The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (2 page)

She sighed and said she didn't know where to begin. It made no difference as far as he could see. He dug a pencil stub out of the silverware drawer. In the parlor they tried to choose what to hang the first tag on. She would have started in on little things and gradually got herself used to the idea, but Mr. Hardy went straight over to the player piano, the biggest thing in the room and the one over which she would have hesitated longest. Mr. Hardy stepped back and looked at it and thought it made the piano look suddenly very important. He imagined the auctioneer going through his spiel, “Now what am I bid for this fine player piano?” the bids going higher and higher, being called in from the front yard where the crowd had overflowed. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

“That player piano,” said Mrs. Hardy, beginning to feel he was parting with it a bit too readily, “has been like a close friend to me. Many a night I believe I'd have went out of my mind if it hadn't been for that player piano.”

“Well, maybe we could keep it,” he said. “Isabel could find a place for it, I suppose, and you could listen to it whenever we went to stay with her.”

She could listen to it; it meant nothing to him, all those fine old tunes she thought had stood for so much between them. No, she told him, they mustn't hang back over the first piece, they'd never raise any money. Well, now, they weren't that bad off; if she wanted it she would have it.

Mr. Hardy could not remember what he had paid for it and thought Clara was high when she insisted on a hundred dollars. Anyhow, they had used it a long time. Yes, but it was like new when they got it. They put down fifty dollars as the least they would take for it, and a note saying he could come down to $37.50 if that was all he could get; then Clara said to put down he ought to try to get fifty though, for it had the finest tone of any she ever heard. She stroked it. For one last time she wanted to hear “Over the Waves” and asked if he wouldn't like to, too. Really he thought they ought to get on, but he knew that tune meant a great deal to her.

She could close her eyes and hear it in her head any hour of the day and it was the night of her wedding when Mr. Hardy waltzed her till two o'clock in the morning. To look at him now who would ever believe it?

She hummed and swayed her head and tapped her foot and smiled to think she hadn't had two dozen words with Mr. Hardy when he asked her to marry him. No denying, he needed somebody to look after his boys, but there were others that he must have seen would do for that job just as well. At first she feared the change. But there was so little difference she felt at home right away, looking after Mr. Hardy and his boys instead of her father and brother and sister. For six months there was hardly time to think of anything; without a woman for three years the house, the boys, their shirts and socks all needed mending and darning, scrubbing and barbering. He told her to ease up a little, that she would kill herself with work as his first wife, Virgie, had done. No one had ever worried before how long or hard she worked. She had loved her mother and father, her brother and sister, but she grew to love Mr. Hardy so much more than all of them it made her ashamed. She came to think it had been sinful of her to marry him without feeling then as she did now about him. She thought of Virgie and dug out an old picture of her and, gazing at it, spent hours wondering if she had felt that way, too, about Mr. Hardy, which loved him the most, thinking up things she would do for him that Virgie, you could tell by her face, would have fallen short of.

The music stopped. If only there had been someone to pump the machine she would have asked Mr. Hardy to waltz with her, she was sure she still remembered the steps. He seemed impatient and she just wondered if he had forgot what tune that was.

When they were agreed on the davenport and the Morris chair, the marble-topped table and the chandelier, Mrs. Hardy took the photograph album, the mantelpiece clock, a couple of antimacassars her mother had crocheted, two or three pieces off the whatnot, and the music roll for “Over the Waves” and went out to look at the buffet while it still had no price tag on it. She had tried for days to figure out some way of keeping it, but it was just too big. She could already see Cora Westfall going straight through the rest of the house until she came to that buffet; the woman had envied her that piece for years. Mrs. Hardy only hoped somebody else turned up who wanted it as bad and ran the bid up good and high.

She watched Mr. Hardy and the way he was putting that tag on the bedroom chiffonier anybody might have thought it was just any old thing instead of the present from the children on their twenty-fifth anniversary. Men never put much store in things, she knew, but that had not stopped her from hoping Mr. Hardy might be different. He never kept souvenirs. “Souvenir of what?” she could remember him asking at the end of days she would never forget as long as she lived. She must have a keepsake for everything that ever happened to her. She had come across a good many that no longer reminded her of whatever they were supposed to. All the same they meant a great deal to her. It would all come back to her in time.

By eleven o'clock Mrs. Hardy was tired, but he was the first to notice. He settled her with a pillow behind her head to rest in the Morris chair, but not before he had removed the price tag, for she said it made her feel she was up on the auction block. She eased herself out with a sigh and thought that even Mr. Hardy's attentions could sometimes cause her pain. He was tender with her, when he thought about it. He ought to know he could call on her to bear the sadness with him, that he needn't try to spare her any of it. Perhaps he was worrying what the neighbors might be saying, that he had failed her, left her without a home of her own in her last years. She didn't want anybody to hold anything against him on her account.

She was watching Mr. Hardy through the open door but turned her head so as not to see the trouble he was having getting up off his knees. She had had the best years of his life, she told herself. He had grown old by her side. But he had never been young by it and that was the thing she couldn't bear to think about. She said: A man's second choice was made when he knew better what he wanted, when he knew from experience what to steer clear of, when he looked deeper than a pretty face. It was only with a ripeness of years, as everybody knew, that true love came.

But as he worked he handled more carefully the things that had been Virgie's, held them longer in his hands as though he hated to give them up. A guilty feeling would come over him and what was it worth if he was gentle with her then? Watching him ponder over a lamp that had been brought out for Virgie all the way from St. Louis, then break off suddenly to come in and pat her head and say a word, she felt she was getting only the crumbs that fell from the table. Such a rush of old feeling for Virgie had risen in him, he would have said a loving word to anybody that stood near.

