But there were moments, too, when Frank Parrott was the Lord, when Fanny watched, and Frank Parrott was thick and red, and Fanny was glad. Fanny watched Frank push away his plate, both to assert his authority and because he was finished. Frank Parrott went and stood against the fire. To roast his rump. He was thick and red. His thick, polished leather legs were stood apart and striped with fire. When he had cleared the phlegm, Frank would speak, but not before. Now he was choosing words, like a fat sheep out of a pen. Fanny watched, her breath just thicker than porridge. There is a time in life when there are pretty long stretches of contempt, broken by the bubbling moments of lust, which are also called love. So Fanny loved Frank. He was the father of her complacency.
‘There is no reason why we should put ourselves out for Theodora,’ said Frank. ‘Theo has never put herself out for us.’
‘No, Frank,’ said Fanny. ‘It is true.’
She was struck by the sudden loveliness of truth.
‘And Theo will be happier in some good solid boarding house,’ said Frank. ‘With a mob of similar old girls.’
‘Yes,’ said Fanny. ‘We can take a nice room for her.’
‘Somewhere where she can show her postcards after dinner to the other old girls.’
Warmed by fire, his great acreage could dispose of more than souls, the bodies of sisters-in-law.
‘There is no need,’ said Fanny, ‘to be unkind.’
But she smiled. Now she touched the envelope of Theodora’s distasteful letter with less care. Fanny loved letters, but the comfortable narrative of wives and mothers, or some harmless appeal by charity, which she would allow to stroke her vanity before tearing up. Not the dark, the mad letters of Theodora. Before Fanny could destroy these, they had torn her.
‘And Theo is not so old,’ she corrected. ‘She can’t be more than forty-five.’
‘Old enough to have learnt sense,’ said Frank.
‘Mother,’ said Lou, ‘why is Aunt Theo mad?’
Outside the window the world had not yet thawed. Lou waited for the aching shapes of winter to dissolve into a more familiar fence and tree. Cutting toast, her hands were still miserable from Brahms.
‘What a thing to ask!’ said Fanny. ‘As if … It is difficult to say. But it is none of your business.’
Lou would not ask more.
‘It is a manner of speaking,’ said her father.
‘No,’ said Fanny, raising her voice to the bright confident pitch that parents adopt for the presence of children. ‘Theodora is not so old.’
‘But stringy,’ said Frank. ‘The type that does not die.’
‘Oh, Frank!’ laughed Fanny.
Her labours to establish respect were wasted.
‘Poor Theo!’ she laughed. ‘How cruel!’
Then Fanny took a knife and slashed the butter. She owed this for something that continued to rankle, under her laughter, unexplained, for Abyssinia perhaps.
The sun was still a manageable ball above the ringing hills as Lou went outside. She walked through this stiff landscape, carrying her cold and awkward hands. She thought about the cardboard aunt, Aunt Theodora Goodman, who was both a kindness and a darkness. Lou touched the sundial, on which the time had remained frozen. She was afraid and sad, because there was some great intolerable pressure from which it is not possible to escape.
Lou looked back over her shoulder, and ran.
Sometimes against the full golden theme of corn and the whiter pizzicato of the telephone wires there was a counterpoint of houses. Theodora Goodman sat. The other side of the incessant train she could read the music off. There were the single notes of houses, that gathered into gravely structural phrases. There was a smooth passage of ponds and trees. There was a big bass barn. All the square faces of the wooden houses, as they came, overflowed with solemnity, that was a solemnity of living, a passage of days. Where children played with tins, or a girl waited at a window, or calves lolloped in long grass, it was a frill of flutes twisted round a higher theme, to grace, but only grace, the solemnity of living and of days. There were now the two coiled themes. There was the flowing corn song, and the deliberate accompaniment of houses, which did not impede, however structural, because it was part of the same integrity of purpose and of being.
Now that the man in the laundered shirt slept, Theodora Goodman could search her own purpose, her own contentment. I am going home, she said. It had a lovely abstraction to which she tried to fit the act. She tried the door of a house and went in. There were the stairs, and the cotton quilt on which she threw her jaded hat. She waited for the familiar sounds of furniture. She looked for her own reflection, in mirrors, but more especially in the faces of the people who lived in this house.
The train rocked the track. The man in the laundered shirt stirred. He was having trouble with his groin.
Then, in a gust, Theodora knew that her abstraction also did not fit. She did not fit the houses. Although she had in her practical handbag her destination in writing, she was not sure that paper might not tear. Although she was insured against several acts of violence, there was ultimately no safeguard against the violence of personality. This was less controllable than fire. In the bland corn song, in the theme of days, Theodora Goodman was a discord. Those mouths which attempted her black note rejected it wryly. They glossed over something that had strayed out of some other piece, or slow fire.
The train rocked the track.
Lying on her shelf at night, listening to the dying wind of many sleepers, Theodora was afraid that this movement might end in an intolerable clash of cymbals. So she compelled her stockings. So she unfolded herself from the narrow shelf. Her hat, with its large black gauze rose, more a sop to convention than an attempt at beauty, was easy to manage. It knew her head. She was soon ready.
There were bells in the night, wheels, and a long gush of steam.
Theodora trod down, out of the high, stationary train, on to the little siding.
A Negro with white eyes suggested that this was not the sort of thing that people did.
‘No,’ said Theodora. ‘But you will not tell.’
The Negro had a kind face. And he was sleepy.
And presently the train had gone, with all its magnificence of purpose, towards California. She heard in the distance its meek, flannel cough absorbing darkness.
There were several small streets of a small town, in which Theodora walked. The town lay wide open, between darkness and light. Soon the colour would drench back. But for the moment Theodora and the sleeping town were pale. Sitting on a step, her head against a tree, she waited for shapes to gather, or sleep. The drifting silence, and the broken sounds of sleep, and the watery colourlessness of early morning were all one.
Finally bark began to bite. She lifted her cheek from where it had been grained by the friendly tree. Sunflowers had appeared over a fence, though their big suns had not yet begun to flame. They were still bemused by dew. The town was pink, mostly, of baked mud, an earth pink. A bronze cock on a wall shook his feathers into shape. There were the frame houses too. The old sagging house, for instance, on the step of which Theodora sat. This house was still comfortable with sleep. But the bronze cock flaunted his metal throat and crowed. Somewhere a voice tore itself from a sheet. A thin, dark, perhaps an Indian woman, or a Mexican, lifted her head and looked, rising out of deep darkness Theodora saw. Theodora looked away, thinking that she recognized her own soul in the woman’s deep face.
The bronze cock was screaming. Voices came from kitchens, prominent voices, because they were still feeling their way, and cold, because every morning is the first.