Home from the Hill (31 page)

She opened the gate and listened to its familiar creak. A problem then came into her mind that seemed to magnify with each step she took up the walk: should she just walk in or should she ring the doorbell? She felt somehow a stranger, obliged to ring, felt she had no right now, for she was not alone, to make herself so at home as just to open the door and walk in. She rang. She could not see them, but she imagined them in their customary armchairs, her father in his old run-over slippers, reading his newspaper, her mother sewing, could see them look up at the sound of the ring, as they always did, and say, or say by a mutual lifting of brows, “Now who could that be, do you suppose?” She thought what quiet lives her parents led; visitors, she thought, must be a rarity now that she was not at home and boys no longer came to call. She remembered how she had so often disenthroned her father from his favorite chair for parlor dates in what suddenly seemed a lifetime ago. And for a fleeting second, before the door was opened, those old carefree times of parlor dates with a different boy each night rose up, a powerful and attractive memory, inside her.

It was her mother who came to the door. Libby looked down and saw her luggage and felt that the scene was horribly trite and ugly, the daughter returning home by night carrying her bags and her burden, met at the door by her mother. Her mother had her reading glasses on her forehead. She peered into the darkness, which Libby was reluctant to quit, waiting for her dilated eyes to focus. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Why,” said Libby, stepping forward, “don't you know your own daughter?” Instantly it seemed a false note and she wished she had not said that, not for a moment established any false cheerfulness that would have to be retracted, that would make what had to come still more of a shock.

“Libby! Why, come in this house, child! Why on earth didn't you let us know?”

Her mother's unthinking joy at seeing her did more than anything yet to unnerve her. And yet, she thought, looking at her simple face, her weak eyes, she could handle her mother. But that thought ceased instantly to be any comfort; it was just that, knowing her mother's trust in her, her easy forgiveness of all the past, smaller worries she had brought her, the knowledge of how easily she could handle her mother, that shamed Libby now, made loom larger still what so short a time ago had seemed such a simple matter.

“Why, it's our own Libby, that's who,” her mother called over her shoulder into the living room. “And looking prettier than ever, though I say it who shouldn't.”

At that moment her father appeared in the hall, peering around the doorjamb, carrying his newspaper, wearing his old slippers, just as she had imagined. The sight of those slippers, the unsuspecting comfort they symbolized and which she was about to destroy, made them a reproach to her.

“Well!” said her father, trying to smile. He came forward, automatically offering his cheek to be kissed. She could not kiss him. She made a fuss over putting down her bags, so as to seem too occupied. It was obvious that he was alarmed, and once her father took alarm he was instantly panicked. He hesitated to ask what had brought her home. Then he said, “Nothing wrong at school, I hope.” It was what anyone would have said, but not the way anyone else in the world would have said it. Something
was
wrong, his tone said; he just knew it, something terrible, something he was not going to be able to stand. “Quick, tell me I'm wrong,” it pled. Her father was a fearful, apprehensive, a delicate man: she had forgotten that, hadn't she?

It was only a moment that the three of them stood together in the hallway while his question hung in the air, but that moment undid Libby. She looked from her father's apprehensive face to her mother's bland and unsuspecting one, and she broke down. Gone now were her confidence and maturity and that defiance which once, thinking of her father's reaction, she had possessed abundantly. She had determined then that she would not take much shaming from him, that her own sense of shame was sufficient unto the deed. She had felt strengthened then in the knowledge that she was less wicked than her father would think. She had given herself to the boy she loved and who loved her, and that made all the difference. Her own knowledge of that was enough, she had said then; in fact, it had been a source of strength that only she knew, and she had vowed jealously to refuse to justify herself. She had determined to let her father think what he would; indeed, to judge him by what he chose to think. Against those who chose to think the worst, it was better not to defend yourself. Those who thought the worst stood self-accused. But now it was no longer a question of whether she was less wicked than they thought, whether she had had her justification. All that counted now was that she had done something they could never understand, which they might forgive—and that was an intolerable reproach—but could never think anything but wrong. She had broken their hearts. She had dug their graves.

