The Love of a Good Woman Read online

  But in fact it had been her role all along. In high school she was always the class secretary or class social convener. She was well liked and high-spirited and well dressed and good-looking, but she was slightly set apart. She had friends who were boys but never a boyfriend. She did not seem to have made a choice this way, but she was not worried about it, either. She had been preoccupied with her ambition—to be a missionary, at one embarrassing stage, and then to be a nurse. She had never thought of nursing as just something to do until she got married. Her hope was to be good, and do good, and not necessarily in the orderly, customary, wifely way.

  • • •

  AT New Year’s she went to the dance in the Town Hall. The man who danced with her most often, and escorted her home, and pressed her hand good night, was the manager of the creamery—a man in his forties, never married, an excellent dancer, an avuncular friend to girls unlikely to find partners. No woman ever took him seriously.

  “Maybe you should take a business course,” her mother said. “Or why shouldn’t you go to college?”

  Where the men might be more appreciative, she was surely thinking.

  “I’m too old,” said Enid.

  Her mother laughed. “That only shows how young you are,” she said. She seemed relieved to discover that her daughter had a touch of folly natural to her age—that she could think twenty-one was at a vast distance from eighteen.

  “I’m not going to troop in with kids out of high school,” Enid said. “I mean it. What do you want to get rid of me for anyway? I’m fine here.” This sulkiness or sharpness also seemed to please and reassure her mother. But after a moment she sighed, and said, “You’ll be surprised how fast the years go by.”

  That August there were a lot of cases of measles and a few of polio at the same time. The doctor who had looked after Enid’s father, and had observed her competence around the hospital, asked her if she would be willing to help out for a while, nursing people at home. She said that she would think about it.

  “You mean pray?” her mother said, and Enid’s face took on a stubborn, secretive expression that in another girl’s case might have had to do with meeting her boyfriend.

  “That promise,” she said to her mother the next day. “That was about working in a hospital, wasn’t it?”

  Her mother said that she had understood it that way, yes.

  “And with graduating and being a registered nurse?”

  Yes, yes.

  So if there were people who needed nursing at home, who couldn’t afford to go to the hospital or did not want to go, and if Enid went into their houses to nurse them, not as a registered nurse but as what they called a practical nurse, she would hardly be breaking her promise, would she? And since most of those needing her care would be children or women having babies, or old people dying, there would not be much danger of the coarsening effect, would there?

  “If the only men you get to see are men who are never going to get out of bed again, you have a point,” said her mother.

  But she could not keep from adding that what all this meant was that Enid had decided to give up the possibility of a decent job in a hospital in order to do miserable backbreaking work in miserable primitive houses for next to no money. Enid would find herself pumping water from contaminated wells and breaking ice in winter washbasins and batding flies in summer and using an outdoor toilet. Scrub boards and coal-oil lamps instead of washing machines and electricity. Trying to look after sick people in those conditions and cope with housework and poor weaselly children as well.

  “But if that is your object in life,” she said, “I can see that the worse I make it sound the more determined you get to do it. The only thing is, I’m going to ask for a couple of promises myself. Promise me you’ll boil the water you drink. And you won’t marry a farmer.”

  Enid said, “Of all the crazy ideas.”

  That was sixteen years ago. During the first of those years people got poorer and poorer. There were more and more of them who could not afford to go to the hospital, and the houses where Enid worked had often deteriorated almost to the state that her mother had described. Sheets and diapers had to be washed by hand in houses where the washing machine had broken down and could not be repaired, or the electricity had been turned off, or where there had never been any electricity in the first place. Enid did not work without pay, because that would not have been fair to the other women who did the same kind of nursing, and who did not have the same options as she did. But she gave most of the money back, in the form of children’s shoes and winter coats and trips to the dentist and Christmas toys.

  Her mother went around canvassing her friends for old baby cots, and high chairs and blankets, and worn-out sheets, which she herself ripped up and hemmed to make diapers. Everybody said how proud she must be of Enid, and she said yes, she surely was.

  “But sometimes it’s a devil of a lot of work,” she said. “This being the mother of a saint.”

  THEN came the war, and the great shortage of doctors and nurses, and Enid was more welcome than ever. As she was for a while after the war, with so many babies being born. It was only now, with the hospitals being enlarged and many farms getting prosperous, that it looked as if her responsibilities might dwindle away to the care of those who had bizarre and hopeless afflictions, or were so irredeemably cranky that hospitals had thrown them out.

  THIS summer there was a great downpour of rain every few days, and then the sun came out very hot, glittering off the drenched leaves and grass. Early mornings were full of mist—they were so close, here, to the river—and even when the mist cleared off you could not see very far in any direction, because of the overflow and density of summer. The heavy trees, the bushes all bound up with wild grapevines and Virginia creeper, the crops of corn and barley and wheat and hay. Everything was ahead of itself, as people said. The hay was ready to cut in June, and Rupert had to rush to get it into the barn before a rain spoiled it.

