When George had found Rose crying, he knew he was far over his head. He thought he might have dealt with anger, but he had little experience with tears. ‘I came,’ he said, ‘to pay the bill.’ She looked at him, and shook her head. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘send it to me?’
She nodded, and turned away. He did a daring thing. He reached out and patted her upper arm, and smiled, and left, to walk down to the river, to think — he who never walked. He who had never walked by that river before, had never before heard the faint sound in the middle of it where the slow water parted around a sandbar. Suppose, he thought, if someone had found him there in the moonlight, sitting on the bank of the river where he had never been before. Well, he thought, suppose somebody did.
She was astounded to see him again a few weeks later.
What she ran was a hotel and restaurant, and people simply walked in. When you deal with the public, say good-bye to privacy.
But George Burbank knocked. He said, ‘I thought I would come to see you.’
‘Do please come in,’ she said. She was apprehensive, for why would George Burbank come to call. She had sent a bill. She had received a check. She imagined that already his car had been observed passing the saloons, and that already her reputation was slipping. ‘There’s a party coming here at noon,’ she said. ‘You see, I’m busy in the kitchen.’
‘Mrs Gordon, I don’t want to be any trouble.’
Then why didn’t he go, do you suppose, if he didn’t want to be any trouble?
‘Would you like to come sit in the kitchen?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said George Burbank.
Beside the kitchen window was the deal table where she and Peter ate. ‘Would you like to sit down here? I’ve got to mix the biscuits.’
‘You go ahead with the biscuits. I’ll just sit here.’
And so he did, and began reading the words on the sauce bottles. Peter had a penchant for sauces and spices. This most wholesome sauce, George read, is excellent with meats, cheese and fish. He traced the flowers on the oilcloth with a finger. ‘It has certainly been a dry fall,’ he offered. ‘The river is low, I notice.’
‘Hasn’t it been dry, though? Some people in here the other day were saying it’s the driest fall they remember.’
‘They’re right, those people,’ George commented. ‘Dry fall.’
‘I guess you have to expect them,’ Rose said.
He liked the look of the flour on her hands. ‘Yes, you have got to expect them. You’ve got to.’ He knew no more of love, he told himself, than he did of tears, but he enjoyed sitting there. And he enjoyed the conversation which seemed to him on the verge of taking an even more sprightly turn. In other words, he knew all there was to know about love, that it’s the delight of being in the presence of the loved one.
‘Peter is over at the school, washing windows.’ She paused, thinking he might take her speaking of Peter’s absence as somehow provocative.
‘I expect you must be proud of him, from what I hear.’
She felt suddenly and fiercely protective of Peter, and the sting of tears was in her eyes. ‘From what you hear?’
‘Oh, I’ve heard he’s a smart young fellow.’
Two cars drove up out front, the party from Herndon. The door opened and the little bell above gave the warning, and theirs were the voices of those excited by the cold and grateful for the warmth of the open fire. ‘I’ll go in and seat them,’ Rose said. ‘Peter should be back in a few minutes.’
It sounded to George as if they were pretty noisy in there. When Rose came back she said, ‘They have wine with them. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I’m not sure how the new law is on that, but it looks funny, if somebody came.’
George rose slowly. ‘Do you want me to go in and speak to them?’
Rose laughed, shocked. ‘Oh, no! I’ll handle it some other time.’ Imagine, she thought, if George Burbank suddenly burst in on them. From the kitchen.
‘Just as you say,’ said George.
‘I don’t know what’s keeping Peter.’
George sniffed the biscuits. ‘I expect he’s not through with the windows,’ George said.
‘And these people are early.’ Early and noisy.
‘I’d say,’ George remarked, ‘that they had more in there than wine. Sounds like booze.’
