Mrs. Garrison was indifferent to children, and with Mrs. Bronson in Reno, Agnes had no rivals, but she was in continual torment lest something happen to Carlotta. She would not let her wear a scarf around her neck for fear it would catch on a nail or in some door and strangle the child. Every steep staircase, every deep body of water, the distant barking of every watchdog frightened Agnes. She dreamed at night that the house caught fire and, unable to save Carlotta, she threw herself into the flames. Now, added to her other anxieties, were the steel traps and the rifle. She could see Jim from the nursery window. The traps were not set, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous, lying there on the ground where anyone could step on them. He had the rifle apart and was cleaning it with a rag, but Agnes felt as if the rifle were loaded and aimed at Carlotta’s heart.
JIM HEARD his wife’s voice, and he carried the parts of the rifle around to the terrace, where Ellen was sitting in a deck chair, having her breakfast from a tray. He kissed her, and thought how young, slender, and pretty she looked. They had spent very little of their married life in the country, and to be together on a bright, still morning made them both feel as if they had recaptured the excitement of their first meetings. The warmth of the sun, like a state of continuous and intense desire, blinded them to each other’s imperfections.
They had planned to drive up Black Hill and see the Emerson place that morning. Ellen liked to visit abandoned farms with the idea of someday buying a house in the country. Jim humored her in this, although he wasn’t really interested; and she, in turn, thought that she was deceiving him and that someday, somewhere, on some dismal hill they would find a farmhouse that would strike directly at his heart.
They drove up Black Hill as soon as Ellen had finished her breakfast. These excursions to abandoned homesteads had taken them over many neglected back roads, but the one up Black Hill was as bad as anything Jim had seen yet. It would be impassable between October and May.
When they reached the Emerson place, Ellen looked from the modest, weathered farmhouse to Jim’s face, to see what his reaction would be. Neither of them spoke. Where she saw charm and security, he saw advanced dilapidation and imprisonment.
The farm lay high on the hill but in a fold of the land, and Jim noticed that while the contour sheltered the house from the lake winds, it also deprived it of any view of the water or the mountains. He noticed, too, that every fair-sized tree within a thousand yards of the granite doorstep had been felled. The sun beat on the tin roof. In one of the front windows, like a talisman, he thought, of the meager rural life he detested, was a faded Red Cross sticker.
They left the car and walked across the dooryard. The grass there was waist high and filled with sweet clover. Briars tore at Jim’s pants. The rusted latch came off in his hands when he tried the door. He followed Ellen impatiently through the dark, smelly rooms as he had followed her through rooms in a similar state of dilapidation in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland. Ellen was a woman with many inexpressible fears—of traffic, of poverty, and, particularly, of war—and these remote, improbable houses represented safety and security to her.
“Of course, if we bought the place,” she said, “we’d have to put at least ten thousand dollars into it. We’d just be buying the land. I realize that.”
“Well, I’ll admit six thousand is a good price for that much land,” he said tactfully. He lit a cigarette and looked through a broken window at a pile of rusted farm machinery.
“You see, we could tear down all these partitions,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“I feel more and more that we’ve got to get some base away from New York,” she said. “If there was a war, we’d be caught like rats. Of course, if we left the city altogether I’m not sure how we could make a living. We could open a deep-freeze locker.”
“I don’t know much about freezers,” he said.
This dialogue was as much a part of his visits to the country, he thought, as the swimming and the drinking; and it would be brief. “Then you don’t like the place?” she asked, and when he said no, she sighed and stepped from the dark hallway into the sun. He followed her and closed the door. She looked behind her as if he had closed the door on her salvation, and then she took his arm and walked beside him to the car.
MRS. GARRISON, Ellen, and Jim ate their lunch that day on the terrace. Ingrid and Timmy ate in the kitchen, and Agnes Shay fed Carlotta in the nursery. Then she undressed the child, drew the blinds, and put her to bed. She lay on the floor beside the bed and fell into a sound sleep herself. At three, she woke and roused Carlotta. The child was sweaty and cross.
When Carlotta was dressed, Agnes took her down to the living room. Mrs. Garrison was waiting there. It was one of the rituals of that summer that she should spend an hour with Carlotta each afternoon. Left alone with her grandmother, the child sat stiffly in a chair. Mrs. Garrison and the little girl bored one another.
Mrs. Garrison had led an unusually comfortable life, so well sustained by friends and by all sorts of pleasures that she retained a striking buoyancy. She was impulsive, generous, and very kind. She was also restless. “What shall we do, Carlotta?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the child said.
“Shall I make you a necklace of daisies, Carlotta?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you wait here, then. Don’t touch the candy or the things on my desk, will you?”
Mrs. Garrison went into the hall and got a basket and some shears. The lawn below the terrace ended abruptly in a field that was covered with white-and-yellow daisies. She filled her basket with them. When she returned to the living room, Carlotta was still sitting stiffly in her chair. Mrs. Garrison did not trust the child and she inspected the desk before she settled herself on the sofa. She began to push a threaded needle through the hairy flowers. “I’ll make you a necklace and a bracelet and a crown,” she said.
“I don’t want a daisy necklace,” Carlotta said.
“But you told me you wanted one,”
“I want a real necklace,” Carlotta said. “I want a pearl necklace like Aunt Ellen has.”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Garrison said. She put aside her needle and the flowers. She remembered her first pearls. She had worn them to a party in Baltimore. It had been a wonderful party and the memory excited her for a moment. Then she felt old.
“You’re not old enough to have pearls,” she told Carlotta. “You’re just a little girl.” She spoke quietly, for the memory of Baltimore had reminded her of other parties; of the yacht-club party at which she had sprained her ankle and the masquerade she had attended dressed as Sir Walter Raleigh. The day had got very hot. The heat made Mrs. Garrison sleepy and encouraged her to reminisce. She thought about Philadelphia and Bermuda, and became so absorbed in these memories that she was startled when Carlotta spoke again.
“I’m not a little girl,” Carlotta said suddenly. “I’m a big girl!” Her voice broke and tears came to her eyes. “I’m bigger than Timmy and Ingrid and everybody!”
“You’ll be big enough in time,” Mrs. Garrison said. “Stop crying.”
“I want to be a big lady. I want to be a big lady like Aunt Ellen and Mummy.”
“And when you’re as big as your mother, you’ll wish you were a child again!” Mrs. Garrison said angrily.
“I want to be a lady,” the child cried. “I don’t want to be little. I don’t want to be a little girl.”
“Stop it,” Mrs. Garrison called, “stop crying. It’s too hot. You don’t know what you want. Look at me. I spend half my time wishing I were young enough to dance. It’s ridiculous, it’s perfectly …” She noticed a shadow crossing the lowered awning at the window. She went to the window and saw Nils Lund going down the lawn. He would have overheard everything. This made her intensely uncomfortable. Carlotta was still crying. She hated to hear the child cry. It seemed as if the meaning of that hot afternoon, as if for a second her life, depended upon the little girl’s happiness.