CHAPTER TWO

Elizabeth Meadows Duncane stood in the dining room, looking at her table as it was set for a noon dinner. It was all wrong. She thought: There’s no use, there is no use.

Her lower lip had developed, lately, a little nervous quiver not in her control. It quivered now. She put her hands on the back of a chair and rested her weight against them to relieve the aching of her back. She thought: What a dragging, and now this silly twitching at the mouth. I must remember I am only twenty-four, and I’m healthy. I am healthy. All that ails me is the baby. It’s natural. It is natural.

These incantations did not help much. She wished it were safely over.

Then she braced her back. “That will do, Libby,” she said to herself in her mother’s voice, and she looked again at the dining-room table through her mother’s eyes.

The white cloth was old and mended. It had been given to Libby as old linen to be put away and used for fine rags. How in the world had that girl dug it out? The silver was not Libby’s wedding-present best, but a mixture of three patterns, which was all right for everyday, but it needn’t have been thrown on sloppily with the forks pointing in and the knives out. The two napkins were not even alike and the flowers in the center bowl needed changing.

Libby could imagine her mother’s quick eyes noting all this, and her mother’s quick hands transforming the table and the whole big room into something neat and cozy, orderly and charming, with the swift magic of her experience. For it wasn’t a question of money—it wasn’t because she and Henry didn’t have things. It was a question of skill, of an art, really.

She began to straighten a fork and then she took her hand away. “Celestina,” she called.

Celestina answered from the kitchen. “Yeh?” She would not say “Yes, ma’am.” She would not even say “Yes.” The “s” was always lost and left off.

“Will you come here, please.” Libby’s voice promised sharpness.

Celestina came through the door with a big spoon in her hand. Her heavy black hair made an insubordinate mass of curls around her gypsy face. “I’m fixing gravy,” she said defensively, her amber eyes dull. Libby already knew that when Celestina’s eyes looked as if they were dusty and did not shine, Celestina was in no mood to listen to instruction.

“Well, you’d better keep an eye on it, then,” Libby was forced to say. “Don’t …” But she didn’t continue. No use. The gravy would be greasy and have white lumps in it.

The worst of it was that Libby herself did not know how to avoid this. Celestina was a terrible cook, but Libby was not much of a cook either. The difference between us, thought Libby, is just that I at least know what food ought to be. She tried to lift the weight of her discouragement by being fair. How could Celestina know, after all? Libby reminded herself. An ignorant little Italian girl only sixteen years old. You have to train them. Everybody says so. When mother comes, I’ll make her teach me. Then I can teach Celestina when this is over, safely over.

She held her lip steady with her teeth, put the table silver neatly parallel, and nipped out some of the shabbier blossoms from the centerpiece. She narrowed her eyes and, pumping hard with her imagination, she decided it would do. It would have to do.

She went into the sitting room, but she did not sit down. Henry would be home soon and it was difficult to struggle up again. So she leaned against the wall and pushed wearily at her fair hair. Very fair, very fine hair she had. Somebody had once called it white gold. A boy, a date, long ago, before Henry Duncane (who was not a boy, but an exciting man) had appeared and swept her off all breathless with her sudden bridehood, to this far place.

Ah, but it was far! She came from Connecticut, from a long line of quiet people who had never aspired to be anything but simple and decent but who had, in the course of three hundred years, become perhaps less simple than they imagined. Libby was late-flowering. In some ways, at twenty-four, she was younger than young Celestina. And, in some ways, Celestina would never be as mature as Libby was already.

For Libby had enough detachment to know that she was being harmfully sorry for herself and she had insight into some of the causes. In those days a pregnant woman did not run around town in a cute pair of specially designed slacks and a gaudy smock. Libby had been secluded in the big house for months. This was only decent. She didn’t question her imprisonment. But she did know it hadn’t done her morale much good.