They were early, and getting noisy. Herndon people — the undertaker who looked like Teddy Roosevelt, his delighted grin contemplating your body some years hence. There was a druggist, and two blonde women. The party included the leading dentist of Herndon, a man who had recently made some sort of history by walking down South Pacific Street in a Palm Beach suit sporting a cane, and with him this cold, early fall afternoon was a woman not his wife, a woman named Consuela who handed him instruments in his office; she was a dark beauty much admired in Herndon and the dentist’s wife was a woman who thought a great deal about missionaries and the heathen and liked to drive about Herndon with her dentist husband on fine Sunday afternoons in their maroon Cadillac automobile, with the minister in the back seat. The wife was at the moment with a sick friend somewhere out of state. Here now was the new crowd, the new fast crowd from Herndon, people always on the go, always aware of new places that opened up, the Green Lantern, the Red Rooster, dim-lighted roadhouses that opened and closed, shady places, smoky places with little orchestras that played suggestive music. New people with new money, but among them were young ranchers who careened about the dusty roads in big cars, having somehow got hold of the family checkbook. Some of them had been seen returning from all-night parties at sunrise, a pretty young girl sitting on the back seat of a roadster, her feet on the steering wheel! In the rumble seat of the car, a drunken couple cheered her on. Nobody could guess where it would end, people staying up all night getting distant stations on the radio.
‘I should never have put that piano in there,’ Rose said. ‘Just listen!’
As she went from the kitchen through the swinging door George saw past her that they were dancing some sort of wild dance, and they didn’t look to be doing too well at it. The whole floor shook, clear into the kitchen.
‘Goodness,’ Rose said. ‘I wish Peter would come back. I’ve got to get the chicken on, and Peter should be serving their salad. Sometimes if you get the food on the table.’ She paused, thinking. ‘Mr Burbank, I’m going to run over and get Peter.’
‘Oh, you baby doll!’ they screamed in there.
‘Shake a leg!’ someone called out.
George said, ‘Mrs Gordon, I’ll serve their salad.’
Before she could speak, he had picked up two plates from the counter, and shouldered open the swinging door. Rose saw past him that the dark beauty was kicking high and swinging her long jet beads.
When the swinging door was still behind George, Rose moved over near it, appalled at what George had done.
For a moment the noise and laughter continued, the voices rose higher. Then there was sudden and utter silence; a chord on the piano went unresolved. In the silence she heard George. ‘Afternoon,’ he said and laughed. ‘Looks like I’m the new waiter. How do, Doctor.’
When George came back for more salad, he found Rose leaning against the sink. He went to her at once, leaping to the conclusion that she was weeping, since he had once found her so. She was weeping now, but from laughter. ‘You were so perfect,’ she whispered. ‘They were so shocked. In their wildest dreams …’ and she doubled over again. ‘You were so perfect.’
Well! he thought to himself. He had done it rather well. And no one had ever thought him amusing before.
‘Mr Burbank,’ she told him later over coffee in the kitchen. ‘Twice when I’ve been worried you’ve been here. And you know, I’m not worried often.’
Had Johnny Gordon told her who’d torn his shirt and tossed him like a knotted rag against the wall, Rose would never have accepted George Burbank. But Johnny hadn’t said, feeling when you give a man a name you give him a face as well, and his humiliation was easier if the man was faceless, a force, like Fate. As she came to enjoy George’s quiet company — even to look forward to it — she rationalized the incident of the paper flowers. Maybe Mr Phil Burbank had meant nothing. For what grown man would humiliate a boy? Was she too sensitive, too quick to remember old taunts in the schoolyard, to recall them again in the words of a perfectly ordinary conversation? What grown man would humiliate a boy!
George made a grave request. ‘May I call you Rose? Will you call me George?’
‘Of course, George.’
A Sunday later, another grave request. ‘Will you marry me?’
She didn’t pretend surprise. ‘I want to be fair, George. I loved my husband. I don’t know whether a woman can love twice.’
‘Of course. How could you know? But if you liked me, and then maybe later? And I could put your boy through school. Any school at all.’
‘I could do that alone. It meant so much to John, getting him through school. Maybe the last thing he believed in.’
