Over the years the old Burbanks — perhaps out of noblesse oblige and perhaps out of loneliness — had given a series of dinner parties, and not one had been successful. It was not merely that the Burbanks had little in common with the other ranchers; it was that men and women in that country had only in common what could not be mentioned at dinner parties. From the earliest days, when the guests arrived by buggy and team — elegant matched pairs of Hambletonians or Standardbreds — to the present when a man with great dignity behind the wheel of his Maxwell or Hudson Super Six drove his wife into the yard, the sexes separated, husbands and wives parted and remained as though they had never met and did not ever wish to. The hours before dinner were strained, the women lined up on one side of the room and the men on the other, the air in the spaces between them charged, hostile and embarrassed.
The women feared their gowns were not adequate, nor their hair nor their hands and fingernails. They took refuge in sitting straight and tense as they imagined ladies did, fearing to open their mouths should some ugliness pop out like a toad and mock them. They could respond to old Mrs Burbank’s chatter of books and articles come upon in her use of the newspapers with but the stiffest smiles, for they had neither read books nor papers. Until this moment, caught in this room, there had seemed no reason to.
On his side of the room, the Old Gent was no more successful in getting the men to respond to his talk of politics, the war with Spain, then the Boer War, then the trouble in the Balkans. They knew nothing of Spain, nor of the Boers, certainly nothing of the Balkans, and they, too, found refuge in sitting straight, sweating. They touched their neckties and collars and looked at their feet, strange in new shoes. The Burbank music, played on the Victrola, could not weld the sexes — selections from Aïda, from operettas of the day, The Runaway Girl, Mademoiselle Modiste, The Red Mill. They had the rugs rolled up and called on the group to dance, but the Burbanks had no reels and schottisches, and the ranchers and their wives hobbled about only briefly in the waltz and two-step and longed for the dear walls of their own establishments.
Uneducated people, they felt talk risky, for if they spoke of what they knew, of ranching and the breeding of cattle and horses, the talk might treacherously veer to the facts of breeding, to the purchase and worth of bulls and studs, delicately called gentleman-cows and he-horses, but suggesting all the same that there was more to life, more to marriage, than merely living in the same house together, and that every couple in that room was guilty of it — however far they now sat apart with wooden faces, however unresponsive. The world must suspect their guilt. Topics that were at once safe and required little imagination or education were few. Recent deaths among their numbers were dwelt on, the duration and nature of the final suffering, the last words, the final scene, the last food taken, and the bereavement of the survivors.
The weather offered a variety of aspects fit for talk, and the subject when broached was leapt on with almost hysterical enthusiasm, that each guest might express and relieve himself before the subject was left lifeless and limp, on the extremes of temperature, of humidity, rain, snow, sleet, the velocity of the wind, winds past and winds yet to be. The weather exhausted, the company might sit dumb until dinner was announced by the chimes struck at the door of the dining room by the hired girl.
The elder Burbanks learned early not to embarrass guests by finger bowls and butter plates; they kept silverware to a minimum. Group eating was scarcely less embarrassing than bodily functions, and guests watched carefully to see how the Burbanks did it.
To eat and to talk at once was especially difficult, but George remembered one dinner party that had been intruded on by the Episcopal minister in unexpected parish call, perhaps not realizing that the Burbanks had no particular need of God and — when they did — they would come to Him. It was the minister himself who had brought up the subject of cabbage (his wife, of German extraction, fancied cabbage) and he was both astounded and flattered by the avidity with which the company took it up, the women expressing either affection or dislike for the vegetable, the men using it as a springboard to memories of their mothers’ preparation of sauerkraut, of the primitive gardens in the country, and of the dear past long gone. Recipes for the preparation and preservation and the enhancing of cabbage were exchanged and each woman vowed, with a nod of the head, that she would soon attempt the recipe of the other. Phil referred to that as the Cabbage Dinner, and it was one of the last parties that the old Burbanks ever attempted. But there had been others — the Mud-Hole Dinner and the Grizzly Bear Dinner.
Dinner over, guests were free to make, shifty-eyed, their lame excuses and to depart, leaving the Old Gent squatting before the Victrola, filing away his records and rising to stare at the green felt cover of the turntable before closing over it the coffinlike lid, leaving the Old Lady to remove her jewelry before her dressing table, staring sober-eyed at her face in the mirror. The guests, now some miles away in their cold cars, drove in silence, ashamed of each other’s wooden performance, wondering what was wrong with them that they couldn’t talk, couldn’t waltz, couldn’t rise to an occasion. Why had they married? Why labored to acquire property and money when the end was sitting in chairs in the Herndon House, watching the townspeople go about their legitimate, mysterious errands?
