“I’ll always remember that you asked me,” said Dolly, her eyes hurrying as though to memorize the children’s faces. “Good luck. Good-bye. Run now,” she raised her voice above new and nearer thunder, “run, it’s raining.”
It was a tickling feathery rain fine as a gauze curtain, and as they faded into the folds of it, Sister Ida and her family, Verena said: “Do I understand you’ve been conniving with that—woman? After she made a mockery of our name?”
“I don’t think you can accuse me of conniving with anyone,” Dolly answered serenely. “Especially not with bullies who,” she a little lost control, “steal from children and drag old women into jail. I can’t set much store by a name that endorses such methods. It ought to be a mockery.”
Verena received this without flinching. “You’re not yourself,” she said, as if it were a clinical opinion.
“You’d best look again: I am myself.” Dolly seemed to pose for inspection. She was as tall as Verena, as assured; nothing about her was incomplete or blurred. “I’ve taken your advice: stopped hanging my head, I mean. You told me it made you dizzy. And not many days ago,” she continued, “you told me that you were ashamed of me. Of Catherine. So much of our lives had been lived for you; it was painful to realize the waste that had been. Can you know what it is, such a feeling of waste?”
Scarcely audible, Verena said, “I do know,” and it was as if her eyes crossed, peered inward upon a stony vista. It was the expression I’d seen when, spying from the attic, I’d watched her late at night brooding over the Kodak pictures of Maudie Laura Murphy, Maudie Laura’s husband and children. She swayed, she put a hand on my shoulder; except for that, I think she might have fallen.
“I imagined I would go to my dying day with the hurt of it. I won’t. But it’s no satisfaction, Verena, to say that I’m ashamed of you, too.”
It was night now; frogs, sawing insects celebrated the slow-falling rain. We dimmed as though the wetness had snuffed the light of our faces. Verena sagged against me. “I’m not well,” she said in a skeleton voice, “I’m a sick woman, I am, Dolly.”
Somewhat unconvinced, Dolly approached Verena, presently touched her, as though her fingers could sense the truth. “Collin,” she said, “Judge, please help me with her into the tree.” Verena protested that she couldn’t go climbing trees; but once she got used to the idea she went up easily enough. The raftlike tree-house seemed to be floating over shrouded vaporish waters; it was dry there, however, for the mild rain had not penetrated the parasol of leaves. We drifted in a current of silence until Verena said, “I have something to say, Dolly. I could say it more easily if we were alone.”
The Judge crossed his arms. “I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me, Miss Verena.” He was emphatic, though not belligerent. “I have an interest in the outcome of what you might have to say.”
“I doubt that: how so?” she said, recovering to a degree her exalted manner.
He lighted a stub of candle, and our sudden shadows stooped over us like four eavesdroppers. “I don’t like talking in the dark,” he said. There was a purpose in the proud erectness of his posture: it was, I thought, to let Verena know she was dealing with a man, a fact too few men in her experience had enough believed to assert. She found it unforgivable. “You don’t remember, do you, Charlie Cool? Fifty years ago, more maybe. Some of you boys came blackberry stealing out at our place. My father caught your cousin Seth, and I caught you. It was quite a licking you got that day.”
The Judge did remember; he blushed, smiled, said: “You didn’t fight fair, Verena.”
“I fought fair,” she told him drily. “But you’re right—since neither of us like it, let’s not talk in the dark. Frankly, Charlie, you’re not a welcome sight to me. My sister couldn’t have gone through such tommyrot if you hadn’t been goading her on. So I’ll thank you to leave us; it can be no further affair of yours.”
“But it is,” said Dolly. “Because Judge Cool, Charlie …” she dwindled, appeared for the first time to question her boldness.
“Dolly means that I have asked her to marry me.”
“That,” Verena managed after some suspenseful seconds, “is,” she said, regarding her gloved hands, “remarkable. Very. I wouldn’t have credited either of you with so much imagination. Or is it that I am imagining? Quite likely I’m dreaming of myself in a wet tree on a thundery night. Except I never have dreams, or perhaps I only forget them. This one I suggest we all forget.”