  He came into the house later and later in the evenings, having worked as long as the light lasted. One night when he came the house was in darkness, except for a candle burning on the kitchen table.

  Enid hurried to unhook the screen door.

  “Power out?” said Rupert.

  Enid said, “Shhh.” She whispered to him that she was letting the children sleep downstairs, because the upstairs rooms were so hot. She had pushed the chairs together and made beds on them with quilts and pillows. And of course she had had to turn the lights out so that they could get to sleep. She had found a candle in one of the drawers, and that was all she needed, to see to write by, in her notebook.

  “They’ll always remember sleeping here,” she said. “You always remember the times when you were a child and you slept somewhere different.”

  He set down a box that contained a ceiling fan for the sickroom. He had been into Walley to buy it. He had also bought a newspaper, which he handed to Enid.

  “Thought you might like to know what’s going on in the world,” he said.

  She spread the paper out beside her notebook, on the table. There was a picture of a couple of dogs playing in a fountain.

  “It says there’s a heat wave,” she said. “Isn’t it nice to find out about it?”

  Rupert was carefully lifting the fan out of its box.

  “That’ll be wonderful,” she said. “It’s cooled off in there now, but it’ll be such a comfort to her tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be over early to put it up,” he said. Then he asked how his wife had been that day.

  Enid said that the pains in her legs had been easing off, and the new pills the doctor had her on seemed to be letting her get some rest.

  “The only thing is, she goes to sleep so soon,” she said. “It makes it hard for you to get a visit.”

  “Better she gets the rest,” Rupert said.

  This whispered conversation reminded Enid of conversations in high school, when they were both in their senior year and that earlier teasing, or cr
uel flirtation, or whatever it was, had long been abandoned. All that last year Rupert had sat in the seat behind hers, and they had often spoken to each other briefly, always to some immediate purpose. Have you got an ink eraser? How do you spell “incriminate”? Where is the Tyrrhenian Sea? Usually it was Enid, half turning in her seat and able only to sense, not see, how close Rupert was, who started these conversations. She did want to borrow an eraser, she was in need of information, but also she wanted to be sociable. And she wanted to make amends—she felt ashamed of the way she and her friends had treated him. It would do no good to apologize—that would just embarrass him all over again. He was only at ease when he sat behind her, and knew that she could not look him in the face. If they met on the street he would look away until the last minute, then mutter the faintest greeting while she sang out “Hello, Rupert,” and heard an echo of the old tormenting tones she wanted to banish.

  But when he actually laid a finger on her shoulder, tapping for attention, when he bent forward, almost touching or maybe really touching—she could not tell for sure—her thick hair that was wild even in a bob, then she felt forgiven. In a way, she felt honored. Restored to seriousness and to respect.

  Where, where exactly, is the Tyrrhenian Sea?

  She wondered if he remembered anything at all of that now.

  She separated the back and front parts of the paper. Margaret Truman was visiting England, and had curtsied to the royal family. The King’s doctors were trying to cure his Buerger’s disease with vitamin E.

  She offered the front part to Rupert. “I’m going to look at the crossword,” she said. “I like to do the crossword—it relaxes me at the end of the day.”

  Rupert sat down and began to read the paper, and she asked him if he would like a cup of tea. Of course he said not to bother, and she went ahead and made it anyway, understanding that this reply might as well be yes in country speech.

  “It’s a South American theme,” she said, looking at the crossword. “Latin American theme. First across is a musical … garment. A musical garment? Garment. A lot of letters. Oh. Oh. I’m lucky tonight. Cape Horn!

  “You see how silly they are, these things,” she said, and rose and poured the tea.

  If he did remember, did he hold anything against her? Maybe her blithe friendliness in their senior year had been as unwelcome, as superior-seeming to him, as that early taunting?

  When she first saw him in this house, she thought that he had not changed much. He had been a tall, solid, round-faced boy, and he was a tall, heavy, round-faced man. He had worn his hair cut so short, always, that it didn’t make much difference that there was less of it now and that it had turned from light brown to gray-brown. A permanent sunburn had taken the place of his blushes. And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been just the same old trouble—the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name that people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.

  She thought of them sitting in the senior class. A small class, by that time—in five years the unstudious, the carefree, and the indifferent had been weeded out, leaving these overgrown, grave, and docile children learning trigonometry, learning Latin. What kind of life did they think they were preparing for? What kind of people did they think they were going to be?

  She could see the dark-green, softened cover of a book called History of the Renaissance and Reformation. It was secondhand, or tenthhand—nobody ever bought a new textbook. Inside were written all the names of the previous owners, some of whom were middle-aged housewives or merchants around the town. You could not imagine them learning these things, or underlining “Edict of Nantes” with red ink and writing “N.B.” in the margin.

