The Grandmothers/Chapter 13

ΤWO locks of red hair falling upon her forehead like red shadows, Alwyn's aunt Flora, when she sang, bent her head timidly or looked straight up toward the ceiling as if it were a sky—and a sky full of beings which other people could not see. The sound of her voice rose and fell, often strained by emotions for which her thin throat was too slender a channel, often failing altogether when its sweetness made her sad.

Alwyn thought that she was beautiful like an idol, vaguely thinking of the bright-colored statues in Catholic churches as idols: her good-natured, dismayed face; her hair like rusted iron in a burdensome crown, broken into large curls at the nape of her neck; her hands blue-white, with perfectly twisted veins. To amuse him when he was a child, she drew sails upon little round lakes, rigid fountains, butterflies, and nose-gays of forget-me-nots, coloring them from a water-color box. When an adolescent, he always stood as near her as he dared, charmed by the perfume of attar-of-roses which drifted from her dress, the odor of orris root in her hair, and the atmosphere, like a delicate scent itself, of the life of a girl nearly thirty years old, gradually losing the freshness of girlhood without growing old, almost without growing older.

He knew that his company gave her pleasure as well; even with her brothers, his uncles, she was less at ease. Perhaps his love was the only love she had received which did not threaten to make itself felt with startling energy, threaten to possess and coerce her—and then fail to do so. They were of the same blood, which meant, she thought, that they shared moral principles and a religious faith; he was a mere child and her nephew. So their relationship afforded her a holiday from having to choose between one man and another, from the alarms and embarrassments of being an unmarried woman.

For two men had troubled five years of her life, less with emotions than with what she called "problems." The first had been Richard Wallace, the son of a wealthy farmer, a grown-up adolescent, wise in the policies and graces of his age; not clever, but with pride to take the place of vivacity. He had bright gray eyes, and drove the most violent and shining horses in the country. He had tired of many girls who loved him. Olive Templeton, a girl named Valentine, and Flora's cousin Edith, if they happened to be where he was, followed him with angry, intimate glances without ever speaking. Their grievances were only those of wounded vanity, for he had never profited by their self-abandonment. He had had a rendezvous almost every night for a number of years, and waited impatiently for nightfall as if it were a ceremony and a feast; but by day he had the look of a victim of his own love-making and his self-control.

Flora was pleased when her turn came to be the object of his fickle attentions. Her life as a woman would begin with an encouraging conquest, for, with perfect confidence in herself, she intended to be the first to enjoy his wooing and resist his charm. Dreaming vaguely of more serious love, she became his favorite, half conscious of her bravado and her disdain. of him and of what he was doing; the disdain was ignorant as well as innocent.

She soon lost her ignorance; a great many serious new sensations made her humble. Each fought, against the other's magic, to keep his will power and above all his will to be good, intact; and a closer companionship developed in their common fear of companionship's magic. In solitude, in a buggy, behind excited mares which jerked the reins, there was his shoulder against her shoulder; his arm stealing behind her and patiently put away; the scent of his wiry hair and his tobacco; the hard pressure of his knees under the lap robe. Picnics and parties were only a truce; and after, once more, his breath on her cheek in the starlight.

His love whispering was meaningless but terribly comprehensible: never all of a sentence, often not all of a word. . . . He did not ask for privileges or favors, as if he neither wanted her to know his intentions nor wanted to know them himself; but continued to reach out his hand obstinately, dreamily: desire fast asleep, in a sleep of self-control. He rarely spoke of marriage. Flora could not believe that he loved her. Because of her vigilance to protect herself from seduction, she could not study her heart to learn whether or not she loved him.

