Foxfire (4 page)

Poor Mama, thought Amanda with impatient affection—trying to crowd the treasures garnered through all the affluent years into a three-room walk-up. Most of the contents of the big Greenwich home had had to be sold, of course, but Mrs. Lawrence had clung to the Chippendales and Bouguereaus, the Chinese teakwood tabourets and the Oriental rugs, and particularly the walnut bedroom suite which she had always shared with her husband.

Dart, Amanda had soon realized, was extraordinarily indifferent to possessions. Indifferent to many things which she had accepted as the natural fabric of life, like shopping and fine restaurants and theaters. During those days in New York they walked miles together. Dart enjoyed walking, and so—after discarding her high heels for a pair of oxfords—did Amanda, happy to be with him, exploring Central Park and the East River, Chinatown or the Battery, eating at any time or place when they felt hungry and talking a lot. There was love between them, but little lovemaking. Only twice during those five days did Dart kiss her and she, though puzzled and finally a little frightened, had understood that in him reserve and a great strength of passion would permit of no casual intimacies. And she had been—almost—content to wait.

She had suffered through a bitter week after he left for the West, with no word from him except a noncommittal post card received from Chicago.

On the seventh evening after Dart's leaving she had been in despair and Mrs. Lawrence, who had been watching and worrying all week, finally spoke. “Andy darling, please stop moping. Get dressed and go to the Merrill's dance with Tim.... He wants you to so much.... Dart's an interesting young man, but he isn't worth all this...” There was much more delivered in Mrs. Lawrence's sweet, incisive voice. The voice of common sense and convention. She ran down at last, sighed and glanced at her daughter. She patted her bobbed, still-broxwnish hair nervously and added, “Besides all that, too.... Well...”

“And besides all that,” said Amanda, “he hasn't actually asked me to marry him.”

“You're so pretty, dear,” said Mrs. Lawrence quickly. “You ought to be having lots of gaiety and fun. If only that horrible crash ... and when I see those Merrills going on the same, not scratched—just because Roy Merrill developed some sort of a sixth sense or something in September of '29 and got out of the market, while poor Daddy...” She shut her eyes, then shook her head. “There's no use going back over things, but when I see the Merrills giving a dance like this at the Waldorf...” She broke off and listened to the buzzer in the hall outside. “I guess that's Tim now, dear. Please be nice to him.”

Amanda had always been nice to Tim and she was still very fond of him. He was a gay and personable young man in his evening clothes, a white carnation winking in his buttonhole, his blond hair gleaming like a helmet above his narrow, pinkish face. But he had gone out of focus for her and there was no gaiety in her to respond to his, nor any deeper chord of answer for the question in his eyes. She acceded at last to the combined urgings of her mother and Tim, and went off dispiritedly to dress. It was while she was pinning on the lavish orchid corsage Tim had brought her that the phone rang. Long distance from Globe, Arizona. And Dart's voice amidst the crackles and fading of the connection said, “Andy—jobs are mighty scarce out here now but I think I've got one lined up as mine foreman. Shamrock Mine at Lodestone, fifty miles from here in the Dripping Spring Mountains. Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” said Amanda after a second of silence. Her hand shook on the receiver and her mother and Tim watched her with identical expressions of dismay as she added, on a breaking quaver, “Did you have any doubts that I would?”

His deep voice answered slowly through the wire, “I wasn't sure. I can't offer you much, my dear. Lodestone's nothing but a tough mining camp. I don't know if you can be happy.”

“I can,” she said. “If you really want me.”

“I want you.” Then he added, with his usual bluntness, “I had to get back here to be certain. This is my country. I see clear here but I don't know if you can.”

“I'll chance it,” she said.

So she had not gone to the ball with Tim, after all. She had apologized abjectly and cried a little at the hurt bewilderment in his eyes.

“I can't, Timmy. I know I'm a beast but I want to be alone.”

“My God—” said Tim, “you just going to sit here and moon over that guy? He's in
Arizona,
for Pete's sake. Honey, you can still dance, can't you—even if you are”—he swallowed—“engaged.”

