THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN a foursome for games. When they were children, the four were the family. After Mr. Larson died, Ida Setworth took his place, not so inappropriate a substitution as it might appear since, as Beatrice had observed, Ida was archaic and without sympathy from the beginning. When Mrs. Larson died, Maud Montgomery joined them, a luxury she would allow herself away from her invalid husband because she was going to a household of even graver sorrows. Then last year, when Beatrice was finally too ill to sit at the table, Carl Hollinger, widower of a good wife and no children, semiretired minister of God, accepted the fourth position. They were not serious bridge players. Often they played coon hollow instead, a nearly mindless rummy. If they met on Sundays they played Mah-Jongg, in forgotten deference to that once holy and cardless day.
Kathy had brought Amelia a bowl of milk and a rag for cleaning the pagan ivories, backed in bamboo, the winds and dragons, the dots and characters and bamboos, white, bright teeth of the wall of China to be built, opened, and destroyed that evening by the remnant four; Amelia, Maud, Ida, and Carl.
“It’s what I’d like for my supper, too,” Amelia said. “A bowl of milk.”
“There’s a chicken in the oven,” Kathy said.
“So there is, and I’ll enjoy it.”
“So that I can make chicken sandwiches for later.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“The doctor said, yesterday, maybe I’d go next week,” Kathy said.
“I know,” Amelia said.
“I don’t want it born.”
“Well, you can’t go around eight months’ pregnant for the rest of your life.”
“You’re lame,” Kathy said, as if that cast doubt on Amelia’s statement.
“You’ll be glad once it’s over.”
“I won’t. I’ll have to give it away, and then I’ll have to go home, empty.”
“That’s all right.”
“It isn’t. I don’t want to go. Couldn’t I just come back here? Couldn’t I just go on working for you?”
“You haven’t even finished school.”
“I don’t care about that. I never did. Anyway, they’ll all say things, they’ll…”
“Kathy,” Amelia said, quietly.
“Miss Hopwood said I shouldn’t ask you.”
“Shouldn’t isn’t ever very strong against needing to. Miss Hopwood understands that,” Amelia said, both to comfort and to end the conversation.
“She’s pretty, and she’s not really strict, but she’s not kind the way Miss Jameson is. I hope Miss Jameson’s going to marry Mr. Fallidon.”
“Do you?”
“Oh yes, don’t you?”
“If they’d like to,” Amelia said. “Now go along and get the table set.”
Was it something lacking in her nature, Amelia wondered, that she did not speculate about such matters? The only thing she ever tried to look ahead to was trouble, and even that was an alien exercise which she took on now simply because Sister was not there to do it for her. Beatrice, reader of horoscopes and weather reports, was, just the same, often surprised about what finally did happen. Amelia rarely was. Without expectations to contradict, she could usually see how whatever it was had come about, motives and clues stored for after-the-fact. She was never as well prepared as Beatrice to accept responsibility, though better prepared simply to accept: love, death, a hot day. And Agate? As Rosemary pointed out, whether Amelia was going to be good or bad for Agate wasn’t the issue; there was no one else to take her. That was not, of course, what Amelia would say to Maud Montgomery tonight.
“I’ve taken Rosemary Hopwood’s advice,” Amelia said.
“I don’t believe Rosemary Hopwood is a real social worker. I never have,” Maud said, trying to find the die she had just cast in one of the two lower areas of her trifocals.
“It’s a two, Maud,” Ida said, without aid.
“Just turning up like that,” Maud said, “after her mother died.”
“She has a master’s degree in social work,” Carl said.
“I’m not talking about degrees. I’m talking about the feel of a thing. Anyone who would advise Amelia to take another of these girls is simply not competent.”
“Well,” Carl said, “we’re all too old to be doing what we’re doing, but we go on doing it.”
“If you’re suggesting that I should hire a nurse for Arthur …”
“Not at all,” Carl said. “What would you do with yourself if you did?”
“It’s Arthur I’m thinking about, not myself. He simply couldn’t stand someone he didn’t know doing the things I do for him.”
“He’d have to if you got sick,” Ida said.
“I don’t intend to get sick.”
“Six, Carl,” Ida said. “So, double East, pick up your luck.”
“Thank you,” Carl said, putting the die on his rack. Mah-Jongg was a relatively new game to him, and he often forgot the ritual gestures, which were more important at this table than any concentration on the game itself. This attitude, in his profession, should have suited him well enough, but he never had been able to accept it easily—in church or at the gaming table.
