Kathy came over as soon as the children went to school. For once her blue eyes were somber. “She might have burned us all out!”
“Maybe that’s what she intended to do.”
“She couldn’t have thought it would go as far as it did! I mean, nobody sets fires to destroy property and maybe lives unless they’re crazy or drunk. . . . Or crazy-drunk, and I’ve seen some of that,” she admitted. “Only my father used to throw his ax at anybody that got in his way, not set the house afire. No, she must have been good and mad, and started the fire to scare Willy, and she expected him to put it right out, but something happened. It got away from them.”
Van shrugged. “You could be right. What difference does it make? She’s made her point.”
“That she’s a vicious little brat?”
“Oh, it’s simple,” said Van. “She doesn’t like where she is. Maybe Willy’ll be fired now, because of having such an unpredictable and dangerous wife.”
Kathy was pale. “Whatever it is, she gave me nightmares. I woke up hollering and Terence was trying to shut me up. . . . She must be wishing for a knothole to crawl into this morning. She must be some ashamed of herself, with everybody being so nice and making believe she was just hysterical with fear when she was screeching around last night.”
There was no point in saying that Gina probably felt more destructive, if anything. Kathy went home soon, and Van walked round and round through the rooms. Her body felt too strong and full of life for her to go back to bed. It was as if Owen had brought her to the full peak of existence, and then had deserted her with all this strength and spirit moiling in her. She had a sense of precariousness, of being so delicately poised that a breath could topple her, but from where and into what?
She walked around the harbor to get some food. It was a warm quiet day, cloudy yet luminous. There was no rote, and the birds seemed very loud. Dandelions spattered the well field, and blazed a strong yellow around the black ruins of the burned house with its naked chimney. The charred smell was strong, half-sweet in the still air.
At the store all the talk was of the fire. “If she really did it, she needs her bottom warmed,” said Helen Campion indignantly.
“Needs her neck wrung,” growled Mark.
“Lord, I was some scared last night,” Nora Fennell said. “That was before I found out what she was saying. Then I was mad as well as scared, but Matt said she was most likely thinking of some cigarette she didn’t put out, and was scared witless, only he didn’t say witless.”
“Could have been that,” Helen Campion agreed. “But being careless with your smoking is as bad as setting fires deliberate. How is she this morning?”
“Still in bed and very quiet,” said Joanna. “I’d say she has a hangover from all that liquor we poured into her last night. Don’t you think the state ought to provide us with tranquilizers as well as Indian pumps?”
“The only way to tranquilize that one is with a gun,” said Mark, “and Willy’ll come to it one day, believe me. Those little fellas take it and take it, and then they explode.”
“I hope not,” said Nora. “She’s not worth prison.”
“Poor Willy,” Joanna murmured. “He was in a state last night. He kept telling me she didn’t know what she was saying.”
Van took her mail and groceries and went out, but Joanna taught up with her. “Come on up for a cup of coffee.”
“I can’t,” said Van. “I’ve got so far behind on my work the house looks like what Barry’s aunt used to call a ‘lapidated whorehouse.’”
Joanna laughed. “You mean you have girls lying around over there wearing long black stockings and nothing else?”
“I don’t know what I’m likely to find when I start digging. They could have materialized off the covers of Barry’s magazines.”
“Well, be sure to let us all know. We need some sort of happy change around here.” She looked up at the charred ruins. Her face was older this morning than Van had ever seen it, drained of its usual color and vitality. Owen’s had been like that down in Ship Cove.
An uneasy silence hung between them until Joanna exclaimed with pleasure and relief, “Oh, here come the kids!”
They were coming along past the harbor beach, Laurie with them, all carrying extra sweaters and jackets. “The Brigport school’s invited them over,” said Joanna. “They’ll go on the mailboat, and then a couple of men will bring them back late this afternoon. Lord, it’s nice to think of children at a time like this. Though Gina was one not too long ago,” she added cynically. “I keep trying to imagine her a baby, but I can’t help thinking she must have been born looking exactly the same, makeup and all, only very small.”
The children’s noise filled the air like the swallows’ chatter. “Don’t you wish you were going too?” Laurie asked the women.
“I wish,” said Joanna fervently, “that I were going with you and that I were ten years old.”
This was acclaimed by the children, as great wit. With a little commiserating smile Laurie steered her group toward the wharf. Van was freed from the apathy of the moment.
“Well, I’d better get back to my messy kitchen,” she said.
“And the girls,” Joanna added, but the effort was obvious.