The day of the Governor’s visit stalked ever closer.
‘Whom should I ask?’ Rose asked George, who greatly admired her English. ‘You’ll have to give me a list. And of course they’ll all come. You can’t refuse a dinner given for a governor. Oh, George!’
Mrs Lewis was cooperative; she had never seen a governor, and fancied the opportunity.
‘Why of course you can meet him,’ Rose said.
‘Thank you, no,’ Mrs Lewis said. She wished only to look on him from the window when he drove up, and departed. She would make popovers and prepare chickens as her dead mother had prepared them. ‘For a time it looked as if she would take the recipe to her grave,’ Mrs Lewis said. She would have one of the men bring ice from the icehouse, and make maple mousse.
‘Well, I’ll tell you, Rose,’ George said, recalling the Cabbage Dinner. ‘If you don’t mind, we won’t ask anybody. Just you and me and Phil. Phil’s a crackerjack talker, and after dinner you can liven things up at the piano. It never worked out to have a lot of people.’ He explained the Cabbage Dinner. ‘My mother’s face got pale, and it was years before she could laugh about it.’
‘Whatever you want, George.’ She had so counted on the safety in numbers (the table would seat twenty-four), had so counted on dazzling the Governor with numbers, wanted to hide in the presence of numbers. ‘I just thought it might be easier.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be easier,’ said George. ‘It would be harder. I almost wish sometimes we hadn’t got ourselves into this.’
‘Don’t worry, George,’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m not worrying,’ said George.
The table was set for five, and there were finger bowls and butter plates that April day that opened threatening snow, the clouds lowering over the mountains, the smoke from the bunkhouse settling down. From upstairs there seeped like a wraith the odor of singeing hair, for Lola the hired girl had been busy with lamp and curling tongs. By two in the afternoon all hope was dashed that the Governor and his lady would not arrive because of some gubernatorial business, some pardoning of a criminal, some presiding at solemn ceremony, for he telephoned from Herndon that they were indeed on their way. ‘He sounds in capital spirits,’ George told Rose, and they stared at each other a moment. ‘He says he’s looking forward to a drink, and his wife likes one, too. Don’t be surprised when she smokes.’
The doors on either side of the buffet were locked on such whiskeys and gins as nobody else in the valley ever drank, and the key hung hidden inside the china closet. Until the Old Gent went to Salt Lake City, only he used the key or touched the bottles, and George had felt curiously emancipated when first he opened the doors and looked on the array of bottles, Holland gin, Booths, House of Lords, Chivas Regal. The Old Gent had long been opposed to women’s drinking just as he, like Phil, was opposed to women’s cutting off their hair and generally acting up, but the swell of the times had forced him into offering females a cocktail called an Orange Blossom, and the recipe was included in the Bartender’s Manual of 101 Drinks, also locked behind the little door.
‘I’ll make the cocktails when they come,’ George said, ‘while you talk to them,’ and his eyes escaped hers. Behind him she touched the napkins on the table. He lifted out gin and bitters and set the bottles on a silver tray, reached for the silver cocktail shaker with the monogram, the sort that people like the Burbanks gave each other. ‘You haven’t seen Phil, have you?’
‘Why, no,’ she murmured. ‘Why?’
‘He’s probably in the shop,’ George said, ‘or in the bunkhouse.’
‘Did you look in his room?’
‘Oh, yes, I looked in his room. He isn’t there.’
‘Then I imagine he’s outside.’ George could not know, she thought, how it disturbed her to speak of Phil. Was he unaware that Phil had not spoken directly to her more than twice? And both times only at the table when he wanted and couldn’t reach something with his long arms and then, in her direction, he mentioned its name — the salt, the bread? Or did George take it for granted that Phil would not speak to her, their having nothing in common, the one a man, the other a woman? Or was he aware of the strain and only able to bear it by ignoring it? When she spoke of Phil her mouth grew dry, her tongue thickened. The thought of him scattered all pleasant and coherent thought and reduced her emotions to a child’s. Almost with relief she saw the speck appear far down the road, at the top of the rise, and the sun picked out some glass or metal on the Governor’s automobile.