She was frightened by the temptation of love, though she wanted to regard it as superficial. It never touched her so poignantly as in the Presbyterian church in Aaronsville where on Sunday mornings she sang of the Shepherd and his wild flock, of mansions with pillars, of being reborn, of death without a sting. She kept morality constantly in mind, as one carries an amulet; she came to love the amulet for itself, imagining dangers where there were none, in order to hold it in the palm of her hand. She prayed that Richard be preserved from evil and she herself from his charm. Kneeling by her bed, the linen and the indoor night spread out before her half-closed eyes, she realized without warning that her lips were parched and pressed on the air as if in a kiss, that Richard's kiss probably would not satisfy that yearning; and she wept. But she could not quite make up her mind to refuse him, if he should ask her to be his wife.

The neighbors watched them with a curiosity scarcely kind, scarcely Christian; her mother and sister-in-law observed that she had lost weight; no one discovered her trouble. When she happened to think of her original intention—to punish him for his frivolity and pride—she was contented for a few days. But the thought of Olive Templeton and the Valentine girl and Edith began to be intolerable; she feared to lose him as they had lost him, and determined never to surrender, less and less in order to triumph over him, but so that he would never tire of her. She clung to his love as those who are not unwilling to die cling to life because it gives them an occupation in the meantime. She laughed as well as cried, but her laughter began to have a frightened sound. Her only confidante was her sister-in-law Marianne, in whose romance there had been obstacles and misunderstandings, but never any ignorance of her own wishes or so it seemed by that time. The two episodes had a certain similarity, at least in so far as all relations between young men and virgin girls, with the monotony of naturalness, are alike; and Marianne told her story because the emotions in it were unmistakable, and the end encouraging. The two women, equally anxious to be perfect, also resembled each other up to a certain point. But Marianne had chosen her own ideals; they were at one with her wishes; and her renunciation had concerned only things which she would not have wanted in any case.

Flora's desires, on the other hand, were so shadowy that she could not tell what was contrary to them, what to sacrifice to them. Able to be faultless in any way already determined by another's imagination, by such an imagination as her sister-in-law's, it was individual responsibility which weighed upon her. But Marianne, for reasons of conscience, was unwilling to relieve her of any part of that burden.

She tried instead to strengthen every germ of decision which seemed to begin to form in Flora's mind, praising Ralph, the girl's favorite brother, as her principal comment on Richard. "It is hard for a boy of Richard's disposition to be good," she would say. "Are you sure that he is a Christian ?"

As far as she could see, there was little true love amid their emotions, their tumult of innumerable hesitations; but she would advise nothing but prayer, which brought Flora no nearer a solution—in fact, carried her thought, as if on the waves of a deep, invisible river, away from the problem itself. And afterward it had to be met with again; her bewilderment merely increased by having asked God to show her the way; so that the last time there was question of marriage, like the first, she was unprepared to give an answer.

That evening she and Richard were sitting on the lawn on a great rock shaped like the Ark of the Covenant. The moon shining in their faces as if it were a spotlight; night birds and sleepless birds in a radiance so bright that those whose eyes were made for the darkness could not hunt; and a splash of moonlight running down Richard's cheek, the tired cheek of a young man who has seemed to have been young for a long time. . . . "This can't go on," he whispered.

The moment had come: a promise or good-by.

"Will you marry me?" he asked, as if he were asking, not for delight—merely for relief from pain. Flora felt that someone was watching them: not God perhaps, but a great Spirit less a stranger to the earth, which enjoyed her confusion—the moon was its hard eye. Through a thousand lilac leaves, the lamps of the house signaling to her: a vague audience of those who loved her, before whom she had to do the right thing. Through the maple leaves overhead, the stars, like lamps of another house.

"I think not, Richard," she said, wishing for a word as definite as yes or no, but meaning neither. She bent forward and clasped her hands.

She had not known.

"You know I love you," he said.

"Tell me why you won't." Her body drooped still more loosely on the great stone, but she threw back her head in order to see him, tall and silvered over by the rays of moonlight. What could she answer? That his morals did not satisfy her? That he would not make a good husband? She did not understand these things; she did not care; others cared—all their eyes were upon her from the windows full of lamps, from the sky full of stars; she would have to do as they thought best. Furthermore, she felt as if she had made other engagements long ago, when she was a little child, perhaps, and had forgotten for the moment what they were.

