"KATE! You're wanted on the 'phone!"
'Phone! Why couldn't Carrie say telephone?
"Who is it, Carrie? I'm right in the middle of my mayonnaise."
"It's Charlotte. Hoagland wants to know whether he should wear his Tuxedo to-night?"
"Tell her no; we're not going to dress up. Carrie! Wait a minute—I'll just have to speak to her. . . . Hello, Charlotte!"
"Oh, Aunt Kate, Hoagland"
"We're not going to dress up—at least, I'm just going to wear my blue. Charlotte"
"Sonny Boy, let pussy alone! Let her alone, lover! . . . Yes, Aunt Kate? I'm listening, I was just . . . Sonny Boy Driggs, did you hear what mother said?"
"Charlotte, they're here!"
"Are they? Well, that's nice."
"Oh, Charlotte, come early!"
It was too queer to hear them moving about in her room, to hear a sudden burst of soft laughter. Her hands shook as she brushed her hair. Usually she rolled it up, pushed in three shell hairpins, and let it go, but to-night she was so nervous she used two packages of invisible hairpins beside.
She had been putting the finishing touches to the bathroom, the best towels embroidered with fat K. S. G.'s and the Christmas-present soap still in its violet wrapper, when they got out of the taxi. She would have done it sooner, but Aunt Sarah had locked herself in for nearly an hour. Kate stood there pressing savon de violette against her heart, looking down at Evelyn waiting for Joe to pay O'Leary's man, their bags, bright with foreign labels, piled beside her. Exquisite, poised, in a dark-purple hat like a petunia, and a close dark-purple coat, her face framed in a soft fluff of fur, slender wrists in softly wrinkled creamy suède, slender ankles in flesh-colored silk, she made Kate's knees tremble so that she could hardly get downstairs to let them in.
And now they were sitting around the table, eating the kaleidoscope patterns of green pepper and pimento and hard-boiled egg on anchovy canapés. Effa came in, wearing her nice black dress and white apron, and those awful pearl beads; too late for Kate to speak to her about them. And it was just like Joe to say: "Hello, Effa! How are you?" and of course she had to answer: "Hello, Joe! Just fine and dandy, thank you. How's yourself?" right in front of that girl!
Small painted flowers bloomed through the soup, and the plates were taken away.
"What's your little girl's name?"
"Why, Je! Haven't you told Evelyn that? Well, you're a nice one! It's really Anna Louise, for the two grandmas, but we call her Nancy Lou. . . . Yes, we think it's dear."
"You'll see the youngsters when you come over to-morrow night," Hoagland promised.
"Oh, Evelyn, they're just the darlingest kiddies that ever were: you'll simply adore them!" Carrie sang.
"The boy's a regular feller, I'll tell the world!"
"Tell Evelyn that precious thing he said."
"I don't just know what you mean, Carrie."
"You know—about not being a girl?"
"Oh yes! He and Nancy Lou were playing on the lawn in their overalls, and Miss Violetta Mortimer"
"Miss Heloise, dear."
"What?"
"It doesn't matter. It simply happened to be Miss Heloise, but it doesn't make any difference."
"Well, anyway, whichever Mortimer girl it was said, 'Well, two little boys, I see!'"
"Because Nancy Lou had on her overalls"
"But Sonny Boy wasn't going to stand for anything like that; he said, 'I'm a boy, but she's a girl.'"
"That wasn't exactly it, dear."
"All right, you tell it."
"It was practically it, only what Sonny Boy said was, 'I's a boy, but Nancy Lovu's nuffin but a 'ittle dirl!'"
"Ah-h!" groaned Carrie, tenderly.
There were olives and salted almonds, because it was a party. Part of Kate's mind was in the kitchen, pouring on the salad dressing at the last minute; part was watching Aunt Sarah, absorbed in her food, wrinkled and tiny, eating something up close, like a monkey eating a nut. Her foot felt about under the table for the bell.
Joe wanted them to love Evelyn; he tried to bridge the space between them. It was touching to his mother to see him simple, like a little boy again, after the months he had hidden away from her. She tried to be simple, too. I will love her, I will, no matter how I feel. Oh, Joe, why did you marry her?
"Shall we have our coffee in the living room?"
"Mother, I never knew anything so stylish as you're being!"
Joe made her so mad sometimes!
They sat making conversation.
"That's not a very comfortable chair, I'm afraid, Charlotte."
"Oh, it's very nice, thank you, Aunt Kate."
