“Yes,” Jarrod said.
“I’ll go with you. I need a little relaxation myself, before facing the cheering throngs at the Dean’s altar.”
“No,” Jarrod said. “This is business.”
“Sure,” the roommate said. “I know a business woman in New York, myself. There’s more than one in that town.”
“No,” Jarrod said. “Not this time.”
“Beano,” the roommate said.
The place was a resort owned by a neat, small, gray spinster who had inherited it, and some of the guests as well, from her father thirty years ago — a rambling frame hotel and a housed spring where old men with pouched eyes and parchment skin and old women dropsical with good living gathered from the neighboring Alabama and Mississippi towns to drink the iron-impregnated waters.
This was the place where Louise had been spending her summers since she was born; and from the veranda of the hotel where the idle old women with their idle magazines and embroidery and their bright shawls had been watching each summer the comedy of which he was just learning, he could see the tips of the crepe myrtle copse hiding the bench on which the man whom he had come to fear, and whose face he had not even seen, had been sitting all day long for three months each summer for more than fifteen years.
So he stood beside the neat, gray proprietress on the top step in the early sunlight, while the old women went to and fro between house and spring, watching him with covert, secret, bright, curious looks. “Watching Louise’s young man compete with a dead man and a horse,” Jarrod thought.
But his face did not show this. It showed nothing at all, not even a great deal of intelligence as, tall, erect, in flannels and a tweed jacket in the Mississippi June, where the other men wore linen when they wore coats at all, he talked with the proprietress about the man whose face he had not seen and whose name he had just learned.
“It’s his heart,” the proprietress said to Jarrod. “He has to be careful. He had to give up his practice and everything. He hasn’t any people and he has just enough money to come down here every summer and spend the summer sitting on his bench; we call it Doctor Martino’s bench.
Each summer I think it will be the last time; that we shan’t see him again. But each May I get the message from him, the reservation. And do you know what I think? I think that it is Louise King that keeps him alive. And that Alvina King is a fool.”
“How a fool?” Jarrod said.
The proprietress was watching him — this was the morning after his arrival; looking down at her he thought at first, “She is wondering how much I have heard, how much they have told me.” Then he thought, “No. It’s because she stays busy. Not like them, those others with their magazines. She has to stay too busy keeping them fed to have learned who I am, or to have been thinking all this time what the others have been thinking.”
She was watching him. “How long have you known Louise?”
“Not long. I met her at a dance at school.”
“Oh. Well, I think that the Lord has taken pity on Doctor Martino and He is letting him use Louise’s heart, somehow. That’s what I think. And you can laugh if you want to.”
“I’m not laughing,” Jarrod said. “Tell me about him.”
She told him, watching his face, her air bright, birdlike, telling him about how the man had appeared one June, in his crumpled linen and panama hat, and about his eyes. (“They looked like shoe-buttons. And when he moved it was as slow as if he had to keep on telling himself, even after he had started moving, ‘Go on, now; keep on moving, now.’”) And about how he signed the book in script almost too small to read: Jules Martino, Saint Louis, Missouri.
And how after that year he came back each June, to sit all day long on the bench in the crepe myrtle copse, where the old Negro porter would fetch him his mail: the two medical journals, the Saint Louis paper, and the two letters from Louise King — the one in June saying that she would arrive next week, and the one in late August saying that she had reached home.
But the proprietress didn’t tell how she would walk a little way down the path three or four times a day to see if he were all right, and he not aware of it; and watching her while she talked, Jarrod thought, “What rivers has he made you swim, I wonder?”
“He had been coming here for three years,” the proprietress said, “without knowing anybody, without seeming to want to know anybody, before even I found out about his heart. But he kept on coming (I forgot to say that Alvina King was already spending the summer here, right after Louise was born) and then I noticed how he would always be sitting where he could watch Louise playing, and so I thought that maybe he had lost his child. That was before he told me that he had never married and he didn’t have any family at all.
I thought that was what attracted him to Louise. And so I would watch him while he watched Louise growing up. I would see them talking, and him watching her year after year, and so after a while I said to myself. ‘He wants to be married. He’s waiting for Louise to grow up.’ That’s what I thought then.” The proprietress was not looking at Jarrod now. She laughed a little. “My Lord, I’ve thought a lot of foolishness in my time.”
“I don’t know that that was so foolish,” Jarrod said.
“Maybe not. Louise would make anybody a wife to be proud of. And him being all alone, without anybody to look after him when he got old.” The proprietress was beyond fifty herself. “I reckon I’ve passed the time when I believe it’s important whether women get married or not.
I reckon, running this place single-handed this way, I’ve come to believe it ain’t very important what anybody does, as long as they are fed good and have a comfortable bed.” She ceased. For a time she seemed to muse upon the shade-dappled park, the old women clotting within the marquee above the spring.
“Did he make her do things, then?” Jarrod said.
“You’ve been listening to Alvina King,” the proprietress said. “He never made her do anything. How could he? He never left that bench. He never leaves it. He would just sit there and watch her playing, until she began to get too old to play in the dirt.
Then they would talk, sitting on the bench there. How could he make her do things, even if he had wanted to?”
“I think you are right,” Jarrod said. “Tell me about when she swam the river.”
“Oh, yes. She was always afraid of water. But one summer she learned to swim, learned by herself, in the pool. He wasn’t even there. Nor at the river either. He didn’t know about that until we knew it. He just told her not to be afraid, ever. And what’s the harm in that, will you tell me?”
“None,” Jarrod said.
“No,” the proprietress said, as though she were not listening, had not heard him. “So she came in and told me, and I said, ‘With the snakes and all, weren’t you afraid?’ And she said:
“‘Yes. I was afraid. That’s why I did it.’
“‘Why you did it?’ I said. And she said:
“‘When you are afraid to do something you know that you are alive. But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of you are dead.’
“‘I know where you got that,’ I said. ‘I’ll be bound he didn’t swim the river too.’ And she said:
“‘He didn’t have to. Every time he wakes up in the morning he does what I had to swim the river to do. This is what I got for doing it: see?’ And she took something on a string out of the front of her dress and showed it to me. It was a rabbit made out of metal or something, about an inch tall, like you buy in the ten-cent stores. He had given it to her.
“‘What does that mean?’ I said.
“‘That’s my being afraid,’ she said. ‘A rabbit: don’t you see? But it’s brass now; the shape of being afraid, in brass that nothing can hurt. As long as I keep it I am not even afraid of being afraid.’
“‘And if you are afraid,’ I said, ‘then what?’
“‘Then I’ll give it back to him,’ she said. And what’s the harm in that, pray tell me? even though Alvina King always has been a fool. Because Louise came back in about an hour. She had been crying. She had the rabbit in her hand. ‘Will you keep this for me?’ she said. ‘Don’t let anybody have it except me. Not anybody. Will you promise?’
“And I promised, and I put the rabbit away for her. She asked me for it just before they left. That was when Alvina said they were not coming back the next summer. ‘This foolishness is going to end,’ she said. ‘He will get her killed; he is a menace.’
“And, sure enough, next summer they didn’t come. I heard that Louise was sick, and I knew why. I knew that Alvina had driven her into sickness, into bed. But Doctor Jules