“I’ll own up: I think it is a dream, Miss Verena. But a man who doesn’t dream is like a man who doesn’t sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.”
She ignored him; her attention was with Dolly, Dolly’s with her: they might have been alone together, two persons at far ends of a bleak room, mutes communicating in an eccentric sign-language, subtle shifting of the eye; and it was as though, then, Dolly gave an answer, one that sapped all color from Verena’s face. “I see. You’ve accepted him, have you?”
The rain had thickened, fish could have swum through the air; like a deepening scale of piano notes, it struck its blackest chord, and drummed into a downpour that, though it threatened, did not at once reach us: drippings leaked through the leaves, but the tree-house stayed a dry seed in a soaking plant. The Judge put a protective hand over the candle; he waited as anxiously as Verena for Dolly’s reply. My impatience equaled theirs, yet I felt exiled from the scene, again a spy peering from the attic, and my sympathies, curiously, were nowhere; or rather, everywhere: a tenderness for all three ran together like raindrops, I could not separate them, they expanded into a human oneness.
Dolly, too. She could not separate the Judge from Verena. At last, excruciatingly, “I can’t,” she cried, implying failures beyond calculation. “I said I would know what was right. But it hasn’t happened; I don’t know: do other people? A choice, I thought: to have had a life made of my own decisions …”
“But we have had our lives,” said Verena. “Yours has been nothing to despise, I don’t think you’ve required more than you’ve had; I’ve envied you always. Come home, Dolly. Leave decisions to me: that, you see, has been my life.”
“Is it true, Charlie?” Dolly asked, as a child might ask where do falling stars fall? and: “Have we had our lives?”
“We’re not dead,” he told her; but it was as if, to the questioning child, he’d said stars fall into space: an irrefutable, still unsatisfactory answer. Dolly could not accept it: “You don’t have to be dead. At home, in the kitchen, there is a geranium that blooms over and over. Some plants, though, they bloom just the once, if at all, and nothing more happens to them. They live, but they’ve had their life.”
“Not you,” he said, and brought his face nearer hers, as though he meant their lips to touch, yet wavered, not daring it. Rain had tunneled through the branches, it fell full weight; rivulets of it streamed off Dolly’s hat, the veiling clung to her cheeks; with a flutter the candle failed. “Not me.”
Successive strokes of lightning throbbed like veins of fire, and Verena, illuminated in that sustained glare, was not anyone I knew; but some woman woebegone, wasted—with eyes once more drawn toward each other, their stare settled on an inner territory, a withered country; as the lightning lessened, as the hum of rain sealed us in its multiple sounds, she spoke, and her voice came so weakly from so very far, not expecting, it seemed, to be heard at all. “Envied you, Dolly. Your pink room.
I’ve only knocked at the doors of such rooms, not often—enough to know that now there is no one but you to let me in. Because little Morris, little Morris—help me, I loved him, I did. Not in a womanly way; it was, oh I admit it, that we were kindred spirits. We looked each other in the eye, we saw the same devil, we weren’t afraid; it was—merry.
But he outsmarted me; I’d known he could, and hoped he wouldn’t, and he did, and now: it’s too long to be alone, a lifetime. I walk through the house, nothing is mine: your pink room, your kitchen, the house is yours, and Catherine’s too, I think. Only don’t leave me, let me live with you. I’m feeling old, I want my sister.”
The rain, adding its voice to Verena’s, was between them, Dolly and the Judge, a transparent wall through which he could watch her losing substance, recede before him as earlier she had seemed to recede before me. More than that, it was as if the tree-house were dissolving. Lunging wind cast overboard the soggy wreckage of our Rook cards, our wrapping papers; animal crackers crumbled, the rain-filled mason jars spilled over like fountains; and Catherine’s beautiful scrapquilt was ruined, a puddle.
It was going: like the doomed houses rivers in flood float away; and it was as though the Judge were trapped there—waving to us as we, the survivors, stood ashore. For Dolly