‘There they come,’ she said, her heart beating.
‘So they do,’ and George’s hand went to his necktie. She had never seen him dressed in a suit except on town occasions, and she felt as if they were about to attend a funeral.
With smiles fixed, they walked down the porch steps and stood at the gate meant to keep wandering livestock from trampling over the feeble lawn. The Governor’s automobile pulled into the driveway, and halted. Then George and Rose in her new satin slippers with the cut-steel buckles crossed the gravel patch.
The Governor alighted, and opened the door for his lady. Then he turned. ‘Long time no see!’ he shouted, and under cover of his cheery voice his lady unfolded herself and arranged her little fur about her and got down to the troublesome gravel. She was a handsome, gray-haired woman with a stiff, nervous carriage and a quick smile. ‘So good of you to let us come,’ she cried. ‘Not really breathed all winter. The air out here!’ and she laughed delightfully. ‘But in this state, you never know whether to carry an umbrella or wear snowshoes. My word!’
‘We couldn’t be happier to see you,’ Rose said.
‘My!’ the lady breathed. ‘The air!’ She turned easily to George. ‘I should think your parents would miss it here. There is such a promise about the spring.’ She moved easily around the puddle of water.
George smiled. ‘I’m afraid the old people began to mind the cold, some years back.’
‘I suppose they would,’ the Governor agreed.
‘I suppose as we grow older, we do mind the cold,’ his lady said. ‘But don’t they find it cold in Salt Lake? I can remember being cold there.’
‘It is pretty cold there,’ George admitted.
‘I believe I read it was thirty below, this past winter. And they have such dampness. The lake.’
‘They’re in this hotel down there,’ George said. ‘They have goldfish in the lobby and they keep it warm.’
‘Oh, I love Salt Lake and I love the Hotel Utah.’
Rose grew a little desperate. ‘I have never been in Salt Lake,’ she admitted.
The Governor’s lady took her hand. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll meet there one day for dinner. We’ll plan something enchanting.’
They could not seem to get started, could not seem to get to the house; and to appear busy, George frowned at the front tire of the Governor’s automobile and kicked it speculatively, and raised his eyes to the Governor. ‘See you’ve got on the new balloon tires!’
‘Well, sir, I have at that,’ the Governor said thoughtfully, ‘and believe me, it makes a difference in the ride!’
‘I imagine it would,’ George said. ‘Great big tires.’
‘What are you driving now?’ the Governor asked.
‘I’m afraid it’s a Reo.’
‘Now, George. The Reo is a good machine.’
In spite of the sun the air was chilly with a small wind that whispered of snowdrifts not far off in the mountains, and the two women, their arms folded, looked at the men. Why could they not move to the house? Rose glanced at the Governor’s lady, noting the veiled look of boredom, fatigue and discomfort. She had driven two hundred miles to stand here watching men kick tires.
‘Well,’ Rose smiled, ‘why don’t we just go in?’
‘Capital idea!’ the Governor roared. ‘Capital idea from a capital little lady!’ and across the gravel patch they went, women first, men behind, George admitting that he had once considered buying a Pierce-Arrow.
‘Mmm,’ the Governor said. ‘That’s quite a machine.’
George deposited the Governor’s coat in the office off the living room; the Governor threw back his shoulders and looked around. The two women disappeared into the bedroom, and in the center of it, the Governor’s lady stopped and took a breath. ‘You’d never guess you were on a ranch, would you? Never, never know you were in the country, in a western state.’
