IV
“I’d go, if I were you,” said Silly.
“It’s only for a week, of course,” said Jane.
“The children will be all right with Miss Parrot,” said Silly.
“Oh, yes,” said Jane. “It’s just moving them back West.”
“Stephen can do that,” said Silly.
They were lying side by side in the shadow of a rock on the sands of Pine Island. Two weeks of Stephen’s precious holiday had already passed. The litter of a picnic luncheon defiled the beach at their feet. A few yards away little Steve, in his scarlet bathing-suit, was digging a canal in the wet brown sand where the waves were breaking. Cicily and Jenny were tossing a baseball back and forth, a little farther down the beach. Stephen and Alden, leaning back against a boulder, were enjoying their after-luncheon cigarettes and discussing the hilarities of the twenty-fifth reunion of the Class of ’88, which Alden had superintended at Cambridge the preceding June.
“And on Sunday,” said Alden, with a reminiscent chuckle, “we had an excursion by steamer to Gloucester. Some excursion! More liquid in the bar than in the bay!”
“I’d go,” repeated Silly. “I’d do whatever I wanted to, whenever I could.”
On Silly’s lips the simple statement took on a wistful significance. Jane’s absent eyes had been fixed on her unconscious children. She turned, now, to contemplate her sister-in-law. Silly’s long angular frame was carelessly clothed in a weather-beaten brown tweed skirt and sun-streaked tan sweater. A dilapidated brown felt hat of Alden’s was pulled well down over her forehead to protect her eyes from the glare. Her clean white sport shirt was buttoned mannishly about her neck, and a diamond horseshoe pin, which had been Mr. Carver’s generous gesture on the occasion of her forty-fifth birthday, was negligently thrust through her orange tie. It twinkled, inappropriately, in the brilliant sunshine. She lay flat on her back on the beach, gazing up at the silver clouds that floated in the stainless August sky. A queer weather-beaten figure curiously akin to the rocks and the sands and the clumps of stunted pine trees that gave the island its name. A pathetic figure and, strangely enough, it seemed to Jane, a beautiful one at the moment. The rough outline of tweed and worsted could not conceal the Diana-like grace of Silly’s lank body, nor mar the delicacy of her slender ankles nor the strength of her slim wrists nor the angular beauty of her long, lean hands. Jane peeped under the turned-down hat-brim. Silly might boast the body of a goddess, but her face was uncompromisingly that of a forty-six-year-old New England spinster. Plain, tanned, and austere, it was set in its familiar lines of controlled resignation.
When had Silly ever done what she wanted to, thought Jane? Never since Jane had known her. For the last fifteen years, as all the Carvers knew quite well, Silly had wanted to do only one thing. To break away from the family and the place at Gull Rocks and the house on Beacon Street and buy a little stone-strewn farm at Topsfield, Massachusetts, and keep cocker-spaniel kennels there with Susan Frothingham. Susan was now forty-eight. For the last fifteen years, she had wanted to break away from the Frothinghams on Arlington Street and live with Silly on a Topsfield hilltop. Jane saw no charms in Susan. A fat, uninteresting New England old maid, if there ever was one. Still—if Silly liked her and she liked Silly—it was dreadful what life did to single women. What families did to single women. Well-to-do families, throwing destitute middle-aged daughters an occasional diamond horseshoe, but denying them the right to independence. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“If you want to go to New York to see Agnes,” pursued Silly, still gazing at the silver cloud, “I think you ought to go.”
“Your mother won’t like to have Stephen take the children back West alone,” said Jane.
“I’m tired of seeing the men in this family considered!” said Silly with sudden violence. “I’d like to see one of the women get her innings for a change.”
“Oh, I never consider Stephen much,” said Jane honestly. “And I get plenty of innings.”
“Well, this is an outing,” smiled Silly. “How long since you’ve seen Agnes?”
“Oh, mercy!” said Jane. “Ever so long! Seven years. Not since she married. The last time I saw her was when she came West for her father’s funeral.”
“I think you ought to go,” repeated Silly. “Mother won’t care as long as you’re going to meet Flora.”
