Of course you’re going to get married!” Kate snapped. “Bess had no right saying those things.”
“It’s not just that,” Harriet sobbed, shaking her head. She hadn’t shed this many tears since leaving Sioux City. And today was supposed to be a happy day.
“Well, that’s what started it. You were happy as a schoolgirl when you left here with Rose. What Bess said made you start thinking and worrying.”
“If I hadn’t started thinking today, I would’ve started tomorrow or next week.”
Again they were at the dining room table, though it wasn’t yet time for supper. Kate had arrived home from Truska’s to find Harriet making herself a whiskey drink in the kitchen, a thing unheard of except at the holidays. Beer now and then in hot weather. But whiskey on a weekday afternoon?
Harriet had run out of the kitchen when Kate and Frieda came in the back door, Frieda carrying Kate’s box of groceries. Frieda had said, “I’ll talk to you after supper.”
Harriet was sitting at the dining room table, the drink before her, both hands clasped around it, as Kate walked in. Tears flooded an already blotched face, and Harriet grabbed a damp and crushed handkerchief lying beside the whiskey glass, dabbing at her eyes and cheeks. Her upper lip was swollen with crying and her shoulders trembled like a pile of dry leaves.
She couldn’t stop crying. She’d thought that the whiskey would help, but she was having trouble drinking it. Her hands fluttered and wouldn’t obey.
Her thoughts stumbled around, as unmanageable as her hands. If she went crazy, they’d send her to the state hospital in St. Peter. Well, maybe that was the place for her. She could finally stop worrying about everything—about Bess hating her for marrying DeVore; about DeVore’s children hating her for trying to take their mama’s place; about hanging on to a job that men had tried to take away from her (Why should she, they’d asked, an old maid with neither chick nor child, have a job that by rights belonged to a family man?). You couldn’t hate someone who was in a state hospital.
“You’ve got to stop this,” Kate was admonishing. “Nerves. That’s all this is.” She fetched a fresh handkerchief from a neat pile she kept in the sideboard next to the napkins. Tossing it across the table, she eased herself down onto a chair. “Wipe your face and stop this. I want to talk to you.”
Harriet plucked up the handkerchief but crossed her arms on the table and buried her face in them, unable to stop sobbing. “Leave me alone.” She’d never answered back to Kate that way, but she couldn’t help herself. All the pain and confusion was making her crazy.
She didn’t want to stay here at the table, going to pieces in front of Kate, but she didn’t have the starch to get up and climb the stairs. She could imagine this unhappy moment expanding itself to fill the rest of her life.
“Maybe I should leave you alone,” Kate said. “I don’t know what good it does me to talk to you. You’ll only believe what you want to.” She frowned and picked up a big ceramic salt shaker, setting it down again, hard, as if it annoyed her. “But I do love you. And you had to earn that love. If you had enough good in you to earn my love, don’t you think you’ve got enough to earn other people’s?”
Kate’s words traveled a great distance to reach Harriet, who was walking away from herself, abandoning the sappy woman sitting folded over the dining room table, the one who’d thrown herself a ludicrous business college graduation party. She was putting distance between herself and all that misery, between herself and that woman’s foolishness.
Kate’s words barely reached her. Something about Bess loving her, about Bess not saying those terrible things unless she loved Harriet.
What did Kate know about not being loved? She’d never been homely as a mud fence. She’d married young, raised a pretty niece and a pretty grandniece, been loved by everyone. What did someone like that know about the absence of love or the awful importance of love? Didn’t it require being loveless to know about love?
“You think everyone but you is strong and sure,” Kate said, her voice sharp, “when really they’re weak as babies and scared and kind of hungry all the time. But they strike a little path and put one foot in front of the other. It’s a risk, but if you keep moving, you find things that need doing, things that you can put to rights. You get courage from moving.” Kate rose and came around the table, laying a hand on Harriet’s shoulder. “But you know that.”
She shook the shoulder until Harriet lifted her head in protest. “Listen to me!” Kate insisted. “It doesn’t matter if you do it for yourself or someone else. But keep moving.
“Hold on to people and let them hold on to you—this galloping Galahad of yours, what do you think he’s doing but holding on to you?”
Kate moved away, grasping the back of a chair for support. With her free hand she covered her eyes as though they were shot through with pain. Harriet turned back from the corner where she’d retreated and stared at Kate’s suffering.
Holding a handkerchief under her nose, she blubbered, “DeVore’s boys don’t want me. They laughed at me. And … and what do I know about being a mother?”
“The only thing you have to know is that those children need you.” Kate lowered herself to the chair she’d been clutching. “They need someone to cook their meals and wash their sheets, someone who knows that they’re scared half to death of forgetting their mother and losing their dad.” Kate flung a folded napkin away from her as if to rid herself of this exhausting scene.
Wearily she said, “You could do that, Harriet, be that someone.”
“But what about Bess?”
Kate sighed. “She probably won’t speak to you. You’re walking out on her. But after a year or two at college, she’ll come around. I’d bet on it. And if she doesn’t, that’s her lookout. But don’t use her as an excuse not to get married. She’d have it on her conscience for the rest of her life.”
Harriet approached the poor heap that was herself and ran her hand over the creature’s hair, smoothing it as she would a child’s. Then she patted the woman’s arm and stood trying to decide whether she loved her enough to put one foot in front of the other.
At length she rejoined herself and blew her nose, though it was not so much for love of herself as for Kate’s sake. What had that been—Kate covering her eyes that way?
“And, my stars, Harriet,” Kate said, her voice spent and reedy, “do you know how happy I’d be to have country people in the family again?” She struggled to her feet. “Now, wash your face.”
In the kitchen Harriet turned on the cold water and splashed her face, soothing her burning eyelids and cheeks. When she was done, she dabbed her face with the hand towel. She would not cry anymore. DeVore was coming tonight to meet Kate. And whatever Harriet decided about him, she didn’t want him to see that she’d been crying.
She really didn’t know what she would decide. So many things were wrong with her marrying him. Why hadn’t she seen that last night? She hadn’t meant to toy with his affections.
She had been flattered to have him ask her. She’d thought it was what she wanted. But she’d been concentrating so hard on his asking that she hadn’t thought about what it would mean. The worst, of course, was losing Bess. Kate could say what she wanted about Bess coming around, but Harriet remembered Mrs. Stubbs. Bess hadn’t come around then.
And the expression on Bess’s face today when she’d heard that Harriet was getting married. That wasn’t something you’d soon forget.
Only minutes before, she had looked at Harriet as if she were someone necessary; they’d been so close, like mother and daughter, Bess feeding Harriet ice cream from her own spoon.
The first time that Bess had looked at her that way—as if she were necessary—was a couple of weeks after Celia and Archer’s deaths. Kate had been down with a migraine (was that what she had today?) when Harriet came home from work, so Harriet had invited Bess out to supper.
They’d walked out to the highway and eaten at the all-night. Then, hiking home afterward, Bess had held on to Harriet’s hand. And when they reached the Drew house and were sitting on the back steps, counting the early stars, seven-year-old Bess had turned to Harriet with much the same expression she’d worn this afternoon, a look of need and trust, and said, “Don’t ever go to the Dakota Ballroom and drink too much, Harriet.”