Shouldn’t have happened so soon, she was thinking. I should have had time to learn to be married to Henry and keeping a house. I should have had a longer chance to fit into this place, to meet all the people and settle myself. This queer little town … I don’t pertain to it or anyone in it but Henry. Alone. Who is there, now, I could go to for any real thing? There isn’t a woman. There’s the doctor. This backwoods doctor. Maybe he’s ignorant, how can I know? Her mouth trembled.

Come, Libby, stop it. Stop scaring yourself. Other women …

The incantation did not help. Across her mind came that haunting phrase, the silly phrase that now obsessed her. She’d read it in some sentimental journal. “And so,” it declaimed, “the woman went now for her child, down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Libby knew, with her perfectly good mind, that it was sententious and silly, a piece of purple writing, a fairly ridiculous way to say that women had been known to die in childbirth. All the same, her smoke-blue eyes grew round and bright. Her lip shook and she caught it in her fine teeth. She sent out of her brain a frantic call across a thousand miles. “Mother, please come. Oh, please come, mother.”

If you went west from the town hall of Thor past the Methodist Church, and did not bear to your right up the long hill out of town, you could continue westward on a gentler slope for one long block. At the top of it you would come to a pair of iron gates and see through them the long sweep of a driveway edged by fine lawns, and the portico of the superintendent’s house, the biggest and finest house in Thor. Below it, all along this block to your left, were the next biggest and finest houses set in the next biggest plots of land that ran deep behind them. These houses would have been on the lake shore had it not been for the railroad tracks. As it was, since the tracks ran below a considerable embankment, the trains were heard but not seen, and the upper windows of the houses had, at least, glimpses of the shy water.

The white clapboard of Duncane’s house, which was the second one up in this elegant row, did not suggest New England, for the style was midwestern instead, boxy, set a bit too high off the ground with a smattering of wooden scrollwork on the porches. It was a big house with big rooms. They were rather bare.

Libby Duncane, teetering back from the edge of panic, shook off her fit of nerves. She heard Henry’s car. She touched her hair.

She thought, to be fair, that Henry was after all as much a bridegroom as she was a bride, and probably he had not looked forward to this exactly. He would not have expected that after nearly a whole year he would still come home to so bleak a dwelling. She hadn’t got around to covering the dining-room chair seats in blue as she had planned. She hadn’t been able to make the sitting-room draperies or accomplish the colors in here, the browns and yellows she wanted. She had been warned not to try to paint the shelves. They would have been cream, had she been able. But it must all wait now. And she and Henry must keep on using the downstairs bedroom which Libby was bound she’d make into a library one day … for the big rooms upstairs were as good as untouched, and she couldn’t climb any more now, or sew on the machine, or scrape and paint furniture, or even get the easier flowers to grow in the shabby garden.

Poor Henry, thought Libby ruefully, must be a little less than delighted to come home and find not the dainty vivacious girl he’d married, but this clumsy hag. (Henry was just the same. His body was as supple and lean, his eyes as clear, his hair, except for the high, bare temples, as thick and shining as ever.)

She heard him coming in through the kitchen and heard him say, “Chicken, eh?” One could always hear what Henry said. There would be, she knew, a most humble murmur out of Celestina, who acted in what Libby supposed to be a hangover of a European idea, as if man were master and woman his slave forevermore. She wiggled a little irritable tension out of her shoulders.

Henry always did come in through the kitchen past the steaming pots, past the smells and the debris of preparation, and so he always knew what he was about to be fed.

Libby thought of her father—who never came home at noon but stayed decently downtown all day—coming in gently at the front door as the day faded, and being received as the master of his house, but graciously by the mistress of it, and sitting genteelly in the parlor with perhaps a sip of sherry beside him. He moved decorously, in due time, to a table which, within their means, would be exquisitely appointed, shaking his white napkin out, smiling about him in the faint, pleasurable suspense before he was served what would always be, for him, a delicious surprise.

But, of course, Henry drove a car, as her father did not, and the garage was beside the kitchen door. And that was that.