The way some of these young women behave,” Maud said. “They don’t even seem to think they have to get married any more. Harriet Jameson, for instance. She apparently believes she can be anywhere with Peter Fallidon, even in his apartment, as long as she takes her own car. He trails her around the city, following her little Volkswagen as if he were a private detective instead of a bank manager. I think it’s disgraceful.”
Ida smiled, opening her part of the wall. Peter and Harriet driving around after each other all over town did not interest her so much as having seen Rosemary’s car parked in front of George’s last night after the shop was closed. Rosemary interested Ida. She found Harriet frankly dull and was sure that, however silly the arrangement with Peter Fallidon might be, it was perfectly innocent.
“… perfectly innocent,” Amelia was saying.
“Oh, Amelia, every girl in this house is treated as if she were victim of the immaculate conception. Sorry, Carl.”
“Quite all right, Maud. I don’t believe in it myself as anything but a metaphor, though it’s an accurate one.”
“Do you know anything about the new girl?” Ida asked.
“Not a great deal,” Amelia answered. “Her name is Agate.”
“Agate?” Maud repeated.
“Short for Agatha, I suppose.”
A peculiarity of the arrangement was that none of these girls was ever given a last name, except in the records.
“Pung,” Ida said, picking up Carl’s discard. “What color are her eyes going to be?”
“What an odd thing to wonder,” Maud said.
“Dark gray?” Carl suggested.
“They must catch the light anyway,” Ida said.
She had no further help, and Amelia regretted it, but she had nothing in her of Beatrice’s whimsy, which could always encourage Ida in her own.
“Kong,” Maud said.
Amelia drew from the wall, paused, and said, “Mah-Jongg.”
Carl never liked the moment of counting because he could not remember the doubling intricacies of flowers and winds, kongs of dragons. He did not mind being helped, but he was always reminded, by Maud, that technically any help disqualified him. She liked disqualifying people so that she could then be generously forgiving. Carl had promised himself for months that he would read and memorize the scoring, but, once away from the table, he could not feel defensive enough to bother.
“I know I pay everybody double,” he said hopefully.
“And with a count of fifty, you’ll be paying everybody,” Ida said.
Maud glared with a slowly raising head so that she could register disapproval in all three ranges of vision. Ida smiled at her, offering her ivory counters, held out in her frail, ivory hand. Payments made, it was time to build the wall again.
“Their ancient, glittering eyes were gay,” Ida said.
“Yeats?” Carl suggested.
“Yeats,” she said. “About some Chinamen on a mountain.”
“I don’t want to talk about the war,” Maud said, “or anything related to it.”
“Hysterical women,” Ida thought, still in the poem and staying there.
“Pung,” Carl said, resisting a boyish temptation to shout “bonsai!” instead. It was a burden of age to feel more often childish than adolescent. To deal with it, he added, “Old Tom Berger died last Wednesday.”
The other three nodded. They had read the death notices. All four had one thing in common: Ida at seventy-eight, Maud at seventy-five, Amelia at seventy-two, and Carl at seventy did not wonder which one of them would be next. Each one, in relative health and commitment, imagined into at least another five years. It made them, for all their other differences, comfortable companions. They would see each other through a number of other deaths first, as they were still, to some extent, seeing Amelia through Beatrice’s.
“Was that a chest of yours I saw on Dina’s truck today?” Ida asked.
“Yes,” Amelia said. “I’m giving it to Harriet.”
“To Harriet? What for?” Maud asked.
“She liked it,” Amelia said.
“Oh.”
“Is she going to marry Peter Fallidon?” Ida asked.
“I don’t know,” Amelia said.
“I don’t think he’s the marrying kind,” Carl said.
“How do you judge that?” Maud wanted to know. “He’s already a widower.”
“You know, he’s nearly convinced me that this town may still turn into a city,” Amelia said.
“So he doesn’t want you to sell the F Street property?” Maud asked.
“Yes, that,” Amelia said.
Kathy was at the door with the chicken sandwiches.
“Is it that time already?” Amelia asked.
“Ten-thirty, Miss A.”