She did not know what she whispered in reply to Richard. "I can't hear you," he said. "I don't understand." He shivered in the light that was like. that of day, clear and embarrassing. The moment had passed—promise or good-by; it was good-by. Where were they? In the corner of the lawn of her own home; she wished they were far away, so he would have to go with her a certain distance (even the distance of the rest of her life, without yes or no) in which at last the moon's blinding, bright eye which confused her might close—for perhaps it was to blame. But the distance of the rest of a lifetime, like that from the corner of the lawn to the house door, seemed short; it was not worth while asking anyone to accompany her that far—she could go alone.

"Good-by, then," he said. A man moving over the damp lawn, moving quickly, so that the time she would have to call him back would be short, too short. . . . His feet, mechanically steady, made a sound of mowing down the well-illuminated grass.

Flora went first to the north wing where her brother and sister-in-law lived, and wept in Marianne's arms. "Be strong. I believe it is for the best," Marianne said.

She dried her eyes, and opened the door of her mother's part of the house. Her mother, who through the thin walls had heard her crying, was waiting in the center of the room under the hanging lamp. "What's happened?" She opened her large arms like those of a man. "Don't you cry," she said. "The one you want isn't always the best husband." She was ready to tell her own story.

"But I don't want him, mother," Flora whispered, moving toward her bedroom door.

A look of dismay on her broad, benevolent face, her mother stared after her, loving her more because she seemed too young to understand, trying to decide which member of the family she took after, and failing to do so. For in fact Flora resembled them all, beginning with her father (his fastidious, idealistic melancholy), and her mother (her lack of cunning, her willingness to wait and give in); preventing herself from doing things, just as they had prevented one another.

Sleepless, pacing barefoot on the rug of her room, night after night Flora watched the moon shrink. She began to believe that the unkind Spirit (not God, perhaps, but arrayed in moonbeams) had won—she had been fooled. Afraid to pray for the reverse of her other prayers, she closed her eyes and murmured softly, "Richard, come back, ask again," thinking she knew her answer now.

But nature took its course toward midsummer; he did come back. He was seen with a girl named Anne MacNeill, the pride of a poor Irish family. Everyone praised Flora's wisdom in having no more to do with him; but when she was alone she wrung her hands until the blood went out of them. Olive Templeton, Mary Valentine, her disappointed cousin. . . . She had not lost him as they had—she had found a way of her own; and she envied them the comfort of having been badly used.

She wandered down the lane with her apron full of green apples for the colt named Oboe. Over the meadow his cry of love and hunger as he trotted toward the gate. . . . A cloud of pleasure in his damp eyes, he took the apples one by one between his teeth, and broke them with a faint, crisp sound, their juice dripping from his mouth. Flora feared and adored him; and as she stared at his tough body, she saw in its place another creature, dark and dappled by the moon. Clinging to the gate, "Richard," she whispered, "I love you. Listen to me. I'll never love anybody else. I'm so lonely." It was like making love to a little dappled angel. Could she have said these things, she wondered, if she had been in Richard's all too human presence? The two apples which were left slipped out of her hand. Oboe rolled one out of the grass with his lips, and with his hoof, which looked like a gray porcelain cup, pawed the sod under the gate for the other, which had fallen out of reach.

Before autumn came, the family worried about her health and complained of her mournful retirement; so she accompanied her brother and Marianne to a large house-warming. She was ashamed of not having a sweetheart, and regretted the fact that she was young. From the corners of the new house came furtive glances of young couples holding hands, embarrassed by the presence of their mothers and the brightness of large oil lamps. Women with aprons over their best dresses bustled around tables of famous jellies and chicken pies, beaming at her supposedly broken but supposedly healed heart. Flora felt that her youth was mutilated, but men and women gazed at it mildly without seeing one scar.