It was an enormous room, rose-carpeted. On the shell-white walls big prints of Fragonard in silver frames — pretty sylvan scenes — caught the cold north light; the big windows were framed in lavish white lace caught by satin bows, and similar bows were poised like enormous butterflies on the lacy shades of the lamps, one beside a chaise longue. The canopy bed had an alcove to itself, and was flanked by highboys; the mirror over the dressing table was as large as a pier glass, casually reflecting an array of heavy silver objects and crystal decanters worth surely several thousand dollars: the number and disarray and the fact that old Mrs Burbank had not bothered to take them along with her to the hotel in Salt Lake struck the Governor’s lady as an insulting attitude toward luxury. How strange that she who had been born for such things had them now only on loan, only so long as her husband remained in office! Then away would go the official cars, the mansion, the cook, the gardener and the maid and again they’d repair to a fair-to-middling house, her husband to his fair-to-middling law practice, awaiting a change of heart in The People. And this small woman beside her had been born to nothing. She had inquired of her husband as to who Mrs Burbank was, and he had inquired, and found she had run some kind of rooming house. Rooming house or not, it was she who now possessed these treasures, her husband who could talk of maybe or maybe not buying a Pierce, depending on his whim — or rather on hers. But suppose this little woman in black beside her failed at living up to it all? She must constantly feel herself on trial, playing a role, wearing a mask that might someday slip. The Governor’s lady could not but feel a little jealous of her who pretended to be born into this room. ‘Imagine finding such elegance — on a ranch!’ She had paused to admire the two Dresden figures that flanked the dressing table — Love, and Love Blinded. Into the ear of the first, a fat cherub whispered nothing. A similar cherub fixed a band of flowers about the eyes of the second whose hands were raised in dainty protest. ‘Such elegance.’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ Rose smiled. The Governor’s lady felt herself stiffen, for here was a casual acceptance of wealth equal to that disarray of the silver pieces. But then she smiled to herself. For wasn’t the little lady perhaps deliberately casual, that the loss of these things would be tolerable, should she fail …? ‘Well, now,’ she said. ‘I’m sure the men must wonder what’s happened to us!’
The men were smoking cigars. Both rose at once. George said, ‘My brother will be here soon. We might just as well go ahead and have our cocktails. Something must have held him up.’
And it was then that Rose knew Phil would not appear.
Until then she had wondered if perhaps it was better that he didn’t, for how could she or George explain — if explanations were even possible — the clothes he wore, his hair, his hands raw with the weather and only casually washed? Now she began to pray silently that he would appear, for when she spoke — and her voice was so frightened it came from the very top of her throat — when she spoke she spoke the very commonplaces George had said made all those other dinners dull, dinners attended by no more important people than other ranchers. The duller the conversation, the more would depend on her piano playing. Without Phil, everything depended on the piano playing.
‘The weather has been awfully changeable,’ she began, and the Governor and his lady agreed, while George clinked glass against glass in the buffet in the dining room, and made Orange Blossoms as he’d seen his father make them.
‘Female weather,’ the Governor laughed. ‘Can’t seem to make up its mind.’
‘Well, sir!’ his lady said, pretending to be offended, but there was George with the cocktails. ‘Why, what lovely cocktails!’ she cried out. ‘Orange Blossoms, I do believe.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ George said, ‘That’s what they are.’
‘Now, I tell you!’ the Governor boomed.
‘I’m afraid they’re something of a ladies’ drink,’ George remarked with a certain shyness.
‘And whyever not?’ the lady asked. ‘Ladies are here present!’
They all smiled at this simple truth, but when the silence fell, Rose found herself staring at the place at the table Phil was to have occupied, just occupy, and she looked away, and her eyes met George’s, and his were miserable. He coughed, and rose. ‘I’ll just take a quick look-see out back for my brother.’
‘Why, of course,’ the lady murmured, and sipped her drink, eyes pleasant over the rim of her glass. The Governor half rose, and subsided. ‘The funniest thing happened recently,’ his lady began. She told a story of how a pack rat had got into the Governor’s mansion, took spoons marked with the official crest from the State Dining Room and carried them up to the bedroom closet where it had built a nest to hide treasure. ‘I went in there one night,’ she recalled, ‘and there was this rat up on its hind legs, defying me, showing its teeth!’ She rose, and showed how the rat had looked, ‘Well, let me tell you, I didn’t laugh — then! I called my husband, here, and he came running in his pajamas! I think the rat would have attacked him — no respecter of persons — but our son had stored his skis there, and my husband took the skis and defended himself beautifully, and eventually killed the thing. Don’t you call them varmints in this country? I have been eternally grateful for winter sports …!’ Rose felt the story was worth more than a smile, that more than a smile was expected, but she could bring no warmth to her laugh; she listened for the sound that would mean George had lifted the steel latch of the bunkhouse door, had entered, had inquired, and left, lifting the latch again. George had had time, now, to do all that, had time enough to walk to the barn, into the long, dark barn where Phil sometimes sat thinking and doing things with his hands. And time now to walk back, and Rose raised her chin, listening for the opening of the back door. It opened, and as always a cold draft fled before George’s footsteps.
George cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid there’s something my brother had to do. Rose — maybe you’d tell Mrs Lewis we can eat in a few minutes.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame!’ the Governor’s lady said. ‘I don’t mean the eating. I mean your brother. Nothing could have happened to him could it? I’ve heard so much about him. Isn’t he said to be brilliant?’
‘Oh, now,’ George said, ‘I expect there was just something he had to do.’
With what dignity remained to her, Rose walked through the dining room to the kitchen.
At the table, the Governor’s lady began again. ‘I was just telling your wife, when you were out back, Mr Burbank, about the oddest thing that happened. This rat …’
‘Yes, they’ll do that,’ George said seriously. ‘My mother lost several rings and a thimble. No respecter of persons, and I don’t suppose there’s any small animal that’s got such defiance.’
Now Lola brought in the coffee in the silver pot, and set it with the cups before Rose. Dear God, prayed Rose, don’t let my hands shake.
‘It’s a shame for your brother to have missed this good meal,’ the Governor said.
‘Well, on a ranch, you never know,’ George said. ‘Things are always coming up.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true. Not like other businesses, other professions.’
‘No,’ the Governor said, ‘on a ranch there couldn’t be any working hours, regular ones. And I dread the day when the ranch hands get mixed up with unions.’
‘Do you think it’s coming to that?’ the lady asked.
‘Well, you can’t tell,’ said the Governor. ‘These wobblies sit right up and defy you, like that rat.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rose said. ‘You said you didn’t want sugar.’
‘Now, now, now, now, that’s perfectly all right. I like good coffee like this any old way.’
Her hands did not shake much until they had taken their second cup of coffee to the living room. Lola had not been told to remove Phil’s place, and from where Rose sat she could see it. Suppose something had happened to him? Suppose his scorn of her had driven him off to his death? Like air into a vacuum, tales crowded into her head, a horse stumbling into a badger hole, the rider’s neck broken, a rock slide covering a man with tons of crushing smothering shale; maybe Phil had crossed a creek and the ice, rotten with April, had given way, and he’d been sucked under the swift, silent water — all deaths common enough in that country, and the subject of more than one song sung by the men in the bunkhouse. Because of the ticking of cup against saucer, she set both aside and folded her hands, twisted her ring.
The Governor’s lady glanced quickly around the room, hoping to find some object that might spark speech, and fixed at last on the portrait over the mantel, the full bosom, the eyes, the pearls. ‘That’s your mother, Mr Burbank?’
‘Painted some years ago,’ George admitted.
‘I’d say she has the face of a woman of many accomplishments,’ said the lady, thinking privately that a woman with such pearls need not be much concerned with accomplishments.
‘She reads a lot,’ George said, ‘and she writes a lot of letters.’
‘Letter writing is a great art,’ the Governor said.
‘Or it can be,’ said his lady, modifying the remark.
‘There’s a book called the World’s Greatest Letters,’ the Governor revealed. ‘Very instructive.’
His lady laughed. ‘You’ve used it more than once,’ she said roguishly, ‘in your speeches.’
‘State secrets!’ he laughed, and waved a hand at her.
George was about to remark that single-handed, his mother had raised the entire sum for the hospital in Herndon, but thought better of it just as the lady spoke again.
‘Did she also play the piano?’
‘No, no,’ George said. ‘Not a note! I imagine I’ve heard her say a thousand times how she wished she could.’
‘Just you, then, Mrs Burbank?’
‘You can scarcely call it playing,’ Rose said, her lips stiff. ‘Before my first marriage, I played the piano in a pit in a moving picture house.’ She smiled. ‘And I’m terribly out of practice.’
‘Why, Rose,’ George objected. ‘You’ve been playing a lot. You know you have.’
‘I expect you’re much too modest,’ the lady said. ‘Do play something.’
‘Indeed a pleasure,’ urged the Governor, seeing in the piano a reasonable end to an uncomfortable evening, knowing that when the last note sounded they could rise and make their excuses. Often, he had found, it was a last cup of coffee, sometimes the last trick taken at whist, sometimes the insistent ring of a telephone.
Rose glanced at George, but he was smiling with pride, and she rose and walked to the piano that had, perhaps, broken a young man’s back, whose chords had provoked Phil’s vicious mimicry. Placed as the dining table was, bare except for Phil’s setting, she looked directly at it, and felt with temporary madness that Phil had arranged things just so, and was smiling wherever he was. His implacable malice pursued and confused her. Her palms were wet, her throat dry. ‘Very well. I’ll try,’ and she smiled.