On a Saturday night they often played whatever they were playing until midnight. On Sunday, though none of them had any reason to consider Monday the beginning of anything, they were careful to stop early. And they could stop in the middle of a rubber or round, in the middle of a hand, since there was never anything at stake, not even their interest. So now they pushed away from the table, variously adapting to their frailties, except for Ida who seemed to have none aside from being frail. Kathy left the sandwiches and came back with thin, hot, nearly bitter chocolate, the only thing Amelia insistently taught all her girls to make, for it was a specialty of the Larson house. Her guests could trust it, no matter who had made it. They were not so confident about the sandwiches, but they ate briefly against the alarms of both butter and mayonnaise, knowing remedies.
“A week from Friday?” Amelia suggested, as she stood with her guests at the door.
They agreed, soft, old lips against the soft, old cheek, careful of dentures. There was only one car in the drive, Carl’s. He helped both his passengers in.
Maud needed to be driven simply round the block.
“Love to Arthur,” Ida said. “I’ll call in during the week.”
“Do that,” Maud said. “He’s always better for a visit. Don’t bother, Carl.”
But Carl had already opened his door. He would see Maud to her house, as he always did, courtesy relieving his small guilt at being glad to be rid of her once again.
“What will she do when Arthur dies?” Ida asked, as Carl got back into the car.
“Perhaps he won’t be that unkind,” Carl said.
Ida sat with that, interested in the unkind dead, who had always been as much her companions as the living. There were so many more of them, and they were her neighbors, which was Ida’s most important comic fact. She lived on the top of a hill in a little white house, overlooking the graveyard. She had lived there since she was seven, orphaned by a fire and taken by her aunt, the “first” or “original” Miss Setworth, who said, “The dead are friendly, peaceful companions, and I would sooner recommend a man to their company than to a good many of the livelier worlds I’ve known.” But her aunt was neither sinister nor cynical. She had been a loving guardian and a loving friend, teaching Ida truths that did not seem hard at the time: fearlessness, horticulture, poetry, and self-discipline. It was one of the marks of a stagnant town that no one had ever thought to suggest that, once old Miss Setworth was dead, Ida should move into town. No one would ever suggest to Amelia that she should move out of the house she had grown up in, either. When anyone had to move, there was sympathy. But before that, there were ways of adapting large houses to reduced numbers and circumstances, ways of limiting isolation and loneliness. It would never have occurred to Ida to apologize to Carl or Cole or Rosemary Hopwood or any of the others who so often drove the five miles out of town to pick her up or take her home. She was too old to drive herself and too careful to spend much on taxis, even though the flat rate to Ida’s had been fixed at $1 years ago and had never gone up. It was a pleasant trip on a back road, past a dairy farm, then along the rising slope of graves, through an old prune orchard to her own dirt drive.
“Are you going to ask me in for a brandy?” Carl asked.
“Do you need one?”
“Yes,” Carl said.
The flowered summer slipcovers were already on the old couch and the armchairs by the fire, and only the African violets and Christmas cactus remained on the plant stand in the window. The others had been put out in the gentle weather. It was not a cluttered room, perhaps because the two Misses Setworth had been domestically related to no one but each other and had shared a taste for serene space. The quiet seascape over the fireplace mirrored in miniature the view from the front windows and the terrace, over the town to the sea.
“How many years have you lived alone now?” Carl asked, standing while Ida got the brandy and, he was interested to see, two glasses from the cupboard.
“Nearly thirty,” Ida said.
“A long time.”
“Not as long, I imagine, as the last two years have been for you.”
“It’s obvious I do it badly, isn’t it?”
“Not badly,” Ida said, offering him the job of pouring the drinks. “You keep yourself clean and cheerful and busy. You just don’t enjoy it. Why don’t you marry again?”
“I’d like to.”
“Then you should go about it,” Ida said. “Stop hiding with A and Maud and me. You never will learn to play Mah-Jongg, you know, and you’d like a serious bridge partner.”
“I’d like to marry you, Ida,” Carl said.
She did not reply except with the unguarded surprise in her finely set, light eyes.
“Does that seem ridiculous to you?” he asked, smiling an apology.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“I suppose it is ridiculous then,” he said, taking his brandy like medicine but immediately pouring himself another—“for you.”
“Why would such a thing occur to you?”
“Well,” Carl said, “I think we’re companionable. I think it might make financial sense. I don’t like living alone. And—if it doesn’t sound foolish—I love you.”
“You love me?”
“Yes, Ida, I do,” Carl said, and again he smiled.
“I’m seventy-eight years old,” Ida announced. “I have not been domestically intimate with anyone for thirty years. In my life I have never been affectionately intimate with anyone.”