Mr. Halstead knew that something was wrong, which is to say, he knew—try as he might to keep from admitting it to himself—knew precisely what was wrong. His misgivings about his daughter ran in just one groove (he thought—one amongst the welter of his thoughts—how pretty, how desirable she looked even now), and he felt an instantaneous conviction, felt a shrinking sensation, a kind of flinch of his whole being—that dreadful moment which comes just before the confirmation of worst fears. He heard a voice inside himself say quite quietly, “It has come.” He had had moments before in his life of sensing that the dread of a thing was a standing invitation to it, and now there came to him a sense of grotesque self-discovery and of a law, going beyond, including his own case, an understanding that the thing you have lived in fear of is the very thing for which you have lived. It had an appropriateness that was almost satisfying, and in those moments when illuminations flickered about him fast as summer lightning, he saw in one flash how silly and wasteful, and even mocking, it would have been if after all the effort he had spent avoiding this one, some other perfectly irrelevant and unprepared-for catastrophe had come knocking at his door. What
could
have happened to him but this?

Her mother made a step towards her and Libby made a move to fling herself upon her breast. Then she caught herself. She had no right. She turned and buried her face in her arm upon the newel post and sobbed.

She had determined before that when they were married, then her father would know that Theron had been the boy. He could suspect it all he wanted to before, she would not tell him. He hated Theron enough already, and though she could not quite see her father getting out a shotgun, she did not want him armed or unarmed going to call on her lover and making a scene. It never occurred to her to try to divert his suspicions from Theron, however; only to refuse to confirm them. And it never occurred to her that he might suspect anyone else. Now her contrition—plus one other consideration—completely diverted Mr. Halstead's suspicions. Had she seemed unrepentant, as she had planned, resolute, defiant, then he might have known. But now he remembered his recent encounter with the Captain—three months after he had turned Theron out, and he interpreted it as evidence of his success in getting rid of that boy. And Mr. Halstead was a fatalist, like all country men, and he had (though he had this once, O Lord, forgotten it) a country man's fear and mistrust of cities and city men. He was dumbstruck, appalled, at how he had failed to heed those two most fundamental articles of his creed. He had packed her off to get her out of the way of the Hunnicutt boy, and she had come back like this. He had found her about to be struck by a snake, had snatched her up and heaved a sigh of relief and congratulated himself and set her down again—in the middle of the nest. He was utterly incredulous, yet utterly convinced. It
would
be this way.

And yet it was as though he had formed not a single dire conjecture, as though he had had nothing but hope; the confirmation was as much of a blow, maybe more, than if no suspicion had crossed his mind, to hear her say (bluntly, because neither had asked, and she could not stand her mother's trusting silence, her father's fearful hush): “I'm going to have a baby.”

43

What made poor Mr. Halstead's situation positively maddening was the consciousness, even to such an unphilosophical mind as his, of how very near it approached to comedy. To the figure he now cut—small-town father of the girl undone by the city slicker—there attached a tradition of jokes and comic songs. This very thing influenced his determination not to force Libby to name the fellow, though mostly it was because he had a horror of hearing the name upon her lips. It was no situation in which to hang back out of fear of looking foolish; but even if he had known, there was nothing he could do. He would have been laughed away, a figure of fun, the outraged father up from the country, if he went up to the college town and hunted out the fellow and demanded that he make an honest woman of his daughter. Libby's fate at the hands of one of them had given him an image of the typical college man that cowed and dispirited him—oh, why had he not formed it earlier! It was of a rakish, well-dressed, athletic young buck, tennis racket or a golf club in his hand, foot upon the running-board of his latest white roadster, a creature altogether out of his class, against whose money and worldliness and proud cruelty he would have been helpless, whom he would not have known how to combat any more than his poor girl had known. He could just see the fellow insolently smiling, could hear his laughter and that of his friends following as he stole away, defeated and humiliated.