Henry wasn’t going to walk around the house to come in. Henry would always be home for dinner at noon. That she could not get used to.

There were no restaurants, no luncheon places in Thor.

Libby put mind over matter. She made herself radiant. Henry kissed her on the cheek and put his arm around her briefly. The slight pull off her own balance hurt the weak spot in her spine. “How’s Libby?”

Libby said she was fine.

“I’d better wash,” said Henry. “Here’s the mail.” He put the pack of letters in her hands and her mother’s was on top. She didn’t even look at the rest of them. She let them slip away to fall on the floor. Even to feel the paper, on which lay her mother’s firm crabbed handwriting, was comforting to her fingers. “From home!” she cried joyously.

Henry was all the way across the front hall into their bedroom, on his way to wash, and he didn’t answer. He never answered when there was no real answer required. He never murmured “So I saw,” or “Yes, isn’t it?” or “Umhum.”

Libby ripped the paper. “My dearest girl:”

Disappointment struck her numb.

I know you will be sorry, dear, at what I have to write today. Your father, it seems, must needs have an operation. It is not dangerous, and you must not be concerned about him, but it does mean that I cannot leave him to come to you. Dr. Amory decrees …

It went on. She read it all. Her eyes passed over the lines and the words.

Henry said, “Anything the matter?”

She looked up wondering what made him think anything was the matter. She hadn’t moved, she hadn’t cried. Now she said in a calm, steady voice, “My mother isn’t coming at all …”

“Why not, dear?”

“Dad has to have an operation.”

“Ah, too bad. Is it anything serious?”

“She says not.”

“May I read it?” Henry took the letter. “Oh,” he said. He read faster than anyone in the world. How could he have read it all so fast? “Well, I doubt if that’s anything much to worry about.”

“No,” she said in a wondering tone.

“You’re disappointed …”

“Of course I’m disappointed,” she said rather brightly.

“You’ll be all right, Libby. Your mother must stay with your father, naturally.”

“Naturally,” said Libby in the bright cheerful voice that surprised her so. “Poor Dad. I must write … and say not to worry about me.”

Henry’s face was grave and kind and watchful. “That’s the girl,” he said.

She thought: It isn’t though. That isn’t the girl. I don’t know who it is being so gay about it. Not me.

Henry turned her gently toward the dining room. “Go ahead to dinner. I’ll pick these up.” He bent to gather the other letters that lay on the floor.

Libby moved slowly through the archway into the dining room, talking to herself. Well, that’s that. Well, I can manage. I will just go minute by minute. I’m very calm about it really. It’s quite amazing how calm I feel.

Celestina was bringing food from the kitchen. Using her hips she batted through the swinging door. She had a platter of fricasseed chicken balanced on her right hand and a white bowl of gravy grasped in the fingers of her left.

Her thumb was in the gravy.

Libby looked at it and screamed.

When she screamed again, Celestina let go the bowl.

It broke on the floor and the gravy began to flow around the pieces with a nasty eagerness to stain the rug. Celestina grabbed for the tilting platter with her left hand, ran crouching to the table, and all the chicken slid off the platter onto the cloth and the silver.

“Oh, oh,” screamed Libby. “How can you be so stupid!”

And then Celestina was waning and bawling, and Henry’s strong arms went around his wife from behind. His cool syllables dropped like ice crystals into the cauldron of noise.

“Be quiet, Celestina. Libby, what happened?”

Henry held her strongly and she seemed to herself to be struggling against his strength, and then she fell back sobbing upon it.

“Her thumb … her thumb … her thumb!”

“Yes …” Henry was patient.

But he must see the enormity! How it was not to be borne! Libby tried to speak quietly, for surely this news would convey its own horror. Surely when Henry knew he would share her revulsion.

“Her thumb was in the gravy,” she said.

Celestina said sullenly, “My thumb’s clean.”

And Henry laughed.

Libby felt the sting all the way down to the bottom of her heart. Laughed …! She knew he was making her walk into the other room, and she knew when he made her sit down, but it was necessary to show him that this was no laughing matter. And she was pouring out a whole mixed flood of words.

