Homer smiled at her. There was a funny expression on his craggy face. "You know I like to fight with you."
It was a heavy, humid day. Over the river the trees piled up like thunderheads. The duckweed lay in a light green scum along the shore. There were tall spikes of cardinal flower and loosestrife along the edges of the water. They drifted silently. Mary leaned her head back and folded her arms, trying to let her mind go blank. Just listen to the birds, don't think about anything. She turned her head and looked in the pickerel weed for the two that were singing, splitting hairs.
Homer looked at her and started to speak. Then he stopped, cleared his throat and started again. "Charley Goss means a lot to you, doesn't he?"
"Charley? Of course he does."
"I mean—what I means is, how much?"
"Well, he's a friend of mine in a whole lot of trouble, that's how much."
Homer digested this, and seemed satisfied. "What about this Ghoolsworthy fellow? How long have you known him?"
"Just since this spring."
There was a pause. "He seems to think a lot of you," said Homer, looking carefully along his paddle blade. He dipped it clumsily in the water and pulled hard.
"Oh, that's just me," said Mary. "I always seem to attract the goofy, adam's-appley ones."
There was another pause. "I guess they think you're nice," said Homer. His voice was thick.
"Well, I'm not," said Mary. "Not to them. After a while I start snapping at them and saying waspish things. But they just droop their tongues out and look pathetic and hangdog around again. He left today, thank heavens, to go back home."
There was another silence. Then Homer changed the subject. He looked around happily. "Look at that muskrat going along over there," he said. "Look at all those ducks!"
By the time they got back to Mary's house it was dark. At the door Homer pulled her back and started talking huskily, quoting Emerson. "Mary, Mary," he said, "a link was wanting between two craving parts of Nature. Oh, Mary, come on. Aw, Mary..."
Mary had been kissed before, but mostly by men shorter than she was. It made her feel maternal. (Run along to bed now, there's a good boy.) Being kissed by Charley or Philip was a nose-to-nose affair, like confronted elephants whose long proboscises were always in the way. But this, now, this was different—Mary struggled against it, then gave in, dissolving altogether. Then she struggled again and broke away. The crazy dope was engaged to Rowena Goss. "Oh, go on home," said Mary unsteadily. She pulled at the knob of the screen door. It stuck and she had to kick at it. It wobbled open, and Mary went inside and slammed it, and spoke through the bulge of the screen. "You give me a great big enormous pain in the neck," she said. What a stupid thing to say.
Homer stood in the dusk, his white shirt heaving up and down. His necktie was the one that glowed in the dark. "You're like the rest of them," he said bitterly. "Like your precious Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Witherspoon and all the rest. Cold as ice. Well, go ahead. Wear a white dress, why don't you, and hide in your room and write poetry. Go ahead. It doesn't make any difference to me. I'm going to find me a girl with some blood in her veins." He turned on his heel and started walking down the road, breathing hard, his white shirt bobbing up and down. Mary went upstairs, lay down on her bed and cried hard. Then she suddenly remembered that they had come home in her car. "Oh, damn," she said. She got up and went downstairs and out of doors, climbed into her car and drove after him. She leaned over and opened the door on his side. "Here," she said.
He looked at her stiffly, then climbed in. "Holy smoke, turn on your lights," he said. Mary said nothing, struggling to control herself. When she drew up beside his car, he got out. "Thanks," he said.
"It's quite all right. Good night," said Mary. She sobbed all the way home.
*51*
Can't you extract any advantage out of that depression of spirits you refer to? It suggests to me cider-mills, wine-presses, Qc., Qd. All kinds of pressure or power should be used and made to turn some kind of machinery. —Henry Thoreau
Next day Homer was gone. Charley Goss was held in custody for the preliminary hearing in the Concord District Court. The judge found probable cause to bind him over for the Grand Jury, and he was moved to the jail in Charlestown. Mary forced herself to go and see him. Charley was calm, resolutely cheerful. He had been assigned a lawyer. He felt himself the victim of large forces. "I've always been unlucky, that's all. Some people are born lucky, some aren't."
"But, Charley, you might as well believe in original sin."
"Like Jonathan Edwards? Newborn babies hanging over the fiery pit? Well, maybe some of us are."
He didn't particularly want to talk about his plight. So Mary went back and forth now and then, and passed the time of day. Edith came, too, but her visits irritated her brother, her tongue was so loose and foolish. Rowena stayed home. She was struggling to maintain the dignity and glamor of her position as one of Boston's most ravishing young engaged debutantes. It was difficult, but if anyone could do it with her brother in jail for murdering her father, Rowena could. Mary had discovered with mixed feelings that Rowena's fiance was not Homer Kelly but Peter Coopering, scion of another of Concord's ancient families, an attractive fellow who could be trusted to keep a well-balanced portfolio, play a good game of tennis and wear sensible, conservative ties. Thinking it over, Mary decided that Homer's love-making the other night had been just the result of his being on the rebound from Rowena. She was wrong, but her whole thinking apparatus was upset and running in strange grooves. She was a little bit crazy that fall, there was no getting away from it.
Gwen worried about her. "She was out in the orchard last night, wandering around in her pajamas with her bathrobe on inside out and her hair every-which-way, singing."
"Singing?" said Tom.
"Yes, that Mozart thing they sang at Alice's funeral."
"Look," said Tom, "I can only worry about one of the Morgan girls at a time, and you're the one I've got my eye on. How do you feel, honey?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, don't be ridiculous. I'm fine. But I don't want my lovely Mary to go getting spinsterish and eccentric. Another thing. Isabelle Flower told me that she saw Mary on the subway the other day, you know, the day she went to the dentist, and after the train started up Mary started to laugh, and after a minute she was doubled up, she was laughing so hard, and everybody was looking at her. Isabelle went up to her and asked her what was funny, and she said she was on the wrong train."
"What's the matter with that? Struck her funny."
"Well, it's just part of the whole picture. I think she needs a vacation. She's at the library all day trying to do everything Alice used to do and everything she used to do, too, and then at night and Saturday and Sunday she's working on those lady Transcendentalists of hers. Sometimes I hear her typewriter thudding away up there in the middle of the night. And when she's not doing any of those things, she's off to East Cambridge to cheer up Charley. And that's guaranteed to bring on the glooms."
"Look, stop brooding. I'm going to get the cider press going and surprise John. He's been nagging at me all summer. Do you feel up to washing some bottles?"
"Don't be silly, of course I do. Grandmaw'll help me after she and Freddy are through with their naps. Where's that long bristly brush we used to have?"
Gwen loved the look of the roadside stand in the fall. There was bittersweet hanging from the top of it, and on the counter there were chrysanthemums in a blue granite kettle and purple eggplants, green acorn squash, white and purple turnips, half-bushel baskets of Tom's apples, so far just the Cortlands and the Macs. Much of the produce was grown by Harvey Finn, but not the apples, of course, nor the cider. The squash and pumpkins were Harvey Finn's, piled up along the road—the Hubbard squash, so graceless in its shape, so delicate in color, like the lichen on the stone walls that bordered Tom's fields, and next to it the humble screaming orange of the pimpled squash and the mellow yellow color of the pumpkins.