When Van came to the harbor beach she saw a small figure drooping on the stern of one of the big seine dories at the edge of the marsh. At first she thought it was a child who couldn’t go with the others, and then she recognized Gina.
“Hello,” she said. “I thought you were in bed.”
“I got away while she was out.”
“Who?” asked Vanessa perversely.
“Lady Bitchybones. So kind. Like she was hiding the straitjacket behind her back.” Gina spat into the marsh grass. There was something peculiar about her today, and suddenly Vanessa knew why; she hadn’t any make-up. She must have lost her enormous handbag in the fire, along with those great fuzzy sweaters. That must have been a worse blow than losing Willy would have been, Van thought. She sat on the gunnel of the dory and held out her cigarettes to Gina, who took one greedily.
“Why’d you do it?” Van asked her.
“So they’d fire Willy,” said Gina candidly. “You know Steve? He’s kept Willy on in spite of me. Believe me, I’ve done plenty to bollix things up. First I wouldn’t live at the Eastern End, so they gave Willy a house up here. Then I’d keep Willy up half the night drinking, and trying to pick fights with him, so he’d be so groggy the next morning he couldn’t get started to work. But that didn’t work because Steve Bennett is next to Jesus, and when he crooks a finger my Willy runs, even if he falls flat on his face. Then he’ll, crawl on his hands and knees. . . . Then I run off, and I knew Willy’d run after me. And we end up here. But now I’ve burned up the house and everything in it, and it could have burned off the whole island.”
Her small face was transfigured; without the eye make-up her eyes showed a clear brilliant green-blue, as innocent in their joy as Cindy’s or Tammie’s. “This they can’t forgive!”
Van sat looking at her. In herself she felt an enervating dissatisfaction and shame. “If they took you seriously on this you could go to jail,” she said. “But at least you’ve got the guts to grapple with something you hate, and do violence to change it.”
“Ayuh,” said Gina complacently. “I was born fighting.”
“What if you have to go away, but Willy can stay?”
“He won’t stay. He’s crazier about me than ever. He thinks I need him.” She hooted. Van stood up, not knowing if the queasiness she felt was directed at Gina or herself. “I’ve got work to do,” she said.
“They’ve sucked you in, haven’t they?”
Van stopped. “What do you mean by that?”
“I remember you when you first came here!” She was raucous as a crow. “Now look at you. Bird-watching and patchwork. You even dress like them. You could be one of the Bennett women.”
Van left her, walking fast, and Gina kept laughing at her all the way across the beach until suddenly the sound stopped. But Van didn’t look back to see why.
She washed dishes and cleaned house. Barry came in early and she had a cup of tea with him, not because she wanted it but because her stomach felt hollow. Barry ate a large wedge of Kathy’s bread with the inelegant enthusiasm of a growing boy, gulping food down so he could talk between mouthfuls. Van listened to him because she had no world of her own to be lost in. It used to be easy once, over on Water Street, to wander away. But no more.
He was talking about shifting traps, of the habits of lobsters; discussing his work, he was at his most attractive. She nodded from time to time and sipped her tea. Then he went on to talk around the shore. He loved that as much as lobstering. It was a rich part of his life; the visits from fishhouse to fishhouse, the knot of advice-givers huddled over an ailing engine, the arguments in the store, or the quiet unexpected conversation with one man during which something might be said which he would repeat to Vanessa with wonder and awe, giving it some great, almost prophetic significance.
Elbows on the table, she laced her fingers across her forehead and under their shade she stared at the tablecloth. On Jessup’s Island the old square table stood by the windows looking seaward. She battled with her anguish, sitting silent, her face shaded by her hands.
“Another chance,” Barry was saying. “Can you beat it? Steve Bennett’s either a simpleton or a saint. Willy must have talked a blue streak to convince him that little turd-heels would behave herself. . . . Huh?”
“I didn’t say anything,” she murmured.
“They’re all some disgusted, by Judas, I can tell ye. Phil set his jaw some hard when Mark told him. Cap’n Charles looks black as hell. Nobody’s heard from Owen yet, but I’ll bet he’ll go through the sound barrier with a roar that’ll break all the windows on Brigport.” He laughed merrily. “Rob and Matt ain’t going to take it very kindly, I can tell ye, and the rest who was in the path of it last night. . . . Course, they’ve got to go back to the other house at the Eastern End, there’s no house up here for ’em.” He went to the dresser and sliced another portion off the loaf. “Dunno how Mrs. Steve’ll fancy Gina switching her backside around the dooryard down there, but according to Willy she’s real sorry, and she got so scared she’s likely to be afraid even to scratch a match again.”