Mr. Hardy's little niceties were the only way he knew how to behave. She couldn't remember ever having seen him lose his temper. But so with Virgie, too, he must have been sweet and good and kind. She didn't enjoy thinking he had got on exactly badly with his first wife. In her own sure ways she had made life easier for him, but it hurt her to think he had ever been really unhappy. She hoped he hadn't stayed a widower for three years only because his first marriage had been unfortunate.

Sitting alone a feeling came over her that her whole life had been an accident. What if Virgie hadn't died? But she did and Mr. Hardy chose her, after looking the field over for a long time.

Mr. Hardy crossed the silver on his plate and tilted his chair back, feeling he ought to say something. He saw in a corner the pile of things Clara meant to keep from the sale. They had only been over the bottom part of the house and already she could start a rag and bone shop with the stuff she had put aside. He could ransack the rest of it, a suspicion came over Mr. Hardy, and not find in this house a single thing that was really his and his alone. Clara had so many things and got such enjoyment from each of them. He found a sixpence, worn smooth, and a rusty penknife from Sheffield; they were his and they were about all.

Clara had to stop and reminisce over everything she came across and persuade herself to part with it. If the job was ever to get done they ought to separate for the rest of the day. But he could not trust her to put sensible prices on things. Already he had spent a good half-hour talking her, first into giving it up at all, then out of asking five dollars for an old table that was not worth fifteen cents and ought, in fact, to have been chopped into kindling long ago, but was the one, she maintained, on which she had fixed the first meal she ever made for him. Then, things that were in perfectly good shape, unless they had some memory for her, she was liable to let go for nothing.

He struck a bargain with her—she could sort the things in the children's rooms if she would leave the rest of the house to him. How nice it would have been, she sighed, to go around with him and recall old times together as they turned up things, but as he didn't want her, she agreed. She worked her way up the steps and when she got her breath back, found she could not get up for the load of memories the girls' room laid on her.

If there was such a thing as being sorry and glad about something at the same time, thought Mrs. Hardy, she felt that way about leaving the house. Really her life hadn't been lived at all the way it was meant to be. It was a mistake to spend your life doing the same things day after day and she never got over feeling she was meant for something better, exactly what, she couldn't say, but she felt she would have been a great one for change, for setting out on new things, traveling. You could change the furniture around every week but it still all had to be dusted.

The trouble was, when a change happened to her it never really made much difference. Even the auction sale and leaving the home she had known so long she could barely remember any other, no longer seemed such a great upheaval, in fact, seemed already done with, accustomed to. Now, instead of her own, she would have a steady succession of her children's houses to look after, their children to bring up, just the same old thing when you got right down to it. It must be wonderful to look ahead and find in the days coming up a choice of ways to spend them. There were only the same old ways of doing the same old things, so she always fell back on the past; what else was there to think about?

She liked to sit like this and figure up how many diapers she must have washed in her time, how many times she had scrubbed this floor, how many strokes she had taken on the churn, and as the numbers climbed beyond her reckoning, she would sit back and rock inside herself in contented amazement. She liked best of all to recall suddenly that she had borne Mr. Hardy ten children.

Pregnancy had taken her by surprise. Mr. Hardy had to tell her she was in the family way. Her ignorance touched him. He thought it becoming; the truth was, as near as she could guess, it had not occurred to her. She had raised so many children not hers, children who had never known their own mothers, beginning at home with her brother and sister, then two cousins and then Mr. Hardy's boys, maybe she had forgot that children could have mothers of their own, that living women might have children.

Taken by surprise, she hadn't enjoyed that first confinement much, Mrs. Hardy thought. She had been scared. There was no time to store up memories of it, not time even to think up a name for the child, only time to think that if it was a boy she couldn't name it Charles Junior and, despite all she could do, to get to disliking the little boy who already bore that name through no fault of his own. The sickness and the pain she remembered and, as though it was yesterday, the feeling that came over her when they laid the child, raw and red, in her arms and she remembered that this was not new to Mr. Hardy, that he had gone through it for the first time with someone else. The doctor smiled and said she would be all right. She thought of how the other woman had gone through all this twice for Mr. Hardy and trying once again, died at it for him.

She made up her mind to live for Mr. Hardy. Out of bed a week her joy in the child grew such that she determined to have another as soon as possible. For twenty years she was never happy unless she was with child or brought to bed of one.

She had her favorites but didn't show it. Mr. Hardy had none and that had always made her feel he didn't like any of them well enough. He made a little joke, that, to be frank, she never had found so funny, of telling the children she was never pleased with any of them and would keep on having more until she was. Her pains were severe. She loved them all and the more she had the more she loved Virgie's as well, but her own she never forgave the travail they cost her coming into the world. “Lord!” she could gasp at one of them still, unable still to understand how she had endured it, unable to understand how the boy could spend his time except in making it up to her every minute of the day, “the trouble I had with you!”

She remembered getting up from that first one dissatisfied. How could she have let so many things slide or just stay the way they were when she came to Mr. Hardy's house? They made the upstairs over into rooms for the children. Mr. Hardy let her have every whim. He was glad, he said, to be able to give hers all the things that Virgie's children never had.

Mrs. Hardy went through the chests and halfheartedly made a pile of ragdolls and teething rings, baby slippers, a moth-eaten hairbrush, a gold-plated diaper pin, and found herself working up a quarrel against her children. They were so selfish. Hers no more than anybody else's, they were just all. As long as they were at home they simply took for granted you had nothing else to think about except them; once they were grown you weren't supposed to have any reason for living left at all. The way they were surprised if you came out once in a while with something that showed you weren't thinking only of them at the moment, that old as you were you might still have a few worries of your own, absolutely surprised.