They were married the middle of June in a double-ring ceremony. I acted as an usher, and the Judge was Riley’s best man. Except for the Henderson sisters, all the bridesmaids were society girls Maude had known at the University; the Courier called them beautiful debutantes, a chivalrous description. The bride carried a bouquet of jasmine and lilac; the groom wore spats and stroked his mustache. They received a sumptuous table-load of gifts. I gave them six cakes of scented soap and an ashtray.
After the wedding I walked home with Verena under the shade of her black umbrella. It was a blistering day, heatwaves jiggled like a sound-graph of the celebrating Baptist bells, and the rest of summer, a vista rigid as the noon street, lengthened before me. Summer, another autumn, winter again: not a spiral, but a circle confined as the umbrella’s shadow. If I ever were to make the leap—with a heartskip, I made it. “Verena, I want to go away.”
We were at the garden gate; “I know. I do myself,” she said, closing her umbrella. “I’d hoped to make a trip with Dolly. I wanted to show her the ocean.” Verena had seemed a tall woman because of her authoritative carriage; now she stooped slightly, her head nodded. I wondered that I ever could have been so afraid of her, for she’d grown feminine, fearful, she spoke of prowlers, she burdened the doors with bolts and spiked the roof with lightning rods.
It had been her custom the first of every month to stalk around collecting in person the various rents owed her; when she stopped doing this it caused an uneasiness in the town, people felt wrong without their rainy day. The women said she’s got no family, she’s lost without her sister; their husbands blamed Dr. Morris Ritz: he knocked the gumption out of her, they said; and, much as they had quarreled with Verena, held it against him.
Three years ago, when I returned to this town, my first task was to sort the papers of the Talbo estate, and among Verena’s private possessions, her keys, her pictures of Maudie Laura Murphy, I found a postcard. It was dated two months after Dolly died, at Christmas, and it was from Paraguay: As we say down here, Feliz Navidad.
Do you miss me? Morris. And I thought, reading it, of how her eyes had come permanently to have an uneven cast, an inward and agonized gaze, and I remembered how her eyes, watering in the brassy sunshine of Riley’s wedding day, had straightened with momentary hope: “It could be a long trip. I’ve considered selling a few—a few properties.
We might take a boat; you’ve never seen the ocean.” I picked a sprig of honeysuckle from the vine flowering on the garden fence, and she watched me shred it as if I were pulling apart her vision, the voyage she saw for us. “Oh,” she brushed at the mole that spotted her cheek like a tear, “well,” she said in a practical voice, “what are your ambitions?”
So it was not until September that I called upon the Judge, and then it was to tell him good-bye. The suitcases were packed, Amos Legrand had cut my hair (“Honey, don’t you come back here baldheaded. What I mean is, they’ll try to scalp you up there, cheat you every way they can.”); I had a new suit and new shoes, gray fedora (“Aren’t you the cat’s pajamas, Mr. Collin Fenwick?” Mrs. County exclaimed. “A lawyer you’re going to be? And already dressed like one. No, child, I won’t kiss you. I’d be mortified to dirty your finery with my bakery mess. You write us, hear?”): that very evening a train would rock me northward, parade me through the land to a city where in my honor pennants flurried.
At Miss Bell’s they told me the Judge had gone out. I found him on the square, and it gave me a twinge to see him, a spruce sturdy figure with a Cherokee rose sprouting in his buttonhole, encamped among the old men who talk and spit and wait. He took my arm and led me away from them; and while he amiably advised me of his own days as a law student, we strolled past the church and out along the River Woods road. This road or this tree: I closed my eyes to fix their image, for I did not believe I would return, did not foresee that I would travel the road and dream the tree until they had drawn me back.
It was as though neither of us had known where we were headed. Quietly astonished, we surveyed the view from the cemetery hill, and arm in arm descended to the summer-burned, September-burnished field. A waterfall of color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.
The End
