He was a loving child, a very fine child. That afternoon she dropped housework and took him down the hill to the park, the rose garden full of the last roses, lemon-yellow, peach-yellow, gold, bronze, crimson, following him as he trotted and shouted along the paths between the thorny, fragrant bushes in the autumn sun.
Edward Meyer sat in his parked car looking across the lights of Berkeley and across the black, diamond-shackled bay to the Golden Gate, faint fragile center of the great sweep of lights and darknesses. Eucalyptus rustled over the car in a dry wind from the north, the winter wind. He stretched. “Damn,” he said.
“Why?” said the woman beside him.
“What’s in it for you?”
“All I want.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, and took her hands. When they touched they both quieted. Her grace was silence. He drank stillness from her as water from a spring. The dark dry wind of January blew, city after city flared below them round the bridge-strung bay.
He lit a cigarette; Elinor murmured, “Not fair.” She had recently given up smoking for the fifth or sixth time. She was a woman not very sure of things, biddable and quiet, taking what came. Edward handed her the lighted cigarette. She took it with a small sigh and smoked it.
“This is the right idea,” he said.
“For now.”
“But why stop halfway?”
“We’re not stopping. Only waiting.”
“Waiting for what? Till my psyche’s patched up, or you’re sure I’m not on the rebound, or something. Meanwhile we make love in my car because you’ve got a roommate and I’ve got a mother-in-law and we don’t go to motels because we’re supposed to be waiting—only we don’t. The whole thing’s illogical.”
At this she suddenly gave a hard, dry sob. His nervous anger turned to alarm, but she drew away from him, refusing comfort. She had never refused him anything before. He tried to apologise, to explain. She said, “Please take me home,” and all down the steep streets from Grizzly Peak to South Berkeley she sat silent, a silence turned against him, a defense. She was out of the car before he had it fully stopped in front of her rooming house; she whispered “Good night” and was gone. He sat in the car, blank, anxious, foolish. He started the engine, and with the noise of it his anger rose. When he got home ten minutes later he was very angry. Harriet, looking up from her book by the fireside, seemed startled. “Well!” she said. “Well,” he said.
“Excuse me,” said Harriet, “I’m finishing a chapter.”
He sat down, stretched out his legs, stared at the fire. He was bitterly angry at Elinor’s weak obstinacy, her irresolute, indecisive, temporising ways. There sat Harriet, thank God, like a rock, like an oak, finishing her chapter. If the house fell down in an earthquake around Harriet she would fix a bed for the baby, light a fire, and finish her chapter. No wonder Elinor hadn’t married before this, there was nothing to her, she had no character. He sat there full of self-vindicating anger and warm with the perfect sexual satisfaction she had given him, ready for more anger, more passion, more fulfilment, and for the first time in two years happy. Harriet finished her chapter. “Nightcap?” he said.
“No, I’m going to bed.” She stood up, erect, short, solid; he looked at her with admiration. “You look grand,” he said.
“Pooh,” she said, “whatever have you been up to? Good night, my dear.”
She had a cold. She usually got a cold in April. It went into her chest so that she rumbled like a truck and ached and coughed; at last she got on the phone and asked old Joan to come out and look after Andy. When Edward got home and looked surprised, she snapped, “I’m not up to running after the child today.” Then she went back to bed and lay cursing herself for having complained. One must never complain to men. Women at least knew complaint for what it was, part of coping, but he would interpret it, he would take it to mean that the full-time care of a child was too much to ask of a women of sixty-two; and then nothing she said or did would matter; he would have the idea in his head. And the child would be taken from her. Gradually or all at once she would lose him, the son she had always missed and to whom she was a wiser mother than she had been to her own two girls. The little monkey-face, the song at morning, the shirts to iron, the small automobiles and journals of chemistry left lying about, the presence by night and day of the son, of the man, of the man of the house gone, gone, all of it gone.
When he came in she did not turn her face to him. She lay grim, aching in the marrow of her bones.
“Well,” he said, “Andy’s spilled his milk and thrown his egg on the floor. Hear him yelling for Hat?” There were in fact loud, theatrical cries from below. “If you don’t recover in a day or two we’ll have to send him to reform school.”
“I intend to recover tomorrow,” she said, still grim, but lying easier. His kindness was exact: it hit the spot, carelessly it seemed, and healed.
“I detest being sick,” she said after a while.
“I know. You aren’t very good at it. Look here, I asked those people in Friday night, I’ll put them off a week.”
“Nonsense, I’ll be up day after tomorrow. Is your friend the checkers player coming?”
Edward laughed. “Yes. He wants to be pulverised again.” She had heard the young Philadelphian boast that he had never lost a game of checkers since he was fifteen, had taken him on and beat him six games running.
“I am a vengeful old woman, Edward,” she said, lying moveless, her short grey hair disordered.
“He doesn’t care—he’s trying to figure out your game.”
“I don’t like boasting.” That was Malheur County that spoke in her, the frontier without hope, the end of pushing on. “We’re all fools enough without adding that,” she said, unyielding, desolate.
“How about a drink before dinner?”
“Yes, I’d like a whiskey in hot water. But no dinner, I can’t eat with a cold. Bring me a hot toddy, and Dombey and Son, would you? I was just starting it.”
“How many times have you read it?”
“Why, I don’t know. Every few years since I was twenty. And put that poor baby to bed, Edward, he isn’t used to Joan.”
“She scares me too,” he said.
“Well she might; you won’t get round her with charm and persuasion. I have an understanding with her,” she went on, driven by a sudden will she did not stop to understand, “that when you and Andy move out she’ll move in with me, if it still suits her. She isn’t doing any regular cleaning any more, and her husband’s dead and her son’s in the Marines. And we’ve always got on.”
He stood silent, taken off guard. She looked up at him, the tall figure that dominated all the house, vulnerable and kingly, the young man.
“Don’t look so stricken,” she said with mild irony, “can’t I provide ahead for the winter? Now do go get my whiskey, Edward, my throat’s like sandpaper.”
To leave him free, that was her job. And she was good at her job. That had been her fault as a mother of daughters, she did not know if a girl should be left free or not, and so had vacillated; Rose had come out a bit weak, and Mary spoilt. But with a boy there was no question, he must have courage, and so needed freedom. Perhaps what a girl must have was patience, but she was not sure; in any case she was herself too impatient—not for pleasure and possession, like Mary, but for completion, for the end of things: unhopeful, and impatient.