‘You understand I’d put him through school, lend you the money or whatever you liked, whether you marry me or not. You see, when we’re together, when we laugh and talk, why, that’s worth anything I could ever do for you or the boy.’
‘But don’t you see, I don’t want your money.’
‘Isn’t it funny,’ he said. ‘I used to think that’s all I had, was money, until we sat here and laughed and talked. Isn’t it funny that even when I’m alone now, I feel so good.’
She looked down at his wide feet. His shoes were old, but freshly polished. She raised her eyes to his hands, almost as wide as they were long, and warm, even when he’d just come in from the cold. Suddenly she felt she knew exactly what he’d looked like as a child.
He said, ‘Please don’t do that.’
She said, ‘I’m not going to cry. But I was thinking how lucky I’ve been, to have known two kind men.’
Driving home in the old Reo he hummed again and again the waltz from The Pink Lady. Suppose she was to teach him to dance, suppose that. When he squinted at the stars the light seemed to shoot right down to the ground like spears. And what a Christmas they could have together!
The elder Burbanks were luckier than most retired ranchers; many, at last broken by the long cold winters, the howling wind, the thought of uninhabited space — crippled by rheumatism and arthritis fingers twisted, drawn up into their horny palms like a dead bird’s claws, forced to watch the young take over, to watch the young ride and rope and hunt and manage as they’d never do again — many retired into dipsomania, seeking out the bars in Beech or Herndon where they stared at the reflection of their disappointed fierce old faces in the cruel mirrors behind the bar; the self-made among them thus ended drinking with the very men they had spent their lives rising above, seeking similar oblivion, sinking into the same old age. Only a picket fence, they reflected, separated Mountain View Cemetery from Potter’s Field.
At home they watched and criticized, quick to take offense, insisted on writing the checks, sulked, certain their sons and daughters wished they were dead before they, too, turned the final corner.
It was not so much that the elder Burbanks were richer than the others, for some half dozen ranchers could put their hands on two hundred thousand cash. Old Tom Bart, say — in spite of the rumors of wild spending and all-night parties in hotel rooms; the Barts and the Burbanks seldom met except perhaps on the streets of Herndon, and it was Tom Bart then who stood modestly aside, he who was known as the life of the party; he would stiffen, smiling and tongue-tied, before the Old Lady’s poise and the cut of the Old Gent’s clothes. George, of all people, secretly admired Tom Bart. Phil thought him a fool, and referred to him as a Vocal Yokel.
No, it was not that they were richer, but that they were educated and had social contacts; reading and thinking took the place of whiskey; they played Melba and Galli-Curci on the Victrola, lost themselves in the texts of Town & Country, International Studio, Mentor and Century, magazines that piled up on the table until someone drove to Beech and dropped them off at the school. Serious discussions on current events took the place of the curious excitement some find in anger and despair — furious discussions during which they sometimes paused and glanced at one another in the sudden silence.
They could not suit Phil, they could not please him, and his glances reminded them of their useless lives. After certain unpleasant episodes, the old people took a corner suite at the best hotel in Salt Lake City, had the hotel furniture (good as it was) removed and installed their own things, made friends with others like themselves, retired ranchers, lumber people, mining people who knew Australia and South Africa quite as well as they knew the American West. They wrote frequent letters back East, read the Boston Evening Transcript, walked in the sun or regarded the snow-covered mountains from their big windows on the top floor. But in their sometimes long silences the one of them would look suddenly at the other and smile quickly a brief, encouraging smile, a smile quickly acknowledged, and then the silence again.
The Old Lady’s eyebrows flew up when she read that George might marry. On receiving Phil’s first letter, the Old Lady wrote several to George, tearing up all but the last. How absurd, she thought, writing to a grown man begging him not to marry until his fiancée had been approved, for Phil’s letter said the woman had played music in a bar and that she had a half-grown child. There was no mention of a former husband. In her final letter, she begged George to ‘think it over,’ a phrase that had long served as a maxim in the family, and in any event to allow them to be present at the wedding. ‘It would look funny,’ she wrote George, ‘if we weren’t there.’ She showed the letter to the Old Gent, who paused in his pacing of the floor.