“I can’t believe that anyone could be so ignorant! I can’t tell her every single, solitary, tiny thing. I have to depend on her. Oh, I’m glad I haven’t any friends and nobody comes. Nothing’s right, the way I want it. Nothing’s neat, and nothing’s pretty.”

Henry stood pressing her shoulders with his firm hands, saying nothing. And suddenly she heard her mother’s voice in her ear. “This is ridiculous, Libby,” her mother said, coldly.

“This is ridiculous,” sobbed Libby. “I know I shouldn’t have screamed. But Henry! Her thumb in our food! It sickens me!”

“You sit here a minute.” Henry put his big handerchief into her hands.

“Oh, I suppose,” wailed Libby, fumbling to recover some reasonable attitude, “she doesn’t know any better.”

“Knows better now.” Some dryness in his tone made Libby turn her face up.

She let one eye escape the cambric and suddenly she, too, saw that it was funny. It was out of proportion. “I “I didn’t mean to scream the house down and wreck the whole place, Henry. It’s just … I couldn’t … Oh, dear …” She began to giggle.

“Last straw, I expect,” said Henry calmly. “Sit still. I’ll see.”

Libby sat sobbing softly and, alternately, choking off soft laughter in the handkerchief. A terrible pressure seemed lifted away. She felt quite surprisingly spry and free. She knew already that she must, of course, apologize to Celestina for the lack of proportion in her behavior. But she didn’t mind. She felt so much better. She thought: Maybe it was a good thing I blew up.

She could hear Henry. One could always hear him. He was saying with a detached crispness that was not unkind, “All right, Celestina.” (Was Celestina crying too?) “Now wipe up that mess on the floor, quickly. Then take everything off this table. Put on a clean cloth, a pretty one, if you can find it. And make some toast.”

She thought: He’s doing what mother would do, what I ought to be doing. How strange! Henry is such a man. How very strange this is, me to be having such a fit and Henry housekeeping …

She let her head drop back and she lay quietly and even rather dreamily in that chair. She thought: Henry is more grown up than I. When he came back and asked gently, “Will you speak to the girl now, Libby?” she said, “Yes, Henry. Of course.”

Her blue eyes, soft and shining, searched his face. Henry had such a finished face, the flesh so firm to the bone. There was no baby fat left on it anywhere. He expected her to have collected herself. Well, she had. She felt quite ready to speak to Celestina now, as a lady should.

Celestina came stumbling and said at once, in Henry’s words, as Libby divined, “I’ll try to be more careful, Mrs. Duncane. I am very sorry.”

Libby smiled with all kindness. “Celestina, you must please forgive me. I’m not feeling quite well just now. I will be better soon. You shouldn’t have carried the bowl as you were carrying it, Celestina, but. I certainly shouldn’t have screamed at you. So I do beg your pardon.”

Celestina said nothing.

“Can’t we forget about it?” Libby prodded. “Please.”

“All right,” said Celestina uneasily. It meant nothing to her that her pardon was begged. Nothing at all. Her own emotions were not to be curbed by a bit of phrase. Words didn’t drive her. When she said “All right,” it was not yet all right in her dark, Mediterranean heart, but Libby Duncane could not know this.

“I do know,” said Libby sweetly, “that everything falls on you just now. I understand.”

Celestina’s dark face seemed to sharpen. Her red lips parted. “When is it?” she blurted.

And Libby’s pink lips parted, and she drew a little back in the chair. Why the girl was wild with curiosity! All these weeks the girl must have been speculating and trying to guess. It had never occurred to Libby to confide in her. But the girl was wild to be told. For just one flash Libby saw the two of them as simply two females in the same house, both born to bear children, both fascinated by the imcomprehensible wonder of their own bodies. But the vision passed. She drew back from such prying.

“The baby will be born in about ten days,” she heard her husband say, quite as a matter of fact, informatively.