"What are you making, dear?"
"Just some little bluebird for happiness aprons for the hospital fair. Marcia Quackenbush has the apron table, and I said I'd help her out. I think these little afternoon-tea aprons are awfully sweet, although I can't imagine anyone ever wearing one; still, they're nice to give away. There're some darling ones in pastel colors, with baskets of flowers appliquéd, even prettier than these, I think."
"I thought you were cake."
"I am, but Marcia was simply distracted. She brought these over with the bluebirds all cut out and everything and said she was nearly out of her mind, so I said I'd help her out, though goodness knows I really haven't the time. I mean, with the cake table and getting the children's summer clothes ready and all."
"You'll find we all lead very busy lives, Evelyn."
Evelyn sat there, warm, humid, faintly fragrant, in dim-pink chiffon edged with fronds of uncurled ostrich, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the full sleeves falling back from her white arms, the twilight-colored feathers floating, stirring. She made Kate in her nice blue silk and her beaded slippers, with her eau de Cologne, and Charlotte in her henna crêpe de Chine (the real Paris model—Miss Gilhooley had brought it over herself), her kinky permanent wave, and the diamond-and-sapphire bar pin Hoagland had given her for having Nancy Lou, the diamond wrist watch for having Sonny Boy, feel heavy and solid—feel that they were just good respectable women.
"I think I'll have a cigarette, Joe," said Charlotte, with a defiant look at Hoagland.
"Try my kind. Mr. Driggs?"
"Oh, now, you mustn't call me Mr. Driggs. Thanks, I never smoke anything but cigars."
"No, Hoagland never smokes cigarettes," Charlotte corroborated him between rapid jerky puffs.
"People often think I disapprove of women smoking because I don't smoke myself," Carrie contributed. "But I always say no, I don't smoke, simply because I never have, but I don't disapprove at all."
Kate slipped upstairs to turn down their bed, and put out the cobweb nightgown and soft blue silk kimona with plum blossoms drifting across its sky, so fragrant. And Joe's old washed-out pajamas. Goodness! Why hadn't he gotten some new? That girl, to see him in those old things, with the bright unfaded patch!
"People who never drank before are drinking since prohibition," Hoagland was announcing when she came downstairs. "Now in my opinion light wines and beer"
"Oh, Joe! A moth!"
"Where?"
"There—no—Evelyn! By you!"
She dashed forward, clapping.
"Mother, you're as good as Pavlowa, only you ought to be in a cheese-cloth nightie."
It was her one moment of naturalness, of honest passion, in the whole tense evening. Only Joe seemed natural. Evelyn, bored and depressed to exhaustion, felt shut away from him. She had married a stranger who was her only friend.
Joe married. Jodie Green married. I can't make it seem true, Kate thought. Where were the children? Charlotte, good and serious, putting her pennies into the little iron house, and eating each Easter's chocolate-cream egg so slowly that it would be a month before she came to the ultimate string. Jodie's never lasted at all; he never could wait; and then he would give other boys licks, and even old Shep—she couldn't stop him! Wild, red-cheeked, red-nosed little Jodie, coming tearing in all snow, mittens lost, though she'd sewn them on a tape and run it through his coat sleeves; little hands red, wet with snow, cold and stiff as a bird's claws. She could feel them now. Charlotte starting off to school with her pencil box like a row of books, a pretty red maple leaf for painting, an extra pear for Miss Miller. Jodie milking his tricycle—it had been a cow for one whole winter—Jodie getting his fingers caught in the clothes wringer. Gone, as if they had been two children made of snow.
"Well, Charlotte, I think"
"Yes, dear, I was just thinking myself. Well, Aunt Kate, we've had a delightful evening."
Kate and Evelyn and Joe went out on the porch to say good night to them. It had begun to rain. There was the sound of the rain entering the earth, the smell of wet leaves and wet earth. The spring night was full of the up-pushing and overflow of life, green jets breaking up from beneath the surface, fecundity and hard resistless passion of new life.
"Why, where's the car?"
"We walked. Hoagland hasn't been getting enough exercise."
"No, I haven't been getting enough air and exercise."
"But, Charlotte! Your thin slippers! Don't you want to call up O'Leary for a taxi? Well, then, you must take my slips, if you can keep them on."
"Why, Aunt Kate, you have little bits of feet! You'd better say if I can get them on!"
Dear Charlotte!