She thought of Gina perched on the dory, jeering and exultant. They might as well kill her and be done with it, she thought. They’ve done the unforgivable. They’ve forgiven.
“You have to hand it to these Bennetts,” Barry said. “They’re not only decent, they’re fine people. The salt of the earth. The rest of ’em don’t like Steve being so easy, but it’s his decision, so they’ll be some nice to Gina. The women’ll go call, and give her stuff for the house, and keep on asking her to the sewing circle.” He gave her a bright earnest look. “I want you to go and call, Annie. It’s the way we do things out here.”
“Is it?” she said to the table. “I’ll tell you; I’ll go when they need somebody to help lay one of them out.”
“What in hell does that mean?”
“It means that’s what all this being forgiven and given another chance by the salt of the earth will lead to. He’ll kill her or she’ll kill him, and that little fire last night will seem pretty small potatoes alongside it.”
He shook his head sadly at her. “You got an awful bitter tongue, Annie. Don’t you know that’s an awful bad unhealthy way to be?”
“Don’t call me Annie. I’m not Annie.”
“Have it your own way, dear.” He smiled at her. “But try to hold back those words. Don’t even think them. Trouble with you is, you never met up with these kind of people before. They’re big. Nothing mean and petty about ’em, they think big and they act big. Take Cap’n Owen, now. He’ll swear like a pirate about this, and call ’em everything he can put tongue to, but he’ll be good to ’em. Wait and see.”
She heard her voice coming out of the center of the hurricane’s eye; she saw the eye, large and yellowish-gray, filling one wall, and her voice came from the pupil as if from a speaker. “Maybe he’ll take an interest in Gina, give her a new interest in life, so she’ll be contented out here.”
“Now look, now look!” He was half-laughing, half-angry. “I called him a wild one, but he’s a family man now, and he’s not chasing after anything, not that cheap little piece for sure, and not after anything else.”
“Maybe he isn’t now, at this minute,” she said, “but you and your holy family! Blessed are the Bennetts and those that suck up to them. You make me laugh, you’re such a bloody fool about them.” She got up. She could still see the eye. It occurred to her that it was her own eye. “You wouldn’t believe that one of them came whoring into this kitchen after me, would you?”
He didn’t move. He sat with bread in one hand and mug in the other, his stare a shiny metallic blue. “I warned you about that tongue of yours,” he said after a moment. “That’s a goddam filthy way to talk, lying like that. What if somebody heard you?”
“I want somebody to hear me,” she said. “You.” She held onto the back of her chair and went on talking at him. “I’m not lying. A Bennett came whoring after me and I went whoring after him. Simple. One and one makes two.”
He stood up. His tan had turned putty-colored, and his lips so pale he didn’t seem to have any. He leaned across the table toward her. “You’re lying, goddam it to hell. You’re back in your old crazy ways, only this is worse, because you didn’t bother to lie then. You’re trying to turn me against ’em because you know I’m happy here.” His eyes flooded. “Damn you, admit you’re lying!”
“I am not lying,” she said carefully. “The man was Owen, but don’t worry, we never did anything in this house. It was always outside somewhere. Thank God his wife’s the schoolteacher.”
He fell back into the chair rather than sat. His hands were trembling. “You’re lying, aren’t ye? You’re fed up here. This going to bed and staying, I should’ve known. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“No, that isn’t it. I’m not lying, I told you. He walked in while you were out of the house, and he didn’t have to say what he came for. He made it clear enough.”
“And you went with him?” His mouth shook.
“Not then. Remember the dance? Remember he left early?”
He was nodding in a kind of palsy. She said, “I’ve never been able to find the place in the woods where we went. . . . Remember the tooth-ache I had?”
He leaped up, the chair fell backward, and he lunged across the table, knocking over the mugs. “Shut up, shut up! I don’t want to hear any more! I don’t believe it anyway!” He was half-sobbing. “Jesus, why do you—you’ve been with him? More than once?”
“More than once.”
“And I have to beg for it. All this time it’s like you’re doing me a favor, but he walks in and—the bastard—” He went off into a long frantic stream of profanity in a cracked and breathless voice. She stood against the refrigerator, watching and listening in awe at what she had done. He pounded his fists on the table and went on swearing. Suddenly he dropped back into his chair and said lucidly, but in a voice thickened as if with long weeping, “When I married you they said you’d destroy me. And they been waiting for it. Well, by God, I’ll do a little destroying of my own so I won’t go down alone.”
