Clair De Lune (20 page)

“Oh,
there
you are!” Mae Dell was likely to say, and Verna as likely as not to grab her purse and herd the pair of them out. “Come on, Allen's not ready yet and we've got to stop by the bank.” Or some such excuse to get them away before she asked to join them.

She wouldn't have asked, not for the world (even pariahs have their pride), for the Ladies were not merely curious, they were afraid. Guilt by association was something they could not risk. They were taking no chances, and she couldn't blame them. One can't be too careful around one who hasn't been careful at all. No wonder they avoided her; she was repellent. Corruption gives off an odor.

Lordy passed her in the hall now with no more than
Good morning
. Even Dr. Ansel seemed distant. He hadn't asked her out once last week. No wonder. If the rest of them had wind of her disgrace, think what Ansel must know! Nevertheless, he had come in a time or two to air his views on proposed munitions plants and what Roosevelt was up to. But that was a pretext, she suspected. Curiosity getting the better of him, he probably came in the interests of research.

In a way it was a comfort that more and more was being said about the war. It was in the air, you heard it in the halls—rumors and predictions. Although such talk alarmed her, she took some solace from the thought that in their concern with the larger issue, they might forget about her.

She went about her business all week as inconspicuously as was possible for a girl who might have been wearing a scarlet letter. Mornings, she crept to school; during off hours, as often as not, she hid in the library. No more free and easy banter with the students in the hall, no slipping out for a Coke between classes. Now she came early and, like the other teachers, stayed late. And crept home nights to stay there.

Her shame was an occupation. The only other, the only distraction, was work. She made out questions for final exams next week and plans for next year's classes, persuading herself that Mr. Frawley must surely prevail and she would be back at work.

Joblessness haunted her. Visions of breadlines flitted through her head. She had never stood in a breadline, nor sold pencils on a street, nor lived in a Hooverville. She came of farm country, where they lived well enough. Even so, it was not always easy. The great drought dried up the fields and burned the gardens and orchards; the cattle, those not sold at a loss, shriveled and some of them died. On Sundays the preacher stood up in his shirtsleeves (his trousers darned where they had worn through at the buttocks) and prayed for endurance of faith through this plague which the Lord had put upon us as upon Egypt, and for the repentance of sins for which it was punishment. He had given up praying for rain. Through the open windows dust had blown in and settled in the pews. Women brushed it off with their handkerchiefs before sitting down.

Those were the years when the banks failed, more than five thousand of them (Ansel reminded her), and fifteen million people were unemployed. In cities a grown man would shovel the snow off your driveway and the sidewalk for a dime. A woman would clean your house for a quarter, if anyone had the quarter. Farmers went broke and left the land. Men left their families and went looking for jobs in St. Louis and Kansas City. And half the boys in town shipped out on freight trains, looking for work, any kind, anywhere. Girls sewed up the runs in their rayon stockings until the toes and heels wore through. A stray bobby pin was considered a find, and luxury most extravagant was a candy bar for a nickel.

Those times were not long ago and she had not forgotten, even though she had been better off than most: Her mother taught school—she had a salary! Because of that, her daughter could go to college, and because of that, she had a job.

What would she do if she lost it?

Soberly she considered the alternatives. She could type; with luck she could get a job in an office. Or she could clerk at Woolworth's. She could go back to the farm, maiden aunt to her brother's children, and help with the butchering and the canning. Or go home to her mother in the country town, turn inward and hide from the world.

In view of those grim prospects, any notion she had had about quitting her job quickly faded. She could not watch the dream go without a pang of regret—that long dream of cities and excitement, theaters and galleries and dance studios, and people rushing through the streets on marvelous, mysterious business. Hadn't she thought about it through those long fall nights, thought seriously, and planned how she would get there?

Others had done it—gone to New York, gone to Paris. She knew a girl who had bicycled through Europe. Why couldn't she do the same, just pick up and go, on a shoestring and a bike? But Europe was at war now. England, Italy, Spain, all in turmoil. Paris fallen to the Nazis. No more seeking your fortune there, or anywhere else in these times. She hadn't a shoestring anyway, and she fell off bikes.

She looked over her shoulder wistfully as the vision receded. But recede it did. The best she could do now was behave herself and hang on to the bird in hand. If indeed it hadn't already flown.

With that possibility in mind, she had written to her mother, a cheerful dissembling letter suggesting that because of other ambitions, wayward though they might appear, she just possibly might resign. She would get a job with a magazine or a newspaper, start at the bottom, work her way up, and so on. Never so much as a hint that resignation might not be voluntary.

She went so far as to draft a letter to Mr. Frawley, giving him all the reasons she gave her mother: she felt the need to broaden her horizons; she had thought about it for a long time and felt she should leave before she got in a rut. It made a good story.

And she might as well say she was swimming to China, for all the faith he would have in it. For Mr. Frawley knew better. And to resign at this point would be a clear admission of guilt. She tore up the letter.

But to her mother she kept up the pretense.

Mother's first response was amused disbelief, a “There, there” letter: Mother understood; restlessness, just like her father's, a touch of spring fever; it would pass. This was followed the next day by another letter, expressing bafflement, then by dire warning, and at last resignation: “great investment in you … faith and hope.”

Oh, Mother knew how to play it. Gave you what you wanted, and if you took it, made you feel guilty as hell. But in the next letter, two days later, the plain facts: “Why in the name of reason are you being so foolish? Aren't you mature enough by this time to know… For heaven's sake, daughter, use your common sense!”

That one stung. Truth usually did. She had been foolish. To leave now would only make it worse. If she had any common sense, she wouldn't. And furthermore, she wasn't sure she wanted to. She had been happy here in more ways than one.