“That will do, Celestina,” she said quickly, and the girl fled. Then Henry began to help her up and, leaning on him, she let it go, let it pass. It was only one more little sting. She could never explain why one was not always blunt and matter-of-fact, why there was reticence, part instinct, part rule. But let it go.

When she had washed and powdered her face and combed her hair, and she took her place at the table, she was surprised to find it charming. Everything was orderly. The cloth was fresh and the rescued pieces of chicken resting daintily on toast were a delicious surprise, somehow. Her outburst must have blown off a lot of steam. It had certainly done her good. She was hungry and her tongue was light. It was easy to chat.

“Mrs. Gilchrist was in the post office,” Henry told her. “Said she would be dropping in to see you.”

“Oh, when, Henry?”

“She wasn’t definite.”

“But she was here only the other day. She’s been awfully nice,” said Libby, pleased.

“Friendly?” He cocked an eyebrow.

“I shouldn’t have said I had no friends,” Libby confessed. “At least, it’s not exactly true. I suppose what I meant is old friends. People who’ve known me forever. But I couldn’t have them anywhere but home.” She sipped tea. “Mrs. Gilchrist has really helped me more than anyone …”

“Helped you how, Libby?”

“Oh, telling me about the town. And who is who, and that sort of thing. Whose husband is important …”

Henry was looking at her with a wry expression—maybe he was going to laugh at her again. She hurried to forestall this. “Oh, I know she’s a snob, Henry, and I think it’s ridiculous, too, bothering to be snobbish way up here in the woods.” Libby herself laughed. “But for goodness sakes, I need to know these things, don’t I?”

“Whose husbands are important, according to Mrs. G.?” asked Henry. Now he wore an innocent-bystander kind of look.

“You should know,” she teased. “But you’d never think to tell me.”

“If I were asked, I’d say we are all important one way or another,” Henry said mildly.

“Oh, that’s too dull,” said Libby merrily. “That’s no fun. Why there has to be some kind of pushing and climbing going on, even if you have to make it up, or you’d just be bored.” She felt he had no capacity for this kind of affectionate laughter at human nature, for he looked at her quite as if he had never heard such talk in his life. She went on gaily, “And if there is, why, I’d better know about it, so I won’t make a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

Henry was so literal.

“Well, I’m not going to let a social climber climb on me, for instance, just because I don’t realize …”

“Who wants to social climb?”

Was he the solemn puzzled innocent he looked, or was Henry going to laugh any minute?

“Well, I don’t know, Henry, but there is that Mrs. Arthur Cole, for instance. You know, she is so nice looking and she goes to our church, so of course I thought … But, Mrs. Gilchrist says not to get too chummy … You see, you are important and that makes me important.”

She thought, Doesn’t he understand, at all? She said sharply, “Henry, do you want me to be a little bit careful, or don’t you?”

Henry’s eyes were unfathomable. “Use your common sense, Libby,” he said gently.

She sighed, to reproach him, but she felt happy. Gossip was fun. It was give and take, at least. She read so much that Henry had no time to read, and it wasn’t fun just to keep telling him what she had been reading or what she had been fancying, and watch him pare all the whimsy, all the playfulness, away from it.

“Oh, and she told me—” Libby remembered more gossip, and she leaned closer—“Henry, now don’t raise your voice because whatever you say goes through the whole house. Mrs. Gilchrist told me that up until just four months ago, our Celestina was thick as thieves with Captain Trezona’s boy. But the captain found out, and he stopped the two of them on the street one night and flew into a perfect rage. Because she’s Catholic, of course … and he forbade them to see each other at all—just like an old tyrant. And the boy is so terrified of his father that he walks on the other side of the road. You heard about it.” This was accusing. She knew by his look that he had.

“I hear what everybody else hears, I suppose,” he admitted.

“Henry, you could have told me. Of course, I don’t suppose …”

Libby felt her eyes roll. Quite suddenly, she wondered: Why, one could put Mrs. Gilchrist’s story and Celestina’s urgent curiosity together and make a scandalous guess out of it.