He looked the letter over. ‘I don’t think George minds if things look funny. He’s never done anything that looked funny before. Why would one thing matter?’
‘Phil cares.’
The Old Gent turned to her. The question he was about to ask had often been on his mind. A hundred times he had phrased the question, opened his lips to speak it. Meeting her eyes, he had until now kept silent, wondering if she might not sense in the question some criticism of herself. ‘Do you think …?’ Shocked, he suddenly realized the same question had been on her mind. It was she, then, who expressed it.
‘Do I think there might be something — something wrong — something wrong with Phil?’
The Old Gent felt hollow in his stomach, but it was a relief to get the thing out in the open. ‘If there is, it’s not your fault.’
‘Nor is it yours,’ she said, and looked at her watch. ‘What time is it, please, I hate these little watches. I can’t see the hands, and they lose time.’ They sent off the letter and prepared to follow it, packed their bags and asked the maid to water the geraniums. They wired ahead for George to meet them in Beech.
He was on the platform to meet them, smiling came forward in the darkness in the buffalo coat that made him huge, leaning into the winter wind that swept dry snow across the platform. ‘Hello, mother,’ he said, leaning to kiss her. ‘Hello, father,’ and formally shook the Old Gent’s hand. ‘You see, it’s begun to snow.’
‘It’s good to see you,’ the Old Gent said.
‘Same here,’ George said. ‘The car’s around the side, don’t you know.’
‘Just as always?’ the old man asked.
The Old Lady thought wildly of speech, some word about the trip, about the meal on the train, something seen from the windows, some anecdote. She could remember only a crying child and a cross mother and the smell of a peeled orange. ‘Is anyone with you?’ she asked.
‘My wife,’ George said.
‘Well, what did you think of her?’ The old Burbanks had been installed in their old room.
‘The clock is going again,’ the Old Gent said. ‘But the windows still rattle.’ He walked over and looked out the window.
‘Didn’t you hear me? I said, What did you think of her?’
‘Think of her? I think it’s mighty considerate of her to turn this room over to us while we’re here. But how much can you tell, driving twenty miles in the dark?’
‘It’s more than twenty miles. When you were in the office talking to George, she knocked on the door and I went and let her in. She said the oddest thing.’
‘What on earth did she say?’
‘She said, “Somehow knowing George, I knew I could count on your kindness.”’
‘Well?’
‘It pleased me. That she sees George’s kindness.’
The Old Gent turned from the black window that reflected the lamp behind him. ‘Will you give her a little of the jewelry or such things?’
The Old Lady coughed lightly and patted her chest and went to the window. On the sill was a dead geranium in a pot. ‘I see Miss Jones is dead. I think we’d better wait and see. Too bad there’s a child. Loyalties.’
‘It was dying before we left, remember? It’s not — the child. You know that.’ The Old Gent turned sharply, walked across the room, turned sharply and walked straight back. ‘I can tell you one thing. I feel sorry for her.’
The Old Lady said, ‘I haven’t seen you pace like that since you left this house.’ They began unpacking. ‘Isn’t it awfully cold in this room? You forget what cold is.’
He looked up from his suitcase. ‘I haven’t heard you mention the cold since you left this house.’
Rose, too, had felt the cold, her first time in the house. They had married after Christmas in the rectory in Herndon. George wondered whether they should invite some people? She said she thought because of Peter, it should be private. Did he understand? He seemed to. He said, ‘Suit yourself,’ but he had smiled.
‘But of course your brother,’ she said.
‘He never goes to anything at a church. He hates to dress.’
Peter did some understanding, too. ‘You know I will always love your father. If I thought you’d be hurt if I got married, if I thought you wouldn’t understand?’ Peter had smiled. ‘You do understand?’