That was probably true, thought Jane. The bond between Mrs. Carver and her brother was a very close one. Flora and Mr. Furness were on the water now, returning from a summer in England. Whatever Mrs. Carver might think of the folly of a headstrong daughter-in-law who deserted her husband and children to spend a week in New York for the purpose of seeing an old Bryn Mawr classmate, she would consider it a very suitable attention for Stephen’s wife to meet his uncle and cousin on the dock at Hoboken, bearing appropriate greetings from the Boston connection.
Not that Jane cared particularly about meeting Flora. She had seen her in Chicago at Easter and would see her again there in two weeks at the very latest. But the Furnesses’ arrival did make a plausible pretext for a trip to New York, and Jane did care, terribly, about being with Agnes again for a few days and seeing her five-year-old daughter and meeting the gentleman whom Jane had always privately characterized as “that dreadful husband.”
In Jane’s opinion, Agnes had ruined her life by marrying Jimmy Trent. She never understood how it could have happened. Levelheaded Agnes, at the great age of thirty-one, with a reputation really established as a writer of short stories, with one good novel published and a better one half-finished, had succumbed to the incomprehensible charm of a ne’er-do-well journalist, hanging about the outskirts of the newspaper world of New York, three years younger than Agnes and perfectly incapable of holding down a lucrative job for more than two months at a time. When Jane considered Agnes as she had been in college, the marriage was really incredible. Agnes, on a Bryn Mawr window-seat, the level head triumphantly crowned with a wreath of potted ivy, saying seriously, “I’m not at all romantic. I just want to accomplish.”
One moment of romance had ruined for Agnes ten years of accomplishment. The baby had come at once, of course, and the second novel had never been finished. After a year or two of living in boardinghouses and trying to subsist on Jimmy’s nonexistent income, Agnes had abandoned her writing and had taken a job in the advertising department of Macy’s. It was a good job, she had written Jane very cheerfully, at the time. She liked advertising. On the whole, she liked it better than writing. They had taken a nice little flat in Greenwich Village and little Agnes was established in a play school at the age of three and Jimmy did a little writing, now and then, mainly musical criticism, and worked with his fiddle, which amused him awfully, and took her to hear a lot of good music, of which he was very fond.
Jane’s lip curled as she remembered that letter. She had had another last week. It was this second letter that had determined her to go to New York.
“I wish I could see you,” Agnes had written. “Jimmy may go West for a few months. He’s had a temporary position offered him on the Chicago Daily News. I hope he takes it, I’d like him to see Chicago. Of course I have to stick at Macy’s.”
Jane read between the lines just what Agnes really wanted. She wanted Jane to meet Jimmy and like Jimmy and make things pleasant for him in Chicago, so that he would hold down this new job and make life a little easier for them all, financially speaking, when he returned to the Greenwich Village flat. Jane didn’t relish the task. She knew perfectly well what she would think of Jimmy and what Stephen would think of Jimmy and what her mother and Isabel and even her father would think of Jimmy, when he showed up in the West. But Agnes was Agnes. And Agnes’s husband was Agnes’s husband. Jane would do what she could for him. But she would like to go to New York and look over the field.
“Stephen!” called Silly suddenly. “Don’t you think Jane ought to go to New York?”
“Sure I do,” said Stephen amicably. “I’m going to make her go. Of course, I’ve never seen the fatal charm in Agnes—”
“But you’re a perfect husband!” cried Jane, sitting up in the sunshine. “It’s time we set sail for home. Come on, girls!”
Cicily and Jenny turned at her call. Jenny threw the baseball, with unerring aim, straight into the group around the picnic basket. It landed with a plop, right in the centre of her father’s waistcoat. Cicily and Jenny and little Steve all burst into laughter as he collapsed in mock agony under the force of the blow. Jenny came running up in hilarious apology. An Alice in Wonderland child, with straight fair hair strained back from a round comb on her forehead, and a plain practical little face that was her Aunt Silly’s all over again. She had none of Cicily’s blonde beauty.
“Come help us pack up,” said Jane. “We must leave a clean beach.” She was picking up eggshells as she spoke. Silly’s support had strengthened her determination. She would go to New York. Suddenly she realized that she was humming aloud. The refrain of an old Bryn Mawr song, “Once there dwelt captiously a stern papa!” Good gracious! She hadn’t thought of it for nearly twenty years! It would be fun to see Agnes again.