In a sudden gust of affection, of longing for sympathy, Kate seized her wrist in a hot tense hand and whispered: "Wasn't it awful, that Effa put the sweetened whipped cream for the dessert on the tomato soup! I was never so mortified in my entire life!"
"Now I never noticed it at all, Aunt Kate. Don't you worry; everything was simply delicious!"
And Charlotte felt a sudden warm gushing out toward her aunt, a feeling of wanting to Protect, of wanting to be protected.
"Oh, you have an umbrella, Hoagland!"
"Yes, I thought it looked like rain when we started out."
"Well, I guess the gardens need it."
"We'll look for you good people to-morrow night at half past six. You see we're not stylish; just family dinner; we're not going to make company of you."
"Why not?" Joe asked.
Evelyn had felt separated from Joe all evening. But now, together again, they were swelling toward each other, aching for each other savagely, her body yielding to his passionately and exultantly, aching for more pain, not for tenderness, quivering and alive, going past feeling to inexpressible completeness.
"Evelyn! We should have died!"
The waves withdrew, sounding faint and far, turning into the rain, the wind in wet leaves. The unbearable beauty of white radiance flowed into darkness, depth beneath depth of gentle darkness.
Effa thought she heard her sick puppy crying, so she put on her old blanket wrapper and took the lamp down to the woodshed to see how he was. He welcomed her with a feeble flop of his tail; his sad eyes looked dimly and imploringly at her; his nose pushed into her hand. She huddled there with the heavy silky body across her knees. She could smell the wet lilacs outside the shed; they made her chest feel queer, as if something was stuck there. She wanted, she wanted! She didn't know what she wanted. Yes, she did, too: she wanted a fellow, and much chance she had of ever getting one, with her fat clumsy body and homely face, always cutting up and making a joke of herself first, before other people could. She wanted a fellow to look at her the way Joe Green looked at that girl. And she'd live and die an old maid, "more fun than a circus." Tears ran down her red face and into her wide-stretched mouth, bitter as drops from the depths of the sea.
Charlotte thought she heard a noise from the children's room, and went in to see if they were all right. There they lay, safe, relaxed, silky lashes lying on moist pink cheeks, so near to her, so unreachably far away. The babies were growing up. The sorrow of birth that leads to death flooded her, though she had no words for it.
"All right, honey?"
"Hoagland Driggs, you scared me to death! Why aren't you asleep?"
He couldn't say, "Because I was thinking of Opal Mendoza." He asked her:
"Why aren't you?"
"I don't know. I got to feeling sort of blue"
"Why, everything's all right, Charlotte. Isn't it?"
"Oh, I guess so."
"Maybe you ate something," he suggested, sympathetically and anxiously.
"Maybe. Aunt Kate always has things so nice. Or maybe it was the coffee." She laid his hand against her cheek for a moment, gently. "Well"
Carrie turned from side to side. If only she could get to sleep. But it was so stuffy. She crept to a window and raised it a little way, waking Aunt Sarah.
"Carrie! Put that window down! It blows right on me."
Carrie shut out the spring and went back to bed, crying a little and wondering whether she could fix over her taupe chiffon to look like Evelyn's dress. She had some marabou edging—dirty white, but perhaps she could dye it. She must ask Evelyn what that perfume was.
The wind had risen. Kate thought it might be driving the rain in on the porch chairs and wetting their cushions. So she put on her flannelette wrapper and went down and out on the porch, and tipped the chairs against the wall, back up. And then, because she was downstairs, she went to see if Effa had shut the ice-box. Almost all the charlotte russe gone, and there had been more than half left. Effa must have stuffed; no wonder she was so fat. That girl hadn't a thought in her head beyond laughing and eating. And the mayonnaise in the best luster bowl! But as she squatted there in her flannelette wrapper, with her hair in a little gray wisp of pigtail, looking fixedly into the refrigerator, she didn't give a hang for anything in it, really, or anything out of it. For her tulips, that were blooming so beautifully along the path—the wet twilight-colored cups of Bleu Aimable, scarlet Mr. Farncombe Sanders, and old-rose Miss Governy bowing under the rain—or her new brown foulard with the cream-colored dots, or the paper on "Childhood in Art" she was writing for the Wednesday Club, or even the new wall paper in the parlor. She didn't care for anything except to be young again, and have her husband back, and not have things over. The sand fort she had built around her went down before the waves.
Only Joe and Evelyn slept, quiet and safe, her graspless hand in his, light as a leaf.