But all this was nothing to the humor that inhered in his being of all fathers the one to whom this thing had happened, he, whose vigilance over his daughter had amounted to a mania in itself comic. That it should happen to him! The mind rejected it—the irony was too obvious; the aesthetic sense repudiated it—it was altogether
too
fitting, too direct a reversal.

Mr. Halstead's whole soul rejected it, and that sustained him for the moment. Nor was he without other resources. His wife clearly looked to him to manage the problem completely, and this gave a much-needed lift to Mr. Halstead's self-esteem. Just how he was to justify her confidence had yet to be thought out, but one thing was settled: the problem was his, to do with as he in his wisdom determined. Silencing his wife when she broke into rather conventional reproaches against Libby had established his dominion; indeed, his wife appeared grateful at being relieved of the role of disappointed parent. She had no principles anyhow but what she had picked up, and only wanted to be told to by him to forgive her daughter and only child for anything. At the moment they were upstairs crying together; he could hear them, and could hear his wife trying to mute them both, so he could think.

What he was to do, then, was the thing to which he must give his mind. But his mind had a way of its own, and kept returning to what he
had
done.

Without knowing it, for he had not consciously thought of him at all, Mr. Halstead had completely reversed his opinion of Theron Hunnicutt. In fact, he had gone as far in the opposite direction as before he had gone in thinking him a menace to the town's young womanhood. His upright figure, cloaked in small-town virtues, open-collared, direct, frank, level-gazing, had silently stolen into Mr. Halstead's mind and taken up a stand alongside the image of Libby's seducer. Now it made its presence known, and Mr. Halstead groaned aloud at the monstrous mistake he had made. A thought traitorous to this mood suggested that nothing had happened to make him change his estimate of that boy. Mr. Halstead spurned that thought. He would meet squarely every reproach he had coming to him. Wasn't the honorableness of Theron's intentions attested to by the fact that three months afterwards he was still in love with Libby—so much so that his father had tried to intercede for him? He had done that boy an intolerable injustice. It was for this that he was being punished.
He
being punished?
He
was not being punished—unless it was with the knowledge that his innocent daughter must pay for the rest of her life for his wrong.

And if he was mistaken now, if the Hunnicutt boy's intentions had not been good, and if he had been the one to have got her into this fix, still the situation would have been better. For with her unknown seducer he had no chance; with Theron in that place he would at least have been able to fight on home ground. Theron could have been brought to marry her. That boy had a sense of decency; you could tell it by looking. His father had that, no matter what else he might be. His mother, too, came of a solid, old family with a tradition of doing the right thing. Oh, the incredible folly of what he had done!

But the question was, what was he to do now? He had never had anything to conceal in his life. He knew now the horror of that old saying that in a small town everybody knows all about everybody else's business. How long would it be before everyone knew? He had been too embarrassed to ask Libby how far gone she was. Surely it was not long. Surely she had not done it in the very first week she was out of sight of home. No matter when, every day counted if …

And thus Mr. Halstead came to realize the trend that his thoughts, quite on their own, had taken: … if she was to be married before it was too late to some unsuspecting young man. He winced at his own duplicity, especially since he knew very well that he was not thinking of just any unsuspecting young man. He knew he was thinking how three months after he had turned him out of the house Theron Hunnicutt had not forgotten Libby, but had been still so lovesick that his proud father had humbled himself to come see him about the matter. Mr. Halstead was quite sincere in his remorse for the wrong he had already done Theron; that he was now contemplating another made him writhe with shame. He tried to rationalize it, saying that he chose Theron because he knew now what a fine husband he would make Libby, what a fine son-in-law he would make him, that he was, after all, giving the boy the girl of his choice; as for the child, well, what you don't know won't hurt you, and many a happy family must have got started off with just such a duck's egg in the hen's nest.