“You’ve never loved anyone?”
“No,” Ida said, sharply.
“A word both too sacred and too profane for your critical use,” Carl said.
“Is that a reprimand?”
“I suppose it is. Forgive me. The natural bad habit of a minister. ‘Love’ is an easy word for me. I mean by it all lands of very ordinary needs and pleasures. I mean by it admiration and affection.”
“I don’t know anything about ordinary needs and pleasures,” Ida said, finishing her own brandy.
“Another?”
“Thank you.”
“I think you know more about them than most people. How else could you have lived alone so contentedly?”
“I’m not always content,” Ida said. “My aunt once said to me, ‘The only way I could ever be sure of having my own way was to live alone.’ She said she was of too amiable a nature to get along with people in a way that would suit her for very long.”
“She got along with you to suit her well enough.”
“I was a child,” Ida said. “A well-behaved child.”
“But not too amiable,” Carl said.
“No, I suppose not. Carl, if you want a wife, you must find someone who knows something about the job and someone young enough to…” She gestured to end that sentence. “Not a virgin, eight years your ancient. That is simply absurd.”
“Put that way, probably. But I don’t really want ‘a wife.’ I’d like for whatever years we have left to share as much with you as we can. And, for heaven’s sake, Ida, I’m not talking about sex.”
“How should I know what you’re talking about?” Ida demanded in embarrassed irritation.
“By listening to me. By considering what might be a perfectly practical, sensible proposal.” Carl was also feeling irritable.
Quite suddenly Ida burst into tears.
“My dear,” he said gently and went to her where she sat on the couch, her face in her hands.
“I shouldn’t have taken that second brandy,” she said, as she recovered.
They sat side by side, Carl’s arm around her, stiff and awkward in their bodies but somehow easier with each other. Then Carl reached for the bottle.
“How are you going to drive home?” Ida demanded.
“Maybe I’m not going to,” Carl said. “Will you have another?”
“I have also never been drunk in my life,” Ida said. “And this is no time to begin. You must go home, Carl.”
“Must I? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Ida said.
“Will you marry me?”
“I don’t know.”
He put the bottle down without having poured another drink. Then he kissed her on the cheek and got up.
“I’ll phone you in the morning,” he said.
“I won’t know in the morning.”
“I know,” he said. “But one of these mornings you may.”
When he had gone, Ida did pour herself another drink, and, as she drank it, she cried again, a frankly drunken crying, though it was true that she had never been drunk in her life. When she had finished those tears, she went into her bedroom and carefully took off all her clothes. Then she stared at her hairless nakedness, the soft folds and puckers of skin that had been her breasts so long ago she had forgotten their shapes, and at her ancient face, bluish and stained now with confusion as well as age.
“Oh, Beatrice, where is your sharp tongue now?” she demanded theatrically. “We are such old fools because the ones who laugh best die first. I can’t love Carl Hollinger. I don’t even know what it means.”
Then she took from the hook on her closet door a pink flannel nightgown and a robe. In the bathroom, she did not look into the mirror after her teeth were out. She never had. And this was certainly no time to begin.
May 20, 1936: Ida called today to say they wouldn’t be able to come for the evening because Aunt Setworth is ill again—the same digestive complaint. Mama is more irritable about other people’s ailments than she is about her own. She is disappointed, of course. Sister offers double solitaire, a game which might have been invented for Ida and Aunt S. How can we all be so resigned?
May 21, 1936: Met Ida for lunch today. She doesn’t look well herself but was as full of whimsy as ever. She never gossips the way I do. She imagines people just as they are not. The way she turned Maud into a scheming nurse after a rich man’s money still makes me laugh. What I said was simply that she does make Arthur sick, which is an exaggeration. At least Ida’s interested. Sister has odd gaps of humor or some lack of malice. It isn’t loyalty in her. It’s a lack.
May 22, 1936: When Maud told us today that Arthur was suffering from slow deterioration, Mama had a real lapse of tact and said, “It’s really everyone’s disease.” Sister does get that from Mama, though Sister’s really much worse. Maud was quite put out though she tried not to show it.
May 23, 1936: Doing nothing but trying to love friends and relatives makes a bitter, frivolous life. Not for Sister. Will I never outgrow envying her deformity? Being in some dark way in love with it, wanting it for myself. But for me, it would be simply another excuse, a way to rest in self-pity. She is so placidly grotesque. With my body, she would have escaped without effort and without guilt.