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked as if merely interested.
“No,” he said. “I’m going to kill the whoremaster who came in and busted up my home. It wasn’t much of a home, but it was getting to be better. No, I ain’t killing you. I figger you don’t know right from wrong the way you should, never having a mother and all. But he’s a Bennett! He’s got no call to bust in and steal another man’s woman.”
“He didn’t lug me off and rape me.”
“It’s the same thing. He come in and dazzled you. He’s one of the big Bennetts. Big in every way, huh?” He leered. “Worth laying down for? Better than little old Barry? Well, we’ll see who’s better now.”
He went into the sitting room and she heard him lift the rifle down. “You’ve got no shells,” she called.
“Who said so?” He came out carrying it and laid it on the table between them. His face was now very red. “You don’t know everything about me.” He started for the stairs, then came back and picked up the rifle, giving her a crafty smile. “I’d better take good care of my old friend here. You’re likely to heave her overboard while my back’s turned. Don’t want me to shoot your fancy man, do ye?”
“He’s not my fancy man,” she said wearily. “It’s over. I only told you so you’d know they were people, not gods. The way you worship them turns my stomach.”
“Ayuh? Well, my stomach’s turned now.”
“So much that you’d kill somebody and go to Thomaston for life?”
“It’ll be easier than living in the same world with you and him, knowing he’s touched you and you liked it. You’re my wife! When you told me I had to marry you I was glad and proud. Even when I found out there wasn’t any kid, I figgered, well, I had you, and never mind what the rest of ’em said. And sure, I know you didn’t want me to touch you, plenty of times, but one thing I could always brag about when somebody give me a sad story about his wife getting it somewhere else—I was sure of you. You had class. Now it turns out you just couldn’t find anybody you thought was good enough for you. Till you met up with the Bennetts.”
He ran up the stairs and she heard him slamming around in his room. Then there was quiet, and she heard the tiny clicking sounds that went with filling the clip, sliding it into the rifle, and jacking a shell into the chamber. All at once the whole business became real; it was entirely possible that he would do what he set out to do.
She slid out the back door just as he came down the stairs again, and dived like a seal through the alders. Where was Kathy all this time? If she saw Barry with the gun, looking as he did, she’d forget about Gina soon enough, and the whole thing would be out. She shut her eyes for a moment, until Barry shouted “Hey!” from somewhere behind her. Then she ran again, finding the track among the thin growth of spruces, remembering thankfully that Laurie and the schoolchildren were at Brigport.
Out in the field the path was a pale streak diagonally crossing toward the barn at Hillside. If Helen Campion should look out her pantry window now she’ll have a shock, she thought. The rites of spring on Bennett’s Island. Sacred fires last night and human sacrifice today. She kept running and Barry ran behind her, shouting. She didn’t get any of the words as they came in fragments like showers of pebbles flung hard.
At the corner of the barn her aching lungs and burning throat stopped her. She waited for him there, leaning against the old shingles. The day was gray but over warm, and she wanted to lie down in the lush cool grass and never get up again.
“Trying to warn him, huh?” Barry said.
I don’t want him, I told you. And neither of us is worth your going to prison for. Barry, I’m sorry,” she said tiredly. “I’m sorry for all the bad ways I’ve been to you. Let’s go home.”
“You still don’t get it, do ye?” he asked with patronizing patience. “He’s touched you. He’s had you. I’m going to kill him.”
“You’re not a killer, Barry.”
“You don’t know what I am,” he told her with that smile, and she was forced to agree. The only thing to do was to try to keep ahead of him; if Owen wasn’t in the house, he’d be at the fishhouse, and if he was on his way around to the harbor in his boat Barry might work off his insanity before he could run Owen down. The thought that he might work it off on her was a refreshing one. She was so tired, she could ask for nothing better than oblivion, short and sweet, in the back of the head. To fall into the thick grass and stay.
She began to walk around the barn. They didn’t have cows now, but chickens scattered away with her with an exasperated clucking. Two large cats watched, unstartled, from the open barn door. Against the woods a large vegetable garden had been started, and all along the back of the long white house there were early daffodils and tulips. The yard lay in silence except for the talk of the chickens as Barry, coming behind her, dispersed them again.