Somehow she got through an easy Strauss waltz, not daring to do more than play it mechanically as a child might repeat ABC’s, mindlessly.
The three behind her clapped, and waited.
George spoke. ‘Play that one I like, won’t you, Rose?’
‘What one is that?’ she asked, to gain time, time to think, time to will away the strange creeping numbness that now started in her shoulders and crept into her hands and fingers.
‘Why, the gypsy one. The one about the gypsy.’
‘Oh, yes. “Just Like a Gypsy.”’ She blushed, knowing he knew she knew what he meant. It was a simple enough piece, but sentimental, and after each phrase she had always made a little coda, a little cascade of notes that lifted the piece somewhat above the notes written on the sheet. It was a thoughtful little tune and sent one’s spirit singing and winging away into an ephemeral land of sweet longing. It was curious that George, George the prosaic, George the tongue-tied, had seen in it perhaps what she had, and it might have been that his affection for the tune had been the beginning of her affection for him in those first days, when she played for him at the inn, on the old mechanical piano.
In professional fashion she rubbed her hands a few moments, took a breath, touched the keys, appalled that her fingers had no feeling whatever, no knowledge. She folded her hands in her lap, and looked at them. Behind her the clock whirred, fixing to strike, and she sat waiting for the chime that might somehow release her from this dark spell. But the clock struck, and her mind was as blank as before, her fingers as dead. She turned on the bench, and smiled. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t remember it.’
George parted his lips, amazed, but he kept silent. It was the first time she’d seen disappointment in his face, and his first disappointment with her she could not repair.
‘Oh, my,’ the Governor said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Goodness,’ the Governor’s lady said. ‘Time and again, I forget things.’
‘Speeches,’ the Governor said in a tone that rose almost to a laugh. ‘I’ve forgotten speeches.’
‘Once in boarding school,’ his lady said, ‘I was in a play, and I opened my mouth, and nothing came out, nothing at all.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Rose said. ‘But everything is just gone.’
‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ the Governor said, ‘it really doesn’t.’
‘And we should be going,’ the lady said. ‘I had no idea it was so late. It gets dark so early, you lose track of time. But summer, the long, long summer is close upon us!’
They stood again beside the Governor’s automobile; the sun, gone down behind the mountains, had dragged spring down with it. Webs of ice already spanned the puddle of water beside the car.
‘Lovely, it was just lovely,’ the lady said. ‘We must see you again sometime.’
The men shook hands. George held the door for the Governor’s lady.
‘Please do come again,’ Rose said.
‘Why, we certainly shall,’ the Governor said, with a great grin.
George was staring at one of the new balloon tires. He smiled at the Governor, and kicked the tire. ‘Good luck with your tires,’ he said. ‘And it’s been a fine day.’
‘Thanks, George, thanks,’ said the Governor, and got in. Everybody waved.
‘I’ll be right in,’ Rose told George as he started for the bedroom. She waited a few minutes after the door had closed behind him, gave him time to remove his shirt and shoes — without them she knew he’d never venture back into the living room — and then she swiftly removed Phil’s plate, glass and cutlery, swiftly but silently, taking care not to let china tick as she replaced the plates in the cupboard, careful lest silver ring — not so much to hide from George what she was doing, should he be listening, but because the sound of Phil’s unused utensils would lend them a further dimension. She could not have faced them in the morning.
When she finished, George was already in bed, he had not turned off the light. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I played so poorly.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that’s all right. I expect anybody might get stage fright, if you’d never met a governor before. Maybe you felt the cocktails a little too much?’
She started to speak. It hadn’t been stage fright at all. Playing before a governor no more exposed oneself to criticism than playing before an audience in the pit of a motion picture palace or for a group of diners. Would he think it queer that she had simply been paralyzed by the eating utensils of someone not present? She thought of the skull Peter kept on his desk in Herndon. She had always hated the thing.
In the bathroom she undressed and lingered drinking a glass of water. Her head was splitting with pain; she could find no aspirin.
He was silent when she got into bed, and in a few minutes he turned away and began to breathe evenly. She began to breathe evenly as if she, too, were asleep. The whole shambles of a day swam in her mind, isolated and sharpened by the darkness. Why had she told the Governor’s lady that her piano-playing days had been at an upright in a pit in a motion picture palace — why, since she had wanted that woman to think George had married someone of worth? Certainly it had something to do with Johnny. What an age-old dilemma it was, that of the twice-married, such a dilemma that theologians, to soothe the conscience, insisted there were no marriages in heaven.
