The Seasons Hereafter (2 page)

There was a wary respect on all sides. She knew what the general opinion was of state wards, and though she watched the boys at school she had nothing to do with them. If one approached her, she ignored him, suspecting that he thought she was loose because she was somebody's mistake.

Sometimes a girl was genuinely friendly, and she was invited to come to Sunday School, and join the Girl Scouts or the 4-H. Mrs. Bearse insisted on Sunday School, but said she could suit herself about the others. Vanessa hadn't ever wanted to be a Scout or a 4-H member. She felt that she had nothing in common with those girls; besides, if you were a state ward it was better to start early being a loner. She went to Sunday School by herself, decently dressed even to gloves, and read “The Song of Solomon” behind her quarterly.
Behold, thou art fair, my love
. . .

“Are you happy here, Anna?” Miss Foster asked.

“Yes, Miss Foster.”

“Mrs. Bearse seems satisfied too.”

Vanessa knew Miss Foster was always glad to get this visit over with. Vanessa wasn't one, of her problems, but neither was she one of the easy ones. Some perversity always took hold of her whenever anyone turned full attention on her, and she became blank and wooden. Dismissed, she sped to the shore, and as she ran, her thoughts followed a familiar pattern.
There was this girl . . . Vanessa . . . and she was fourteen, and everyone thought she was a state ward. Even Miss Foster thought she was, because everyone had to believe it; positively everyone, so nobody could give away the secret. It was absolutely important that nobody should know who she really was. Even she couldn't know, until The Day
.

What had been the dining room in the old glory of the house on Water Street was Vanessa's and Barry's bedroom. She rented out the front and back parlors, and it was from the back parlor that the shuddering crash came. Brutally it knocked her out of the clear icy air around the convent in the Himalayas where the eagles flew level with the lawn. She sat staring across the kitchen until there was a thump and a yelp. Then she got up and went to the back-parlor door, where she beat her fist against the panels. Nothing moved inside, so she opened the door. The smell of cheap gin, stale cigarette smoke, a kerosene heater, sweat, and dirty clothes, was thick as a wall. She said coldly through it, “What's going on?”

“Oh-oh!” The woman giggled through her fingers splayed across her lips. She was dumpy and frowzy, her housewifely print ripped on one shoulder. She rolled her eyes foolishly at Van and kept giggling. Van pushed her hands into her hip pockets and sighed. “Where's Brig?”

“What do you think he tried?” asked the woman, suddenly prudish. “And him old enough to be my father!”

“I doubt that,” said Van. “Brig!” He rose from the floor on the other side of the bed and hauled himself up by the ornate head-board. He was bald and stubby, chinless, wet-eyed, his belly sagging out in the grimy undershirt over unbelted pants. He looked pitifully at Vanessa.

“It's not what you think. We was just having a sociable little drink.

“I know your sociable little drinks. Remember what I told you the last time. And there's not a place in town that'd rent you a room.”

Brig hung miserably to the headboard. “White slaver!” the woman spat at him and began looking around for her coat. “Honest,” she appealed to Van. “I never dreamed when I come in with him. He seemed a real nice gentlemanly fellow, the kind a girl could feel safe with.”

“Oh, rats,” said Vanessa. She stood aside and the woman minced out, giving her head a haughty toss as she passed Van. On the way through the hall she stopped outside the front-parlor door, then looked back and saw Van watching her. She tossed her head again and went out.

Brig snuffled wretchedly. “If you throw me out where'll I sleep tonight?”

“I'm not throwing you out tonight. But you've got no more chances, you understand?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He began to weep. Vanessa thought with a keen pain of the thin pure air and the eagles, Kanchenjunga's snows rosy with sunrise. She slammed the door on Brig and started back to the kitchen, just as the big front door swung open and one of her upstairs lodgers came in.

“Hi, Van.” The woman leaned on the newel post and looked tiredly up the stairs. She worked at the Harborview Bar; she was in her late forties and had a bleached, prim prettiness, but there were lines in her face from bad hours and tired feet. “You talked Mooney into swapping rooms with me yet?” she asked, with a longing glance back toward the front-parlor door. Television began to blare behind it.