Peter gazed out the window over the scrubby sagebrush past the schoolhouse down to the river and to the clump of willows where he used to sit planning and watching the moon. ‘I understand.’
The stilted cast of his speech had long perplexed her, his ‘of course,’ his ‘for instance’ — and so did his calling her Rose. She would not question his motive, maybe fearing his answer, that it might reveal some inferior sort of love for her. In fact, the name Rose more closely fitted his image of her, more the beloved than the mother, the sole object, after the death of his father, of his strange affection, the single remaining subject of the scrapbook that had served him as guide and Bible for five long years. He felt no jealousy of George Burbank, or, if he did, it was as controlled and as impersonal as his hatred of those who might attempt to destroy his private images. Marriage would simply make possible for her what she deserved long before he himself could ever make it possible, and her getting what she deserved was all that mattered to him. Marriage would remove her forever from the Red Mill where she served those he loathed and scorned, where she must parry the drunken remark and the insinuating smile because she must make a living, secure a future for him who longed only to make a future for her. Sooner than he had dreamed, she would travel dressed in fashions from Harper’s Bazaar, drive a Lincoln or a Pierce, take a stateroom on an ocean liner, and arrange fresh flowers.
The hours before the wedding his mother remained in a room at the Herndon House and George took him to Green’s to buy a suit.
‘Fix this young fellow up with whatever he wants,’ George told the man, and Peter smiled when he saw George take a quick look at himself in his own new blue serge, and draw in his stomach and take in his new belt a notch. ‘Your mother wants us to have our dinner alone,’ George said. ‘Guess she wants to get all fixed up and surprise us. Goodness, but doesn’t she always look so pretty!’ They ate at the Sugar Bowl Cafe. ‘Now you go ahead and have anything you want. Me, I always have the fried halibut when I go out. It’s sort of a little change. But you hop to it and have anything you want.’ Never before in his life had Peter had all the chili con carne he wanted. ‘Fix the young fellow up with another bowl,’ George told the waitress. ‘This is a kind of celebration for us.’
Peter was the only guest at the wedding and properly so, he thought, for he was the only other principal involved. He liked the array of roses George had bought and the fussy woman at the florist’s had arranged in the brass pots on the altar. He was honestly touched that George had made so sentimental a gesture and scarcely breathed through the marriage service and merely moistened his lips when George took his mother’s hand and slipped on the wedding band; but his heart leaped when his mother turned and smiled and touched and arranged and fixed the fold of her dark blue traveling suit, as easy and elegant a gesture as he’d ever seen — heartbreakingly beautiful — the gesture of the charming, the enchanting, the rich Mrs Burbank. She walks in beauty, he quoted from his father’s books. She walks in beauty, like the night.
He must have one of those roses later on. A few pressed petals would make a good entry for the last page of the scrapbook.
Rose found a Mrs Mueller in Herndon, a dietitian at the hospital, a clean, starched, ambitious woman who was glad to give Peter room and board for the remainder of the school year.
‘I’ll try to come to you every weekend,’ Rose promised Peter. ‘And maybe sometimes you might like to come to the ranch? Won’t that be fun?’
He thought it wouldn’t, but didn’t say so. He smiled his faint smile and took her hand. Thus he was removed from Beech where he had been taunted and avoided as the spawn of suicide. At the school in Herndon there was a real library, courses in chemistry and physics. ‘This is a pleasant room,’ he said.
‘Peter,’ she said, ‘sometimes I think you don’t listen to me. Do you listen to me? I never can tell what you’re thinking.’
‘I’ll pay more attention,’ he said. He thought what a relief it was to have to think now only of his own future. ‘Say hello to — George.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s hard for you to know what to call him, isn’t it? But he wants so much for you.’