George cleared his throat, and she knew he was not asleep. She reached out and took his hand. One of the dogs out back began to bark, a sudden, hopeless barking; another dog joined in. She heard the latch of the bunkhouse clink, and one of the men shouted ‘Shut up!’ The dogs were abruptly silent, and she imagined them crawling back under the house.
George’s hand grew rigid.
In a moment she heard, too: hoof beats, distant hoof beats measured and deliberate as a dead march over the frozen earth; closer and closer, crescendo as they approached the house, diminuendo as they moved toward the barn, and ceased.
Now the dogs again. Another voice shouted an obscenity.
Phil.
She winced.
George coughed.
So much time to lead a horse into the dark of the barn, so much to loose the latigo and let the cinch swing free, so much to remove the saddle and blanket and hang up the saddle, so much to let the horse out to the hay pen.
They heard Phil let himself in the back door, and close it as firmly as if it had been noon. They heard his quick step. At the opening of the door the wind whipped down the hall and whistled under the farther door.
Phil’s door closed. Then through the locked door of the bathroom came the coughing and snuffling.
Then George rolled out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bed.
‘What’s wrong …?’
‘I’d better go in and talk to him.’
‘Talk?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I was too rough on him.’
‘Rough?’
‘Rose, you know — he hasn’t got very much. And he’s my brother.’
‘He is. You must. I know.’
So George dressed and let himself into Phil’s bedroom, and stood there. After a while his eyes picked out the dull gleamings of the brass bed. ‘Phil?’
Phil’s voice was like daytime. ‘Yes?’
‘I thought I’d come in and …’
‘All right. You’re in. What you got to say?’
‘Phil? Hey? I shouldn’t have said what I did.’ He heard the small hiss of a cigarette paper. A match flared, died, dark.
When Phil drew on the cigarette the glow briefly flooded his face. He said, ‘You two can keep your apologies to yourself.’
Now the Governor and his lady approached Herndon where they had reservations at the hotel for the night. For some miles, the Governor was silent, considering the remarkable failure of people to enjoy each other, or even to communicate. He’d found it hard going — but to admit it, even to his lady, was to expose his own belief, that most people gathered only out of boredom, or for gain. To have your table graced by a Governor was no small thing, and he knew it. Was his visit supposed to launch the new Mrs Burbank? But he had his angle, too, wanting to insure the several thousand dollars that had always been the Burbank contribution to the campaign. And now — what did he feel? Defensiveness about Burbank’s wife. ‘Imagine George Burbank marrying such a pretty woman.’
‘Can you light this cigarette for me?’ his lady asked. ‘She’s not all that handsome. There’s such a lot of wind in the car. No, I suppose she is, but she’s frightened, and pretending she was used to cocktails. They affected her, too.’
‘I didn’t notice that.’
‘A woman would have to fall headlong. You didn’t want to notice.’
‘And speaking of noticing, did you notice that flower arrangement on the corner table?’
‘If you can call it that.’
‘Well, what did you think of it?’
‘I thought it was — clever. It cried out for some sort of comment.’
‘Well, you didn’t comment.’
‘You were supposed to. No woman wants to have another woman say she’s clever. You might as well say she’s predatory.’
‘I don’t think she meant to be clever at all.’
‘Don’t you now.’
They fell silent. Sometimes to the right or left they saw the lonely lights of ranches. Just as they pulled into Herndon, his lady said exactly what the Governor was afraid she would say. The painful thought he’d been entertaining she voiced.
‘… last very long,’ she was saying. An automobile that suddenly slowed in front gave him a chance to apply the brakes, to occupy himself and thus to pretend he hadn’t heard her. But there was no refuge in that, for he knew she knew he always listened and always heard. ‘What was that you said then?’
‘I said, I think she’s probably failed already.’
‘You’re always quick to see failure, aren’t you.’
‘And then just before we got into the machine, she said the oddest thing. Said, “You’ve been very kind.”’
‘Well, what the devil’s wrong in saying that?’
She turned and smiled at him. ‘Don’t be so edgy. And I’d like another cigarette.’
A dog ran out from the shadows and the Governor came close to hitting it. ‘God damn it,’ he said softly. ‘You smoke too much.’