“I know—” she had said gently. “But I don't
want
to go. Forgive me. You'll have fun anyway. You always do.”

And he had, apparently, for she heard later that Tim and his special crowd had closed the Stork Club and then taken a ferry ride to breakfast in Staten Island.

During the months before Dart came back East for the wedding she lived on his letters. They were brief and almost devoid of the endearments which had sprinkled her other love letters, but there emerged from them, nevertheless, a strength and assurance that made her happy. Once only he mentioned his mother. “I went to see Saba yesterday at San Carlos and told her about you. She was glad I had found a woman I want at last. She seems not very well. I tried to persuade her to go to the Agency doctor there, but she won't, I'm afraid.” Upon reading that, Amanda had thought—Oh, poor thing, I'll soon fix that when I meet her, I can persuade her. And yet today, as they had come through part of the reservation, Dart had checked her suggestion that they call on his mother with a brief “No. Not now.”

Dart came East after Christmas and they were married on New Year's Day in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the Walker home.

Mrs. Lawrence after some weeks of dismay had achieved resignation and put her considerable efficiency into giving Amanda the best possible wedding. Over Amanda's vehement protests she sold the Chippendales and a gold mesh evening bag which dated from her own honeymoon in Paris. George Walker, badgered by Jean, finally permitted the use of his Greenwich house for the wedding. George was careful of his possessions and of his standing in the community and he found his sister-in-law's choice of a husband unpleasantly bizarre. During one of the pre-wedding family conferences he was moved to express his opinion.

“Good Lord, Amanda, if you've got to marry a Western miner who's part Indian, why couldn't you pick one of the Oklahoma Osage boys with an oil well, at least? This guy'll never make a nickel. No ambition.”

“I don't mind being poor,” said Amanda smiling and politely sipping George's bathtub-gin Martini. Nothing from the outside affected her during this time.... She dwelt in a golden secret room with her love.

“You don't know a damn thing about it,” snapped George. “You've never been poor—yet.”

Neither have you, thought Amanda, looking around the Walkers' pine-paneled living room.

“We don't want the papers to get hold of this Indian thing,” said George, pouring himself another Martini. “People'd think it very queer.”

“They did get hold of it once—” said Mrs. Lawrence, smiling. “Here's a letter I just got from Aunt Amanda.”

“You told her about Dartland!” exclaimed George frowning.

“Of course. I asked her to the wedding—with slightly venal motives, I admit. She ought to do something handsome for Andy, after we inflicted that name on the poor baby.”

Jean had been upstairs reading Sally Lou a bedtime story; she entered the living room in time for her mother's speech. “Aunt Amanda never has crashed through yet,” she said, pouring herself a cocktail. “I wouldn't count on it. George, you look cross. What are you worrying about now? I said we'd take care of all the wedding arrangements. You won't have to bother.” Jean was a brisk and handsome young matron, who ran her house without effort, played excellent bridge and golf, and never neglected her duties towards her husband and child. Only Amanda suspected that she was sometimes devastatingly bored.

“Here's the letter—” said Mrs. Lawrence and began to read from the sharp spidery writing....“I found your news about little Amanda most interesting. I had some acquaintance with Professor Dartland years ago when he was teaching at Amherst College, and was later dismayed, as were all his friends, by his extraordinary marriage. I met the woman once when he brought her East just before the war. Some of the ladies on Beacon Hill ‘took her up'—as a novelty I daresay. Mrs. Ransom e gave a reception for her. I'm bound to admit that there was nothing outre about Mrs. Dartland, no feathers or costume. She wore a plain black dress. She was tall and very quiet. We all urged her to give a little talk about her strange life and Indian customs, but she would not.

“She did not seem to enjoy the party, and as I remember they left very early, which I thought most ungracious. I enclose a clipping from the
Transcript
about her. I do not consider the Dartland boy a
suitable match
for Amanda (though I have no expectation that my opinion will be heeded), but I'm bound to admit that on his father's side the background is impeccable. The Dartlands came over with the Winthrop fleet in 1630. I thank you for your invitation to the wedding, but my age and sciatica make it quite impossible for me to leave Boston.”