Rose remembered the cold the first few moments in the ranch house. George’s brother stood in the middle of the room as she and George walked in from the winter afternoon; she had waited on the steps while George drove the old Reo into the garage; the sound of the exhaust of the electric light plant smacked against the hill out front. The ranch dogs, alerted by the mutter of the car and the flash of the headlights had barked and come running around the house and now whined and leaped at George as he trudged back from the garage carrying suitcases. These he set down, and opened the door. Rose went in first, and there was the brother standing in the middle of the room.
‘Hello there, Phil,’ George said. ‘You remember Rose.’
‘Oh, hello there,’ Phil said.
‘Something wrong with the furnace?’ George asked.
‘Search me,’ said Phil.
It was a huge room and sparsely furnished, for the Old Lady and the Old Gent had gone away with chairs that left yawning spaces; there had been no rearrangement of furniture since their departure some years before. They had left behind the Navajo scatter rugs they had introduced from time to time as fitting in a ranch house, but the Indian motif had never been able to clear the air of disappointed elegance. The fire was laid in the fireplace, but unlighted. Over it the portrait of the Old Lady stared down with her Boston look, the eyes level on Rose wherever she moved.
‘Well, I’ll go down and shake it up,’ said George.
‘We had such a nice trip,’ Rose said.
Phil said, ‘George, the Old Gent wrote. Stage brought the letter this morning. There’s a deed he wants I can’t lay my hand to. Mind looking around for it?’
‘I reckon that could go till morning,’ said George.
‘I been waiting around here for you all day,’ said Phil.
‘Rose,’ George said, kneeling by the fireplace and touching a match to the kindling. ‘Come over here and get warm. I’ll go below and shake up the furnace.’
‘I’m perfectly all right, perfectly warm,’ Rose said, but moving over there. She was terrified at being left alone.
‘No, I’ll just go below,’ George said. ‘Be a minute.’ He watched a moment while the small fire of the kindling lapped weakly at the tough, resistant bark of the green logs, then he turned and walked out through the big dining room with all the heavy, crouching mahogany furniture. Rose heard a door open and close, and steps descending.
She was to know that basement well, that basement that flooded every spring; the rising water, slick with oil that leaked from the water pump, found out the dwellings of mice who drowned and floated bloated and belly-up in the small light that seeped through the ground-level windows. She heard a frantic rumbling down there, then the excruciating scraping of shovel on concrete that made her flesh crawl, then the clank of an iron door. Smelled coal smoke.
She could not control her trembling, nor forestall the beginnings of an unusual headache. Phil had seated himself close to the fringed lamp on the table in the middle of the room and held a magazine at a painful angle to catch the required light; when Phil read, his lips moved. She felt that the silence was bound to be worse than anything she might say, but her light voice caught in her throat. ‘Well, brother Phil,’ she began, ‘it’s good to be here.’
His lips continued to move, reading. Then he looked up from the magazine directly at her and smiled. He smiled as already George’s heavy steps ascended the still-unknown stairs, and Phil continued to smile, and then said clearly, ‘I’m not your brother.’
George entered. ‘I heard you two talking together,’ he remarked pleasantly. As he spoke, the kitchen door opened and Mrs Lewis, humming something mournful, lumbered in to set the table for three.
After supper Phil read for a time close by the lamp; then he rose abruptly and marched down the hall to the bedroom, closed the door behind him and got out his banjo and tuned up. He had to smile, had to smile thinking of George coming into that house with this woman, trying to make things smooth. How had he said? You remember Rose? That was it. What kind of a name was Rose! The name of somebody’s cook. He had to smile, had to smile thinking of George down on one knee before the unlighted fire — a little disappointed that Phil had not lighted it before their arrival, that the room might be all comfortable and welcoming. Ha-ha-ha. George should have known Phil better than to think he would do something he didn’t feel. Phil had to smile thinking of the sidelong glance Rose gave him at the supper table. He knew how he looked, knew it would get her goat. It used to get the Old Lady’s goat, the rumpled shirt, the uncombed hair, the stubble of beard, the unwashed hands. She might just as well get smart to the fact that he didn’t do things like other people because he wasn’t like other people, that he left his napkin pointedly untouched, reached for food rather than asked for it, and if he had to snuffle his nose, he snuffled. If the fancy relatives back East could stomach it, God knew this woman could, and if she was unused to a man’s leaving the table without first bowing and scraping and saying ‘Excuse me,’ she might just as well catch on now. Oh yes (he had to smile) she was in for a few surprises.