Libby said, tensely, “If she’s that kind of girl, Henry, I don’t … Do you suppose …?”

Their eyes met.

Henry said, “Ask her.”

“What?”

“Ask her,” he repeated.

“But Henry … I can’t ask her such a thing. What do you mean? I only wanted to know what you think.”

“I don’t think about it,” Henry said.

“Well, Henry, I don’t suppose you do, but I’d like to know.”

“Quickest way to find out is to ask someone who has the information. Ask her, Libby. She knows what kind of a girl she is,” he grinned.

“Oh, Henry … You just put on that, that bluntness. You know very well it’s impossible.…” He just sat there wrapped in his merciless reasonableness. He was a million miles away. “You know I can’t insult her.…”

Henry’s lip twitched.

Libby sat as straight as she could. “If I insulted Celestina before dinner, I’ve apologized for that,” she said stiffly. “And I know I shouldn’t listen to gossip, Henry, or jump to conclusions. And you needn’t remind me, because I’ll try not to. But I don’t quite understand this kind of town. And I don’t know what might be going on. It’s such a queer place, with so few people, divided up so sharply. I don’t always know what I ought to do, and I wish you would help me a little bit more.”

Henry’s eyes were softer, but they were thoughtful too. “You don’t like it here very much, do you, Libby?” he stated.

Well, she didn’t. She couldn’t lie. “I haven’t had a chance …” she said impatiently. “It happened too soon, Henry …” She wished she hadn’t said it. “You know?” she added anxiously.

His lips closed before they opened, as if Henry had been going to offer another thought but now forbore. He said, and rather sadly, too, “Yes, it happened too soon.”

Libby was glad he agreed, and a little bit surprised. Henry might have come out with one of those blunt remarks that was always shocking to her sensibilities and undeniably true. She nibbled toast. “Will you always have to live in a town like this one, Henry?” she asked him, suddenly.

“This, or worse.…”

“Worse!” She was startled.

“‘Have to go where the job is,” he said lightly, and got up from the table. “I’m late, Libby. Let Celestina do the best she can, will you?”

“Yes, Henry.”

“Try not to worry about the house.”

“All right.”

“There’s no need for you to worry,” he said, rather awkwardly.

“I know,” she lied, absent-mindedly.

“Ring me on the mine phone, in case you want me. I may be going underground for awhile this afternoon, but somebody will find me.”

“Oh, yes Henry. All right.” She was hardly listening. She was thinking about his word “worse.”

“Good-by,” said Henry.

Libby, lying on the top blanket with the afghan pulled over her ankles, gratefully let the alien weight go against the bed. The big room was cool and dim. She would close her eyes. She would rest. She would not remember for now that her mother wasn’t coming, at all.

But Libby came of people who were in the habit of trying to understand themselves. Lying still, it was revealed to her in the peaceful silence what kind of a woman she had seemed to be during all that dinner hour. A woman who had a tantrum, who caused an ugly scene with a servant, who wept and complained, who indulged in petty gossip and in cruel speculations. One had only to stop and count to know that, of course, Celestina was not pregnant. Libby Duncane, a woman counting! Without a generous thought! She squirmed on the bed. Oh, why had she screamed so?

Then this was revealed to her, also. She had screamed not from the shock of Celestina’s thumb, at all, but from the shock of that letter. Because of the news in it. Because of her fear.

Oh, I’m not so small, thought Libby, I’m not so petty. I am not. Oh, surely Henry understands. She rubbed her hot cheek on the cool pillow. But I am, she confessed, a woman who is afraid of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. And also afraid to say so.

And she thought, further; Henry Duncane never was afraid in all his life. He’s fearless, that’s what it is. That’s what I feel is so far-away about him.

She bit into the pillow. She thought, I’m afraid, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be brave. I’ll manage—I will manage. Everything will be better when this is safely over.