Mrs. Lawrence folded the letter and there was a silence.

“Well—” said Jean. “That's that. No dice. No present either, I guess. Let's see the clipping, Mother.”

Mrs. Lawrence extracted a yellowed column of newscript. It was headed “Indian Princess visits Boston.” There followed a highly sentimental account of Professor Dartland's marriage to a tenderhearted Indian princess called Saba who had nursed him devotedly and saved him from the perils of the desert. Saba, the paper said, was the daughter of a great Apache king, who had in his turn rescued a little white girl from his savage retainers, whereupon love had shown him the error of his evil ways, so he had married her and become a devout convert to Christianity. Saba was described as being “quite dainty in her beaded buckskin costume, and lisping in charming broken English, her wide eyes dazzled by the wonders of civilization.” The whole flight of fancy was characterized in the last paragraph as a “touching romance linking bluebloods of the white and red races.”

“Thus producing a revolting shade of purple,” cried Amanda violently. “How Dart must have hated all that. And poor Mrs. Dartland.”

“Well, I don't know—” said George thoughtfully. “It makes it sound better, though thank heaven there's no question of Dartland's mother coming to the wedding. But if anyone asks questions we can show them that clipping.”

“We will not,” cried Amanda. “It's a sickening mess of sticky lies. It makes Saba sound like a half-witted freak. Tanosay, her father, wasn't any king, he was one of many chiefs, he didn't do any rescuing, and he never was converted to Christianity. Dart's told me that much.”

“So much the worse, then,” said George, “But I see no reason for not putting the best foot forward. I'm not intolerant, I believe.”

“Oh, well—stop fussing, old boy,” said Jean rising. “It'll be a very small wedding. Andy seems to love him, so that's that. And Dart's very nice.”

Amanda looked quickly at her sister and then at George. Had there been a note of unconscious envy in Jean's voice?

 

The Ford bumped around the corner of a cliff and Amanda opened her eyes and stretched her cramped legs.

“There's the Gila, down there,” said Dart and his voice expressed an affectionate satisfaction which surprised her though she was later to find how personal and beloved were the few Arizona rivers.

“Where?” she asked craning over him to see nothing but a drop of black canyon on the loft. “I guess I was asleep. I was dreaming about our wedding.”

“Lots of speculative faces and too much champagne,” said Dart laughing, and pushing into low for the steep climb through the canyon. “Thank God, it's over.”

“Didn't you get any exalted moments out of it at all?” she asked after a moment. “How about our nuptial vows?”

“The vows are fine but I don't much like labeling my feelings in public. Mating is a private business.... Here's the Lodestone turnoff.” He threw the flivver into reverse, backed to the edge of the cliff, then turned right, apparently into the mountain.

At once the jiggling to which she had become accustomed turned into bounces. The dirt road, fortunately dry, narrowed to the width of a car and a half, and pointed straight up into the sky. Amanda bit her lips and clung to the top of the car door. “Is this the only road to Lodestone?” she asked after several tense moments.

“Sure,” said Dart. “The ore trucks make it every day, unless it's wet.”

“What happens if you meet another car?”

“Oh, somebody backs up to a turnout. You'll get used to the mountains.”

“Yes, of course.” Only twelve miles of this, she thought, why, that's nothing—and a hundred more back of this since we've seen a town, added a sharp little voice in her head. It certainly would be good to get there, to get to Lodestone. After all six hundred people lived there. There would be lights and houses and shops, a self-contained little island in the mountains. There was even a hospital and a school and a Catholic chapel, Dart had told her. These things made a nucleus of civilization. She had, in New York, been almost disappointed to hear of them, detracting as they did from the thrill of pioneering. A long twelve miles, with the Lizzie in low most of the time, though, and around each corner she strained her eyes to peer ahead for the lights of Lodestone.

But when they rounded the last curve and the little canyon widened a trifle, and Dart said, “There she is,” she saw no lights yet. She saw the dim shapes of little shacks, higgledy-pigglledy in the gloom of the hillside. Some of them seemed to be made of adobe and some wood. Their corrugated iron roofs gleamed dully in the car lights, then flattened into darkness and silence.