Katherine hopped out and waited, clutching her handbag, as the men unloaded the cages and carried them around to the chicken pen in the side yard. Mr. Loveland remained with the chicks, opening the cages and dumping their contents into the pen. Bert got their suitcases again and she followed him into the silent house.
To her dismay, she saw two cots set up on the porch and an old chiffonier, clearly intended for them.
“Are we living out here?” she whispered.
Bert looked down at the cots. “Oh,” he said. “I guess so. Well, it’s hot, ain’t it? We’ll be all right.” He dropped the suitcases and pushed through the door into the house. She followed him, wondering where she was going to put her things when they arrived.
“Ma!”
The kitchen was small and dark, and the woman kneading biscuit dough at the table filled it effectively. She looked up at them. She had Bert’s strong jaw. She did not smile as she said: “Oh.”
“Hey!” Bert edged forward and embraced her.
“You’ll get your good clothes floured,” Mrs. Loveland told him, looking over his shoulder at Katherine. “You’re Kathy, I guess.”
“Yes, Mother Loveland, Katherine,” she said, smiling and nodding. “I’m awfully glad to meet you—though I guess we’re a little early. I hope that’s not an inconvenience.”
“Katherine, huh?” Mrs. Loveland looked coldly amused. “Now, that’s funny. Bert told me you were born in Chapel Hill, but you sure don’t talk like it.”
“Well, I was,” Katherine stammered, “but I grew up in New York, you know. I studied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, did Bert tell you?”
“No,” said Mrs. Loveland.
She was miserably homesick, through the weeks of Indian summer. Without his football sweater Bert no longer looked much like Nelson Eddy; and he’d changed, as a son will change in his mother’s house. The other illusion, about coming home to the South and having a big, loving family instead of living in boarding houses with Mother and Anne—that was fading too.
She saw clearly enough that she’d better make Mrs. Loveland like her, but her attempts to help out were dismissed—she didn’t know how to cook. She and Mother and Anne had eaten in restaurants, or heated Campbell’s soup over Sterno cans in their rooms. She took on the task of feeding the chicks, but her decision to make a pet of the crippled black one earned her contempt even from Bert. She persisted; made it a separate pen, gave it special care, named it. It lived and grew, to Mrs. Loveland’s disgust.
Her things came, in far too many crates, and Bert and Mr. Loveland grumbled as they stacked them in the barn. With them came the letter from Mother, and she cried as she read it. She could hear the stern, quiet voice so clearly, she could see Mother looking up at her over her steel spectacles, as term papers waited for grading.
Beloved daughter,
I hope this finds you well and settling in. It may be difficult at first, as the life is not one to which you are accustomed. “I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty.” Please believe, however, that I wish you happiness with all my heart.
I have sent all your books, and some of the things from the Goldsborough house that you loved, as well as the rest of your trousseau. If there is anything else you require, I will send it along at the first opportunity as soon as you let me know what you lack.
Your sister and I continue well. Anne is now understudy for the ingenue as well as in the chorus. I had occasion to meet Kurt Weill, the composer, who was dining at the table next to mine. His music is considered quite avant-garde but I found him to be a very nice little man, quite shy. What I have heard of his work so far impresses me mightily.
I must go now, but send sincerest wishes for your continuing joy, and the earnest hope that you will find with Bert the domestic happiness for which I know you have always longed. It is not given to all of us, but may it be given to you.
So she couldn’t write to Mother about how miserable she was, not without seeming like a worthless failure. Mother would send another gloomy letter that talked around the shame and scandal of The Divorce while never actually bringing it up. She had never discussed it, never once in all the years Katherine and her little sister had been growing up, rattling around in the back of the Ford as Mother drove from teaching job to teaching job.
All that Katherine knew about The Divorce, she had learned from the servants, when they stayed at Grandfather’s house in those intervals in which Mother was broke. Philanderer… Miss Kate had her pride, she wouldn’t stand for it… threw him out… never gave him a second chance, never spoke of him again…
And once a neighbor’s little girl had asked Katherine if it was true her mamma and daddy had had a Divorce, and she’d run home crying to ask Mother, who was taking tea with Grandmother. Mother’s face had seemed to turn to stone; she stood and towered over Katherine, and she had looked like the statue of the Goddess Athena on the library steps. She’d swept out of the room without a word. Grandmother had set down her teacup and held out her arms, but all she’d told Katherine in the end was: Some things are best not spoken of, child.
In the present, Katherine endured. Most of her clothing was inappropriate for daily life on a farm. Under Mrs. Loveland’s blank stare she was stupidly inept, burnt clothes while ironing them, broke dishes while washing them.
The warm weather ended and it rained, and in the leaking barn her books got soaked. She carried them into the house frantically, armloads spread and opened before the stove to dry, weeping as she peeled back wet pages from the color plates: A Child’s Garden of Verses with its Maxfield Parrish illustrations, Kay Nielsen’s East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Myths and Enchantment Tales, the Volland Mother Goose, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. When Mrs. Loveland saw them her jaw dropped. “You still look at picture books?” she said.
The winter was mild, so she and Bert continued to sleep on the enclosed porch.
One night she dreamed that she was back at college, that Mother had left her at the entrance to the dormitory and she’d gone in to find that the building was dark, deserted. Everyone had gone home for Christmas. She turned in panic and hurried outside again, and to her horror saw Mother driving away.
She ran after the car, after its red winking taillights. She chased it for miles. There was brilliant moonlight, blue-white, so bright it hurt her eyes. She lost the car at last and stood there alone, sobbing, and then a strange little girl came to her and told her everything would be all right.
Then she woke, and found herself alone on a country road in her thin nightgown, in the terrifying silence of the night. Had she been sleepwalking? She was more than half a mile from the house. Teeth chattering, she hobbled back, and Bert did not wake when she crawled back into bed.
She was unable to get warm again, and lay awake for hours. She hadn’t walked in her sleep since the winter she’d been twelve, in New York, when the letter came informing Mother that Daddy had died of pneumonia. He’d been living in a hotel only the other side of Central Park, all that time; she might have stolen away and visited him, if she’d only known.
And in her dreams, for months afterward, she kept trying to cross the skating pond to reach him. She could see Daddy so clearly, standing under a lamp on the other side, but she knew he didn’t know she was there, and she knew if she didn’t run to him he’d never know. She never managed to cross the ice, somehow; and once she started awake on the sidewalk, with Fifth Avenue roaring before her like a river and a horrified doorman clutching her arm to stop her plunging into the traffic.