A stranger was introduced: Herbert Ruhl, the new doctor, a brown, wiry man in his thirties. Someone played a blistered piano in which two or three bad strings tingled. Dr. Ruhl asked Flora to dance, but the girls of the Presbyterian church did not waltz. His eyes, under weatherbeaten eyelids, hardened when he looked at her. Someone whispered, "He's a Catholic." Then he asked if he might take her home; but she was drawn into a Virginia reel before she could say yes or no, which pleased her.

Marianne said, "Dr. Ruhl asked to take you home, didn't he? Then cousin Edith can come home with us—she is alone." Flora realized that a girl ought not to be alone; she would have to keep her fidelity to Richard a secret. She thanked the doctor.

From the beginning he seemed to have serious intentions. Flora found that she thought of him continually; but he was not young or handsome, so she felt safe from love. He became the family doctor, and they grew fond of him.

Only Flora's old father said, "I shan't be doctored by any man who takes orders from a priest." He seemed to divine the reason for Herbert Ruhl's frequent presence in the house, of which no one ever spoke to him; and three days before his death, when Flora was sitting beside him, holding one of his hands, smaller than her own, he said, "Don't ever marry a Catholic."

Marianne hoped, in the beginning, that contact with a good Protestant family would change the doctor's faith.

He would stop at the farm when he made his round. of calls in the country, ask her to drive with him, and bring her home before dusk on his way back to Aaronsville. On these occasions he offered his love with patient candor. Meaning to marry her, he did not oblige her to give him an answer, but in spite of her requests asked again and again.

Flora would wait while he visited his patients, calling to mind pathetically the face of her other lover; but the day came when she realized that she did so by an effort of her will. She tried to want her hopelessness back, and envied Richard's other sweethearts their disconsolate ways of living. Her relation to him lost its romantic dignity—she had been so proud of her broken heart. But finally his troubled, light-gray eyes haunted her no more, and the years over which he had ruled so lightly, so uncertainly, shrank in her memory to a few unsatisfying moments.

Then, under Herbert's different appearance, she discovered a force which she had thought peculiar to Richard. The same breath on her cheek, the same fear of constrained movements in the dark, behind other less fiery horses; the misunderstandings, the paroxysms of timidity, the agreeable weakness, the slight nausea of disappointments. . . . But because Herbert was a man, not a boy, the pressure of his wooing had a definite and different purpose. He wanted to be repulsed, as if to test her fidelity as a wife, and was enjoying in advance a lifetime of peace. His confidence in her increased; she shrank from the liberties he took, by which it was revealed, but her resistance grew automatic; after years of having been loved, her senses could not have been taken by surprise.

She was profoundly tired. Her girlhood was lasting too long. She envied married women and old maids. She came into possession of the sort of knowledge one would like to be without. The key to her heart was so simple—the world might forge many; she averted her eyes from the young men she knew, lest they discover her weakness. The world itself was simple, and when she thought of her confusion in the face of it, she was ashamed and wanted another mind and another soul.

Herbert's hard glance opened her heart as if it were a key—more exactly, it turned in the lock as if made for it; but the lock seemed to have been set in a wall in which no doorway had been cut. There was a part of herself which would always be closed, until the very wall of life was destroyed. The faith of her family was a part of this wall.

Herbert was a devout Catholic. The time came when they talked of religion as it might concern their future lives; these discussions were in effect proposals of marriage, rejected proposals. If he had presented his religion theoretically, she might have ceased for a moment, in the pleasure of being able to understand, to be aware of her family's disapproval and her own lack of conviction. It was its human poetry which frightened her, each word with a vague, dangerous, earthly meaning-pope, purgatory, confession, absolution. . . . A sort of Italian king; veiled nuns (unveiled by a newspaper called The Menace to which her father subscribed); a pit full of souls covered with human transgressions, having lived on earth too long; whispering, whispering guilt through the barred windows of the confessional; all evil forgiven—and she did not even want to know what evil was.

