have been built on the land north of town which had always been regarded as country, simply because it lay beyond the Hunnicutts', the town's natural boundary line for so many years. And so, up the street past the courthouse and up the long steep hill, Harvey set out to walk home. It was a mild wintry evening, and his pace was brisk.

It was an uneventful walk. He did not meet a soul out of doors until he was almost home—and then that, thinking about it later Harvey decided, was exactly what he had met: a soul out of doors.

He had passed through the light of the streetlamp at the corner and then into the shadow of the wall, when the lights came on at the Hunnicutts' and a man stepped through the gate.

The man had stood for a moment, and in the lights Harvey had seen that it was his good friend Albert Halstead. That at least was the way Harvey put it to himself. He and Albert were not really good friends at all, because he and Albert were both of the sort who have no good friends. But every man must think of somebody as his friend, and it was the recognition by Harvey of this kinship in spirit which made him choose Albert Halstead. Perhaps it also helped impress upon him and make subsequently so memorable the scene he was about to witness. That it could happen to Albert made it seem to Harvey a little less impossible that it just might have happened to himself.

As Harvey neared him, Albert lost his hat. He bent to pick it up. But he experienced a little trouble catching it—though there was no wind—and it was still on the ground when Harvey got there. Harvey stooped, retrieved the hat, and handed it to him, saying, “Evening, Albert.”