She had never been here. This was where he was father and husband, the stranger. She stood staring at the white clapboards, trying to think. She had not seen him face to face since the day at Ship Cove, and now her mouth dried not only with fear but with an anticipation that had nothing to do with Barry and the gun, or anything else that had happened this afternoon. Barry came up beside her and said breathily, “He can’t lay you when he’s dead.”
Without looking at him, still staring at the house, she said, “Barry, it was hardly anything. It would never happen again. It wasn’t anything we’d want to keep going.” But she knew that the words were wrong, the “we” lacerated him deeply.
“Owen!” he bawled at the house. “Come out here!”
She wanted to cry, “No, stay in!” but she couldn’t raise her voice. Could she turn to Barry now, cry, abase herself, hug his knees, beg him to drop the gun? Would the granting of this give him enough self-esteem to last his lifetime? There was no time to find out. Owen appeared at the screen door of the ell. He had a glass in his hand.
“Well, well,” he said, coming out. He squinted at Barry and the rifle. Then he swallowed something he had in his hand, drank from the glass and set it down on the doorstep, and came across the grass to them.
“I’m going to kill you, Cap’n Owen,” Barry said. He had begun to tremble as if with chills.
“What for?”
“You know. She told me.”
“That so?” He lifted an eyebrow toward Van. “Chatterbox, isn’t she? Go home, Barry. You like it here, you make money. I’m not worth half a life in state prison, and neither is she. She’d still be out and you’d be in. So who wins?”
“But you wouldn’t be walking this earth, you fornicating son of a bitch. I’d wake up laughing at that every day. Prison’d be worth it. And she could think how you looked lying dead, and how she really did it because she told me.” His laughter cracked. “And I wouldn’t believe her at first! I kept begging, pleading with her to say she was lying. I never thought a Bennett would do anything like that, see?” He shifted the gun around, cradling it in his arm, and released the safety.
“You forget something, son,” said Owen. “I’ve not admitted anything yet. She could be lying in her teeth.”
Van could feel the waves of uncertainty that stopped Barry, and the passion of his longing to believe she had lied. She looked past the men, on by the syringa and lilacs past the corner of the house, down the road toward the schoolhouse. The yard was empty, and the flag hung limp from the pole under a heavy sky.
“They’re coming back,” she lied. Both men looked quickly that way. She grabbed the rifle barrel and thrust it up. Barry resisted at once, and the gun fired, the shot going toward the roof of the house. A gull flapped away from the chimney with an offended squawk. As Van and Barry struggled with the rifle between them, their faces close together in a deadly intimacy, she thought how strange his looked, contorted into a sort of frozen leer. Neither spoke. He was stronger, and suddenly he wrenched the rifle away from her; but as he did so, Owen reached them and swept her away with one arm. He knocked Barry down, the rifle flew out of his hands, and he collapsed in the grass, over on his side and unconscious. Owen picked up the rifle, took out the clip, and put it in his pocket.
Vanessa walked away around the far corner of the house, facing the sea. She wished she could keep on going, out over the end of Windward Point, but instead she had to lean against the clapboards and concentrate on not vomiting. Owen came up behind her.
“Why did you tell him?” he asked very quietly.
“Why do you think? He worships you all, he goes on and on. And I— I can’t get away!” She was going to blubber without shame, she thought. “I tried to get him to shoot me. He wouldn’t. Nothing works.”
He took her by the shoulders and turned her to him, holding her off and looking into her face, not angrily but with a deep-seamed tiredness that she couldn’t bear as well as she could have endured rage. “I don’t want you to die,” he said. “You’re young. No matter what you think, you’ve got a life.”
“I had a life for a few weeks. You were it. Oh, damn my nose.” He let go with one hand and pulled out a handkerchief. She grabbed it fiercely and mopped her eyes and blew her nose. “He’s right. All he says about the Bennetts. . . . I mean about you. There couldn’t be anyone else after you. I’ve had my life and it’s over, it ends the way I got it, with nothing.” She sounded as tired as he looked, she couldn’t have screamed or raged because there was nothing left to do with it. “I didn’t tell him anything about us. The island up there, and about—” She had no words. “Oh, about anything real. I made him think it was just something cheap and fly-by-night. He was going on about how perfect you all were. I had to shut him up somehow. And now he thinks I’m a tramp, but I don’t care.”
They both leaned wearily against the house. The eastern sea was a solid gray mass, but somewhere Jessup’s Island floated in a globe of summertime; the birds would eat the field strawberries as they ripened. Suddenly a gasping cry was wrung from her. “I don’t want you to die! I thought at first if I couldn’t have you I didn’t want her to have you either, but she can have you if you’ll just stay alive. I can’t stand to think of you dead.”