He had her figured, had her figured from the first time he sighted her, knowing her as one who doubted herself too much to dare put a wedge between him and George by repeating what he’d said about not being her brother. She’d be pretty careful not to test George, risk his anger, tamper with his feeling for family because George was her meal ticket. And suppose by some chance she did whine, what good would that do her? The house was his as much as George’s, the money as much as George’s, and the ranch so set up you couldn’t split it without causing financial troubles, water rights, grazing lands and so forth. If she looked for trouble, she’d really be in the soup. He could see her now, coming into that house for the first time that late winter evening in a new getup that George had doubtless bought her, scared to death.
Phil made no bones about it that he often laughed and talked to himself — ‘keeping hisself company,’ as he put it. It amused him to repeat the speech of those who amused him, to savor it. And now in a chillingly accurate female falsetto he imitated Rose. How had she put it? We had such a nice trip. Phil could imagine about how nice the trip had been, the wind and snow finding spaces between the side curtains where the grommets had torn out. Feet half frozen, hands too stiff to move, aching with the cold, the weak lights of the old Reo playing out over the frozen ruts. Phil had, furthermore, absolutely no use for people who tried to make conversation, knowing it as a ploy people used to make themselves feel adequate and to ingratiate themselves. She knew she didn’t belong there among Burbanks. Question was, how long would it take George to get wise to the fact?
And then George’s coming up from downstairs, poking up the furnace and then coming up and saying, ‘I heard you two talking,’ and being satisfied about it. Oh, George was easily satisfied, all right. And the woman and Phil had been talking, all right.
Phil cleared his throat, smiled and began to pick out ‘Red Wing,’ looking across the room at the empty bed. Beyond, in the darkness, was the butcher pen. They’d have to butcher pretty soon. Not much more than a hindquarter left in the icehouse.
Suddenly Phil’s fingers were still on the frets of the banjo, and the fingers of his right hand were still, arched like a spider over the strings. His eyes darted to the light under the crack of the bathroom door between that room and the Old Folks’ room. George or Rosey?
When the Old Folks had the big room on the other side, they had always unlocked the door of Phil’s side when they got finished in there, had finished their ablutions, made their ablutions, so if he or George wanted to sashay in there, they were welcome as flowers in May. Of course, Phil never did go in there, somehow uncomfortable with the Old Lady’s things, her scents and colognes, her Pears’ soap and monogrammed towels; the place had the offensive odor of women, and the Old Gent’s shaving mug and set of straight razors couldn’t fumigate it; it gave Phil a turn to come upon some filmy garment hung up to dry on a folding rack. You’d have thought the Old Lady would have kept those things cached and out of sight, and to hear her speak her la-di-dah language and to see her walk her proper walk, you’d have thought she’d have kept such stuff to herself. No, Phil used the lavatory down the hall, the stark, functional little room that smelled of functional soap and the damp gray roller towel. It puzzled Phil that George could have bathed in that other place while the Old Lady lived in the house, and now George was going to expose his body before this woman. Would he first douse the lights?
Phil picked up his ears. Someone was locking the door between.
Was it George who turned the key, or the woman? Must be the woman, for after a reasonable length of time the door was not unlocked, as in the old days. Must be her hand that, instead, cautiously tried the knob so the door, so to speak, was locked against him. And you can bet your life that even if it were George who did it, it was the woman who was at the bottom of it. Phil lay there, rigid in the dark, thinking how the woman would go lie down with George and let him work away over her, and maybe get her with child.