“Mooney and I don't talk.” Vanessa gave her a small smile and went back to the kitchen as Brenda began wearily to climb the stairs.

Outside the kitchen, the dusk thickened. The back yard became a jungle, dense and impenetrable except for cats. Vanessa read on in the island of light from the pin-up lamp. The oil bottle gurgled, the ancient refrigerator heaved into asthmatic life, there was a persistent drip in the black sink, and faint scratchings and rustlings inside the cupboards. She heard, yet did not. In the three years that they had lived here, rent-free because their presence kept the house from being ripped to pieces or burned down by vandals, she had grown used to the house's sounds. She didn't stir until the back door was flung open and Barry came into the kitchen in his work clothes and rubber boots, his oil clothes over his arm.

She saw him as if from a great distance, blinking dreamily. He put a newspaper-wrapped package on the dresser. “Caught a big haddock in one of my traps today,” he said. He kicked off his rubber boots and stood them beside the stove. He contemplated the emptiness of the stove and then the alarm clock on the mantel shelf. It had stopped. He grunted something and went in his stocking feet to the sink to wash. Vanessa returned to her book, and instantly his motions and noises became as insignificant to her as the others had been.

When he pulled out a chair opposite her and dropped into it, she saw him as if he had just come in. “Oh. What time is it?”

“Suppertime. Not that it means anything to you.” He said it without malice. “Did you hear about the haddock?”

“What haddock?”

He laughed outright. There was a boyish delight in it, as if he'd caught her with an April Fool joke. In fact, as he sat opposite her, in the softening meld of shadows and yellow light he could have been a high school boy—snub-nosed, twinkling-eyed, square-chinned, his fair hair cut short as it had always been since she first knew him in grade school. Her gaze dropped back to her book and the arrival of the General, riding up to the door of the convent with a hawk on his wrist.

A hand reached across the table and snapped the book shut. Rigidly she faced Barry, but before she could speak he leaned toward her and his smile had changed. “I've got something to tell you. You want to start supper while I talk, or will you sit right there?”

“You'd better get it over with. I don't know if I'll get supper or not.”

“All right, we'll go over to the Harborview and celebrate.”

“With what and for what?” Why couldn't he come and go and leave her alone? A new thought stabbed her. “Did you tramp across the lilies of the valley when you came in?”

“No, I did not. Come on, loosen up, honey, you're stiff as a cat in a pan of ashes.” He laughed at that, and when she didn't move he sat back and took out cigarettes. “I've got a job.
The
job. No more fubbing around with a leaky boat and a handful of traps where everybody and his brother's got traps. God, how I hate this place and always did.” He sprawled back luxuriously and blew smoke at the ceiling. “This water-front, this stinking old tomb of a house—”

“You agreed when I got the place that it was better than those two rooms over the garage.”

“Anything would be better than that. And I told you before honey,” he said winningly, “you did a good job talking Burrage into letting us move in here. Not many women could walk cold into a lawyer's office and put up a deal like that, and carry it through. But we've been here three years, and you ought to be as sick of it as I am.” He leaned toward her, his eyes bright as sunlit water in his red-brown face. “And this time
I've
done it, the way it should be. We're going to be all right, Van. For the first time since we left home we're going to be all right.”

“Mooney's got you that job on the dragger.” Her heart began to beat faster, she came wonderfully alive. Ten days out and ten days home. Every other ten days she wouldn't have to get meals, think of his clothes, listen to him talk. “Listen,” she said fervently, “if you haven't enough cash to join the union I've got some of the rent money saved up. I can let you have that.”

He was shaking his head, a child bursting with a secret. “This is better than the dragger could ever be! This is a whole new start in a new place. You ever hear of Bennett's Island? Sure you have. Remember back home, some Bennett's Island boats used to tie up in the harbor when they came to the mainland?”

