Her unsteady touch on his wrist bobs like the swaying tops of the tall hemlocks. He associates these trees with forbidden estates; it gives him pleasure to be within their protection. "Ali. Now here is a plant." They stop at a corner and she lifts her dangling cane toward a small rhododendron clothed in a pink of penetrating purity. "Horace's Bianchi," Mrs. Smith says. "The only rhody except some of the whites, I forget their names, silly names anyway, that says what it means. It's the only true pink there is. When Horace first got it, he set it among the other so—called pinks and it showed them up as just so muddy he tore them right out and backed the Bianchi with all crimsons. The crimsons are by, aren't they? Is today June?" Her wild eyes fix him crazily and her grip tightens.
"Not quite. Memorial Day's next Saturday."
"Oh, I remember so well the day we got that silly plant. Hot! We drove to New York City to take it off the boat and put it in the back seat of the Packard like a favorite aunt or some such thing. It came in a big blue wooden tub of earth. There was only one nursery in England that carried the stock and it cost two hundred dollars to ship. A man came down to the hold to water it every day. Hot, and all that vile traffic through Jersey City and Trenton and this scrawny bush sitting in its blue tub in the back seat like a prince of the realm! There weren't any of these turnpikes then so it was a good six—hour trip to New York. The middle of the Depression and it looked like everybody in the world owned an automobile. You came over the Delaware at Burlington. This was before the war. I don't suppose when I say `the war' you know which one I mean. You probably think of that Korean thing as the war."
"No, I think of the war as World War Two."
"So do I! So do I! Do you really remember it?"
"Sure. I mean I was pretty old. I flattened tin cans and bought War Stamps and we got awards at grade school."
"Our son was killed."
"Gee. I'm sorry."
"Oh he was old, he was old. He was almost forty. They made him an officer right off."
"Still -"
"I know. You think of only young men being killed."
"Yeah, you do."
"It was a good war. It wasn't like the first. It was ours to win, and we won it. All wars are hateful things, but that one was satisfying to win." She gestures with her cane again at the pink plant. "The day we came over from the boat docks it of course wasn't in flower that late in the summer so it looked just like foolishness to me, to have it riding in the back seat like a" —she realizes she is repeating herself, falters, but goes on – "like a prince of the realm." In her almost transparent blue eyes there is pinned this little sharpness watching his face to see if he smiles at her addlement. Seeing nothing, she snaps roughly, "It's the only one."
"The only Bianchi?"
"Yes! Right! There's not another in the United States. There's not another good pink from the Golden Gate to – wherever. The Brooklyn Bridge, I suppose they say. All the truly good pink in the nation is right here under our eyes. A florist from Lancaster took some cuttings but they died. Probably smothered them in lime. Stupid man. A Greek."
She claws at his arm and moves on more heavily and rapidly. The sun is high and she probably feels a need for the house. Bees swim in the foliage; hidden birds scold. The tide of leaf has overtaken the tide ofblossom, and a furtively bitter odor breathes from the fresh walls of green. Maples, poplars, oaks, elms, and horsechestnut trees compose a thin forest that runs, at a varying depth, along the far property—line. In the damp shaded fringe between the lawn and this copse, the rhododendrons are still putting forth, but the unsheltered clumps in the center of the lawn have already dropped petals, in pale neat lines, along the edge of the grass paths. "1° don't like it, I don't like it," Mrs. Smith says, hobbling with Rabbit down past the overblown blooms. "I appreciate the beauty but I'd rather see alfalfa. A woman – I don't know why it should vex me so – Horace used to encourage the neighbors to come in and see the place in blooming time, he was like a child in many ways. This woman, Mrs. Foster, from down the hill in a little brick shack with a metal cat climbing up the shutters, used to invariably say, turn to me with lipstick halfway up to her nose and say" – she mimics a too—sweet voice with a spirited spite that shakes her frame – " `My, Mrs. Smith, this must be what Heaven is like!' One year I said to her, I couldn't hold my tongue any longer, I said, `Well if I'm driving six miles back and forth to St. John's Episcopal Church every Sunday just to get into another splash of rhodies, I might as well save the mileage because I don't want to go.' Now wasn't that a dreadful thing for an old sinner to say?"
"Oh, I don't know -"
"To this poor woman who was only trying to be civil? Hadn't a bean of a brain in her head, of course; painting her face like a young fool. She's passed on now, poor soul; Alma Foster passed on two or three winters back. Now she knows the truth and I don't."
"Well, maybe what looks like rhododendrons to her will look like alfalfa to you."
"Heh! Eh—HA! Exactly! Exactly! You know, Mr. Angstrom, it's such a pleasure =" She stops them in the walk and caresses his forearm awkwardly; in the sunshine the tiny tan landscape of her face tips up toward his, and in her gaze, beneath the fumbling girlish flirtatiousness and the watery wander, there glitters an old acuteness, so that Rabbit uneasily standing there feels a stab of the penetrating force that drove Mr. Smith out to the brainless flowers. "You and I, we think alike. Don't we? Now don't we?"
"You have it pretty good, don't you?" Ruth asks him. They have gone on the afternoon of this Memorial Day to the public swimming pool in West Brewer. She was self—conscious about getting into a bathing suit but in fact when she came out of the bath—house she looked great, her head made small by the bathing cap and her shoulders round and wide. Standing in the water she was cut off at the thighs like a broken statue. She swam easily, her big legs kicking slowly and her clean arms lifting and her back and bottom shimmering black under the jiggled green. Once she stopped and floated, putting her face down in the water in a motion that quickened his heart with its slight danger. Her bottom of its own buoyance floated up and broke the surface, a round black island glistening there, a clear image suddenly in the water wavering like a blooey television set: the solid sight swelled his heart with pride, made him harden all over with a chill clench of ownership. His, she was his, he knew her as well as the water, like the water has been everywhere on her body. When she did the backstroke the water bubbled and broke and poured down her front into her breastcups, flooding her breasts with touch; the arch of her submerged body tightened; she closed her eyes and moved blindly. Two skinny boys dabbling at the shallow end of the pool splashed away from her headfirst approach. She brushed one with a backsweep of her arm, awoke, and squatted smiling in the water; her arms waved bonelessly to keep her balance in the nervous tides of the crowded pool. The air sparkled with the scent of chlorine. Clean, clean: it came to him what clean was. It was nothing touching you that is not your element. Ruth in water, him in grass and air. He is not a water animal. Wet is cold to him. Having dunked, he prefers to sit on the tile edge dipping his feet and imagining that high—school girls behind him are admiring the muscle—play of his broad back; he revolves his shoulders and feels the blades stretch his skin in the sun. Ruth wades to the end, through water so shallow the checked pattern of the pool floor is refracted to its surface. She climbs the little ladder, shedding water in great palegreen grape—bunches. He scrambles back to their blanket and lies down so that when she comes over he sees her standing above him straddling the sky, the black hair high on the insides of her thighs pasted into swirls by the water. She tears off her cap and shakes out her hair and bends over for the towel. Water on her back drips over her shoulders. As he watches her rub her arms the smell of grass rises through the blanket and shouts shake the crystalline air. She lies down beside him and closes her eyes and submits to the sun. Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. "You have it pretty good."