“Nor I you,” he said. “So don’t do it.”
“I won’t,” she promised. She put her hand on his face. “And you be careful. Don’t go getting reckless and trying to speed things up.” He lowered his head quickly and made a muffled sound in his throat. She felt his mouth against her fingers and then, as if they had both heard the shuffling footsteps in the grass, they were standing apart when Barry came unsteadily around the corner. He looked at them from watery, bloodshot eyes, supporting himself with a hand against the wall.
“Are you ready to go home?” she asked him in a flat tone.
“You!—the both of ye—” He began to swear again, and Owen cut that off.
“Look,” he said. “Nobody but us three has to know what went on here this afternoon. Sure, it’s hell, but it’s not the first time it’s happened to anybody and it’s not the last, and folks manage to survive. You can go home, and tomorrow we’ll act like it never happened. Ten years from now you’ll be sure it never happened. You’ll have a kid or two in the school and a big boat in the harbor, and today’ll be a bad dream.”
“You mean if I crawl on my knees to you like that poor fool Willy and apologize for myself and my slut of a wife, I can stay?”
“Philip’s the only one who can fire you.” She had never known him to be so quiet. She remembered that he had swallowed something as he came out to them, and she wondered if he were feeling those warning sensations in his chest and arm; if this afternoon killed him, her promise wouldn’t be binding any more. She stood apart from the men and stared at that thick motionless sea. “Your wife’s not a slut and don’t ever call her that again where I can hear you. . . . You don’t owe any apologies. It’s the other way around. I apologize. That suit ye? Now, by God, the both of you put for home, and the next time I think I see a good thing, I’ll make damn’ sure she knows how to keep her mouth shut.”
“Ayuh, you didn’t make much a fetch of it this time, Cap’n Owen. Didn’t show much sense.” There was a tremor in his blurred voice; he was beginning to weaken, to be won again. She knew it with neither relief nor disgust, only exhaustion. In time he would forgive her; it would come all the more quickly because a Bennett was involved. “Well, I’ll get my shooting iron and go home,” said Barry. “But by Jesus nobody’ll knock it out of my hand the next time. I’ll lay in the bushes and pick the pimp off when he goes by, whoever he is. You hear that, Annie?”
She didn’t answer. “She’s right, she ain’t worth going to Thomaston for,” he said almost jauntily. “But I married her, and if I hadn’t got kicked out of my own home for it, I’d never have ended up out here. And I figger on staying, even if I have to lock her in when I go to haul.”
Neither spoke. She thought, He thinks we’re standing here humbly before him, ashamed and foolish. Well, I suppose it’s owed him. She began to walk away, out around Barry and across the yard toward the barn. Under the low cloud ceiling there was a magnified beat of engines coming up Long Cove, and children’s voices raised above them.
She knew without looking around that Barry was following her, and she wondered if Owen were standing by the house watching them go, or if he had already gone inside or down toward his workshop. The desire to look back almost overcame her, but she kept on around the barn and found the path across the field.
One thing she knew; she was more tired than she had ever been in her life, but in all this it had not once occurred to her that her mind might fly apart. I’ll never go insane, she thought. Even if I wanted to, even if it was the only way out, it would never happen, and it was never about to happen. Whatever became of my mother doesn’t touch me. She left me because she was scared or silly, maybe a mean little imbecile like Gina or a sweet and trusting one, and she was wiped out years ago like a kitten crossing a highway. A child who never lived to be as old as her daughter was now.
Suddenly Van’s stomach sucked in on a great shuddering breath, but she quickly expelled the air and forced herself to breathe more naturally. At last I’m free, she thought with either grief or irony, she didn’t know which.
As she crossed the yard, Barry came through the break in the alders behind her. She pretended to feel the dish towels hung on the line, and he went on into the house. She was alone for this few minutes. She, Anna Howard. You’re young, you have a life, he had told her, and she had answered, I had a life and you were it. They were both right. The agony of the truth struck her again so that she almost staggered, and agony at once took on forever the texture of a linen dish towel, natural-colored, edged in blue.
Then as a gay burst of voices sounded on the boardwalk beyond the Campions’, she unpinned the towels and began to fold them with neat housewifely motions. It was a curious thing, she reflected, that in all the disguises The Day had taken she had never guessed until now what its true face would be.