She remembered, but not willingly—not with any eagerness to flesh out the memory. When she married Barry, after the Bearses moved to Florida, it had been in the belief that Seal Point would be home forever. Neither of them had anticipated his family's fury; and Van hadn't realized that Barry didn't even own his boat and gear, so that when his father put him out he had nothing. One thing to which she hadn't become indifferent in twelve years was Barry's use of the word
home
. As always when she felt threatened her fingers twitched toward a book, but Barry had drawn it away from her, so she folded her hands tightly and waited with resignation for this to be over with.

“Almost unlimited fishing grounds, if you can imagine such a thing. When you see 'em sometimes on Main Street, it's like looking at Rockefellers. At least it is for somebody like me, the way I've been living from hand to mouth for so long.” He was all ablaze, even his voice sent off sparks. “Well, I was over at the factory dock today, trying to get some bream cuttings for bait, and Simmy introduced me to this big guy standing around with a pipe in his mouth and his hands in his pockets. Turns out he's Philip Bennett from Bennett's Island.”

“Did you kneel and bang your head on the wharf three times?” She hated Barry's capacity for admiration.

Barry grinned. “Nope, but I felt like it after he said he was looking for a man to work for him, and Simmy recommended me.”

“Work doing what? Chore boy? Baiting up?”

“Fish for twenty percent! My God, girl, they each run eight hundred, a thousand traps out there!” He sprang out of his chair and walked rapidly around the kitchen, waving his arms. “Do you realize—right out of a clear sky like that too—why, half these ginks fubbing around the waterfront would give their eyes for a chance like that!”

She kept her eyes on her laced fingers. “When do you go?”

“I can go out on the next boat. You come as soon as you can talk to Burrage and get packed.”

“Are you
crazy
? I'm not going anywhere! I'm settled here.”

“Honey, there's a nice house out there for us, away from this stink and these—these—” He ran out of words, but his gestures took in the house and its tenants. “It's clean out there, lots of green grass and woods, a place for a garden—it's like home, Van,” he pleaded.

“If you're so homesick you could've gone back anytime. They'd have been delighted. Angela's married now, but they'd have picked out someone else for you.”

He sagged onto the edge of the table. “I thought you'd be tickled foolish. Do you know what I can make out there?”

“Well, go on out and make it. I'm not stopping you. I've never stopped you.”

“No, that's right,” he said. “That's the truth. You've never stopped me. If you saw me about to take poison by mistake, you wouldn't stop me either, would you? It's a funny thing, Van. I always admired you. Back in school before you'd give me a look, I liked the way you walked and held your head and stuck out your chin, as if you didn't give a damn.” He spoke with a kind of reverence. “Even when all hell broke loose when we got married, I was proud because of the way you went ahead and took what you wanted. And even the way we've lived since— even if I couldn't be too proud of myself—when I see you coming along the street I'm still proud of you. You read highbrow stuff and understand it. You think different from other women. Fancy houses and new clothes don't matter to you, you still don't give a damn. But Van,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I'd like you to give one little damn for me.” They looked at each other silently. Then she said “Damn,” and they both grinned. He reached out and took hold of her pony tail. “Come on, Van,” he whispered. “Let's go away. We could start all over again. We could think about kids, we—”

“I don't have to start all over again. This is my home and my life.” At the thought of being uprooted she was physically ill, her stomach roiling. But nobody could uproot her, least of all Barry. She didn't ever have to be afraid of anything Barry could do.

He was halfway across the kitchen, grabbing up his cap and jacket on the way. He slammed the back door behind him. She thought of the new green spears under the dining-room window. If he tramps on them, she thought, if he does . . . But already she was reaching for her book. In a few moments she would forget that he had been there.

M
ooney thrust into the kitchen without knocking and pulled on the overhead light. Dazed, she swung in an abyss between Kanchenjunga and Water Street, staring at first without recognition at the grinning mask in the white glare from above.

“The Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “What do you find in those pages that's better than life?”

“Something that's better than life,” she said. “Put off that light.” He did, and came to the table looking more human, a broad-shouldered stocky man with a strong freckled face and thick hands. He took hold of her chin and wagged her head back and forth. Stony, she didn't please him by resisting. He let her go and sat on the edge of the table.