The Church was so perfect in Herbert's eyes that she could not think of asking him to leave it. He talked of his boyhood by the hour: a priest who could forgive, without tolerating, any young sin; the same old man transfigured by embroideries and linen; his name carved on a wooden bench where he had knelt; the small bells of the parochial school. Flora realized that these were his dreams for their children, unable to imagine herself having children; and feared that if she began to yield, she might lose sight of herself and her obscure destiny, whatever it actually was, in the pleasure of yielding.

Then her brother John Craig came again, and she happened to hear him say to Marianne, "If Flora likes this young man, I don't see why religion should keep her from marrying him. She ought to be a Catholic, anyway. She is as pure as the snow, and hates having to decide things for herself. If she had to live with her other sister-in-law—I mean my wife, and I'm glad she doesn't—there'd be another story to tell. Indeed, I shouldn't be surprised if Susanne would make a nun out of her. She has the proper spirit for it."

"John," Marianne replied, "you are wicked to make fun of us all."

But after his departure, she was more severe about the unsuitability of the marriage, and seemed frightened. The community also had much that was well meant and a little that was malicious to say about a Tower turning Catholic.

Flora saw her love, what there was of it, sink into a quicksand of impossibility. If it had been greater, she might have been comforted by a sense of her sacrifice, though so little deliberate. As it was, she merely let herself be forced by the convictions of others into being afraid that it would escape from the quicksand. It did not.

One day at dusk she and Herbert were sitting on a stone wall among strands of bitter-sweet, between trees thinly covered with brown foliage and dark brown fields. He said again, "Will you marry me?"

She felt her braids, like the silky hand of a spirit, slipping down the nape of her neck. She answered, "Dear, I believe that I love you. But I cannot marry a Catholic. We would not be happy."

He whispered, "You will love me more."

Flora understood bitterly that this was not an end, not a promise, not good-by—because Herbert was a strong man who could wait as long as she lived. She sighed, one sigh as small in proportion to her whole weariness as one prolonged breath to the breaths of a lifetime.

A sunset like a great, sumptuous couch. Flora imagined that she lay in it, safe from human intrusion as if it were a deathbed, and remembered her monotonous life, moment by moment—the moments of the past mingling with those of that very twilight, and resembling all those there would be in the future. She stared idly at the lights dying upon cloud after cloud, upon empty ether. Life no less could be transfigured but not transformed; life no less was a sky full of colors, whose future was to fade.

She continued to sing bravely throughout the last years of her life. Alwyn listened, and envied all those who had taken part in her secret experience, not caring (because he was an adolescent boy) how much of it was misery, how much love, and how much the homesickness of a spirit which had not felt at home anywhere. He thought of a scarlet tanager he had seen fluttering in the fringe of a shower; for her voice was also a warning so sweet that one could not give heed. A bird's voice in a sugar-maple bough—both voice and transparent bough darkening slowly, and seeming most distinct in the moment before they cease altogether to be heard and seen.

In her twenty-ninth year she fell ill. When Herbert first entered her room with his doctor's leather case, she cried: "I am not going to get well. I knew it all the time, I knew it. That was why I couldn't decide.”

Thereafter she wept whenever he came, so pitifully at last that another doctor had to take his place. There was a week of hope, a week of losing it. Finally at midnight, in a shower which blew down with a mournful abundance on the garden, the tree tops, the mossy shingles of the house—in which for hour after hour no one exhaled a normal breath, and all their mouths were pressed into their hands, and tears ran down over their knuckles—the second doctor learned that he could not save her life.

Flora's mother left the room. They could hear her heavy tread up and down the porch. When she came in she stumbled over the threshold, and it was clear to everyone that she would never be strong again, that she would not thereafter be of much importance in life, and that, for her, life would have no importance at all.

Sunrise. Flora's face, tired and still confused, lay on the pillow between the two great ropes of red hair. The body of the sunlight floated through the window and lit on the flowered wool rug. Then she opened her eyes, and seemed to know that the light which stood like a curly-headed angel beside her bed was perfectly good, and it believed what she believed (though she may not have remembered clearly what that was), and it had come for her. She lifted her hands and placed them in one large, gilt hand of the sunshine.