She studied the university catalog, weighed and considered and chose courses she must take in order to go on teaching. Somehow she must squeeze history into the schedule and find time to study Greek drama.

Each morning she would read the news from last night's paper, left on her desk these mornings by Dr. Ansel. There was word now of munitions plants proposed for southern Missouri. The president said the international situation was on an hour-to-hour basis. She was horrified by the bombing of London, bewildered by Harry Hopkins. Dutifully she memorized the names of fallen countries and the number of bombers built or about to be built in American factories.

Alone in her rooms, at the kitchen table, she struggled to atone for her sins and achieve salvation. She studied, read, graded, wrote, and listened for a step on the landing.

She tried not to listen. But it was a habit not easily broken, even though no one would come. Not Toby. And not George. For George knew. No one had had to tell him. He knew, though he made no accusation. Only his distance reproached her. He had gone back to his own kind, and Toby with him, resuming the old easy camaraderie of best friends. But not with her. It was in their eyes too, that she had seen that look, the gentle reproach of the young. She had erred, and all of them were sorry.

And yet, she protested, Toby was guilty too. She hadn't forced him to come up her stairs that night. Why should he be absolved and back in grace and she alone be the outcast? It was one of the questions that harried her through the long, still nights.

Sleep was skittish. No ritual seemed to help, no rhymed words nor the counting of sheep nor the black mass of the Lord's Prayer said backward. No matter how she coaxed it, it came when it pleased or not at all, and halfheartedly at that. She turned and turned in the darkness, enduring the snaps and nibbles of remorse. Until one night, as the clock struck two, she had had enough and she put on her clothes and ran.

It was a reflex, involuntary. She couldn't have said why she did it, only that she had to escape. And she ran down the alley like one running to freedom. Between the high hedges, the fencerows of mulberry and bridal wreath and the lilac bushes, past the bins by the carriage-house doors, and on to the house with the empty fountain, where she stopped to breathe. The cool air washed her skin. It smelled of green growing things and moist earth. She walked on slowly, taking deep breaths. Here the scent of viburnum lay across the path, made heavier by the dampness. It followed her for a long way and she turned and went back, counting the number of steps of its reach, the point where you first could detect the fragrance and where you no longer could. She played at this for several minutes, absorbed in the counting, the precise demarcations, then went on to where the willow drooped over the fence. She waded into it, into the long, thin hanging branches that made a soft clicking as she moved. Out and in and stopping a moment, letting them close around her, a familiar whispering element.

She drifted, aimless and careless, with little thought to how far she was going, conscious only of her joy to be in the open, received again in the hospitalities of the night. Leaves brushed her face.

She began to sing under her breath. She sang, because it rose unbidden,

Au clair de la lune. Mon ami Pierrot…

and, singing, came to her own corner, where the tree stood at the entrance to the alley, its branches touching her windows. She stopped in its shadows and looked up at the thick, dark leaves. Here she was safe. How many times had they sheltered here from the fine rain, measured the trunk with their arms, and scratched against it like horses! She laid her hand on the rough bark.
Tell me tell me tell me elm
. Where did it go? And what was she doing here, alone and absurd in the middle of the night, playing her solitary games? The time was gone and maybe should never have come, not for her. She was not a child. Yet she had behaved as one, all seemliness forgotten, all rank and position, decorum, and consequence. She, a grown woman, prancing about in the dark singing nonsense songs, fishing up busted parasols.... How
could
she? she asked herself once again. And what was she doing here, alone in the night, trying to bring it all back?

For that's what she was doing, and no use pretending she wasn't. And it wasn't Toby alone she wanted, she wanted George too, and the fun and laughter and James Joyce under the streetlamp, and the three of them singing together as they had in those fine spring nights before the night of the fog and the moonlight, when the laughter stopped and the spring and everything they had made it was over.

She stood for a long time under the elm tree, thinking back. Well, it was over, all of it, and perhaps it was just as well. Gone and good riddance. And for this she could thank her own iniquities. She had turned greedy. It wasn't enough that she should invade two lives—one of them she must possess. That was the first sin. The second was that they had been false to George. And there was another. She could see it now, clearly, out here on the dark field alone, all the players gone home, except her. Somewhere in the heat of the game, when she was too fevered to notice, the boys had suddenly grown up. And it wasn't the times alone that had done it, or the war she did not understand. It was she who had led them out of childhood before they were ready to go. That was the third sin, and that one undid her.

High in the tree a robin whistled, answered by another somewhere in the alley. She looked up through the branches, still dark against a dark sky. But it was no longer night. Morning had come. Heaving a sigh, part regret, part relief, she climbed the stairs and went in, locking the door behind her.

Nineteen

S
he awoke with the sun at the window and the clock ticking toward 9:15. Saturday morning. She turned over on her stomach and pulled the pillow over her head, making it dark again. A long day ahead and no place to go. Nothing to do but grade more papers and worry.

She was trying grimly to go back to sleep, when an assertive knock at the kitchen door brought her upright. Toby. No, not on Saturday, not at this hour. Then who—? Bounding out of bed, she grabbed her robe, ran through the kitchen, and stopped at the door in panic.

Mother!
She had come!

Another knock, louder. She unlocked the door, opened it cautiously, only a crack, and peered out.

“Open up, lady, it's the FBI!”

She flung the door open with such relief that for a moment she was speechless. Dalton stood there, her own dear old hayfoot-strawfoot funny old brother, solid and beaming in a blue work shirt and a new straw farm hat. Squealing welcome, she hugged him, pulled him inside, hugged him again, and pelted him with questions: How were the kids, had he had breakfast, how was Gwennie, why hadn't she come too, and how come he was here
this
weekend? “You didn't come to take me home today, did you? School's not out for another week!” She stopped with the coffeepot in her hand. “Did Mother send you to check up on me?”