  Edict of Nantes. The very uselessness, the exotic nature, of the things in those books and in those students’ heads, in her own head then and Rupert’s, made Enid feel a tenderness and wonder. It wasn’t that they had meant to be something that they hadn’t become. Nothing like that. Rupert couldn’t have imagined anything but farming this farm. It was a good farm, and he was an only son. And she herself had ended up doing exactly what she must have wanted to do. You couldn’t say that they had chosen the wrong lives or chosen against their will or not understood their choices. Just that they had not understood how time would pass and leave them not more but maybe a little less than what they used to be.

  “‘Bread of the Amazon,’” she said. “‘Bread of the Amazon’?”

  Rupert said, “Manioc?”

  Enid counted. “Seven letters,” she said. “Seven.”

  He said, “Cassava?”

  “Cassava? That’s a double s? Cassava.”

  • • •

  MRS. QUINN became more capricious daily about her food. Sometimes she said she wanted toast, or bananas with milk on them. One day she said peanut-butter cookies. Enid prepared all these things—the children could eat them anyway—and when they were ready Mrs. Quinn could not stand the look or the smell of them. Even Jell-O had a smell she could not stand.

  Some days she hated all noise; she would not even have the fan going. Other days she wanted the radio on, she wanted the station that played requests for birthdays and anniversaries and called people up to ask them questions. If you got the answer right you won a trip to Niagara Falls, a tankful of gas, or a load of groceries or tickets to a movie.

  “It’s all fixed,” Mrs. Quinn said. “They just pretend to call somebody up—they’re in the next room and already got the answer told to them. I used to know somebody that worked for a radio, that’s the truth.”

  On these days her pulse was rapid. She talked very fast in a light, breathless voice. “What kind of car is that your mother’s got?” she said.

  “It’s a maroon-colored car,” said Enid.

  “What make?” said Mrs. Quinn.

  Enid said she did not know, which was the truth. She had known, but she had forgotten.

  “Was it new when she got it?”

  “Yes,” said Enid. “Yes. But that was three or four years ago.”

  “She lives in that big rock house next door to Willenses?”

  Yes, said Enid.

  “How many rooms it got? Sixteen?”

  “Too many.”

  “Did you go to Mr. Willens’s funeral when he got drownded?”

  Enid said no. “I’m not much for funerals.”

  “I was supposed to go. I wasn’t awfully sick then, I was going with Herveys up the highway, they said I could get a ride with them and then her mother and her sister wanted to go and there wasn’t enough room in back. Then Clive and Olive went in the truck and I could’ve scrunched up in their front seat but they never thought to ask me. Do you think he drownded himself?”

  Enid thought of Mr. Willens handing her a rose. His jokey gallantry that made the nerves of her teeth ache, as from too much sugar.

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Did him and Mrs. Willens get along all right?”

  “As far as I know, they got along beautifully.”

  “Oh, is that so?” said Mrs. Quinn, trying to imitate Enid’s reserved tone. “Bee-you-tif-ley.”

  ENID slept on the couch in Mrs. Quinn’s room. Mrs. Quinn’s devastating itch had almost disappeared, as had her need to urinate. She slept through most of the night, though she would have spells of harsh and angry breathing. What woke Enid up and kept her awake was a trouble of her own. She had begun to have ugly dreams. These were unlike any dreams she had ever had before. She used to think that a bad dream was one of finding herself in an unfamiliar house where the rooms kept changing and there was always more work to do than she could handle, work undone that she thought she had done, innumerable distractions. And then, of course, she had what she thought of as romantic dreams, in which some man would have his arm around her or even be embracing her. It might be a stranger or a man she knew—sometimes a man whom it was quite a joke to think of in that way. These dreams made her thoughtful or a little sad but
relieved in some way to know that such feelings were possible for her. They could be embarrassing, but were nothing, nothing at all compared with the dreams that she was having now. In the dreams that came to her now she would be copulating or trying to copulate (sometimes she was prevented by intruders or shifts of circumstances) with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners. With fat squirmy babies or patients in bandages or her own mother. She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, and she would set to work with roughness and an attitude of evil pragmatism. “Yes, this will have to do,” she would say to herself. “This will do if nothing better comes along.” And this coldness of heart, this matter-of-fact depravity, simply drove her lust along. She woke up unrepentant, sweaty and exhausted, and lay like a carcass until her own self, her shame and disbelief, came pouring back into her. The sweat went cold on her skin. She lay there shivering in the warm night, with disgust and humiliation. She did not dare go back to sleep. She got used to the dark and the long rectangles of the net-curtained windows filled with a faint light. And the sick woman’s breath grating and scolding and then almost disappearing.

  If she were a Catholic, she thought, was this the sort of thing that could come out at confession? It didn’t seem like the sort of thing she could even bring out in a private prayer. She didn’t pray much anymore, except formally, and to bring the experiences she had just been through to the attention of God seemed absolutely useless, disrespectful. He would be insulted. She was insulted, by her own mind. Her religion was hopeful and sensible and there was no room in it for any sort of rubbishy drama, such as the invasion of the devil into her sleep. The filth in her mind was in her, and there was no point in dramatizing it and making it seem important. Surely not. It was nothing, just the mind’s garbage.