Love in a Dry Season Read online

  Amanda said, “How long do they stay the same—in the ground I mean, before they begin to change?”

  “Hush,” Florence said. She was the older.

  But what frightened them even more was their father’s face. It showed through the succeeding months, at once stern and unyielding and yet at the same time ravaged—a surface whose changes could be remarked only in details, a certain redness rimming the eyes, a tremor at lip or eyelid in moments when he thought himself unobserved. Florence and Amanda watched. Before this time, grief had been merely a word in the speller. Now they knew its image.

  For two months after the funeral the girls did not leave the house except for church or Sunday school. In the hours of gathering dusk and early darkness they would hear children from adjacent houses playing on lawns and sidewalks, the abrupt bursts of laughter which meant that a joke had been played, or, worse, the sudden periods of quiet which might mean almost anything. From their upstairs bedroom window Florence and Amanda would hear the others, children of families death had not touched, playing Spin-the-Bottle or Clap-In Clap-Out, new games somehow connected with kissing and introduced since their retirement, their imposed period of mourning. They would look at each other in the glimmer from the arc light in the street below, their faces neat pale ovals empty of everything, even regret, and they could feel in the room—not quite tangible, but no less real for that, like an odor of sachet or musty velvet—the presence of the dead brother.

  “Has he changed yet, in the ground?”

  “Hush, Amanda. Hush.”

  But later she did not need to ask. For he came to her in her dreams, and he was changed indeed; she hardly knew him. Then she did know him and she was frightened worse than she had ever been in her life. She went and got in bed with Florence, hugging her back. But when she told her sister what she had seen, Florence said she must never tell a living soul about it. People would think they were haunted.

  Late in September, the day after they returned to the convent, Amanda stayed behind in the classroom during the first half of the recess period, doing her afternoon homework. When she came down the steps she saw a group of girls clustered at the far end of the playground, by the swings. Those on the outside of the circle were straining on tiptoe, their hands on the shoulders of the girls in front, and occasionally one would give a little jump for a better glimpse, causing her curls to toss on the collar of her middy. From the top of the steps Amanda could see Sister Ursula in the center; she was bending over something. Then the girls gave back, opening a lane, and Sister Ursula came running, her narrow black shoes flicking from under the skirts of her habit. She carried someone in her arms, and when Amanda saw the long yellow hair streaming almost to the Sister’s knees she knew it was Florence.

  They laid her on the couch in the Mother Superior’s office and then the priest came, Father Koestler, red-faced and flustered, and after a while the doctor arrived with his satchel. Florence could not catch her breath. She had been swinging on the exercise bar, a girl said who was peeping round the others in the doorway, and suddenly she had stopped and could not breathe. Her nostrils were ringed with white and her eyes bulged with terror. The doctor said Asthma, a terrible word, and when she was better he took her home in his buggy and carried her up the veranda steps. This was 1912. It was twenty-six years before she came down them again, and that time she was carried too.

  It changed their way of life, their outlook. They lived apart, removed from a world they had only begun to know. Major Barcroft hired the high school principal, Mr Rosenbach, to come every schoolday afternoon from four to six-thirty and give them private lessons, with an additional four hours on Saturday mornings. Professor Frozen Back, he was called, a German with a soft brown beard and inward-slanting teeth; his stiff Prussian carriage made him appear almost deformed, and on his watch chain he wore seals that clanked like a miniature saber. His public school pupils could testify to his zeal with the birch, though of course he never punished the Barcroft girls. He never had to, for they were terrified and never gave him cause; they knew their lessons perfectly and sat as still as mice all the time he was with them. “Very good, young ladies,” he would say at the end of a session. “Very good indeed.” Then he would take his hat and be gone, and the sisters would sigh and look at each other, smiling trembly smiles of nervous relief.

  That was the way they grew up in the big gray house on Lamar Street, where hitching posts and carriage blocks were being removed as traffic hazards, and filling stations and curb markets were already beginning to encroach. The clapboard cottages would disappear overnight, like palaces in the Arabian Nights, and the stucco mansions would come down in clouds of dust, workers swarming over them with the disinterested rapacity of locusts in a Biblical curse. It was no longer the best residential section; their neighbors were migrating east of town to escape the soot and whistles of the new box factory and the incessant gramophones of the wives of men who worked there. Mrs Esther Sturgis, an old lady in a wheelchair—soon to be known as “the Mother of Bristol”—was subdividing her plantation east of town, and those who could afford it were buying lots and building new-style houses beyond the silver twin-thread sweep of the C & B. So now, seated by their window in the darkness, the Barcroft girls had more to overhear than the ice cream parties and kissing games. Weekend nights were filled with music, throbbing drum and wailing horns muted by the sliding feet of dancers at the Elysian Club three blocks away, and while sleepless townspeople would toss and curse, or lie quiet and regret, the sisters would imagine they could identify, by the shrill empty cachinnation and even by the sliding feet, their former schoolmates and neighbors, one by one.

  Soon afterwards, however, Florence stopped sharing the second-story bedroom with Amanda. Her choking fits continued, and under the doctor’s orders to avoid the stairs, she moved into the downstairs front parlor, a high dim room, musty from disuse and cluttered with velvet drapes, dark gold-framed paintings, cumbersome furniture, and ornate wall-paper with birds stenciled on it like no birds that ever flew. Their mother had furnished it; this had been her favorite room. It was where Major Barcroft had fought the Battle of Fredericksburg in small, as well as where Malcolm had been displayed in his gray steel box. Florence called it her bedroom, but there was no bed in it. She spent her nights in a chair, a patented model with an adjustable back and a pull-out for her feet, because she believed she would choke unless her head and shoulders were propped higher than the rest of her body. The room was made airtight for her fumigations, calked with folded newspapers at jambs and sashes. Yet even above the reek of camphor and burning sulphur there was always a rancid odor of unwashed female flesh. She feared death by drowning; one of her attacks might come while she was bathing, and her modesty would not permit anyone, not even her sister, to be in the room with her at such a time.

  She claimed she never slept: “Not really. I just rest my eyes every morning about two,” but Amanda would be wakened almost nightly by her screams. She had nightmares of clammy nets and snakes and galloping horses, smothering her, constricting her, running her down. In consequence, her appearance was affected. No one, even by the old limited comparison, called her “the pretty one” now. She had begun to get fat, in a flaccid, dropsical way. Her skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones and at the backs of her hands, which were curiously rounded. There were little folds, like the flap of an envelope, at the outward corners of her eyes. All that was left of her restricted claim to beauty was her long yellow hair, now finer and longer and yellower than ever. Hanging over the back of her Morris chair so that it almost trailed the floor, it had the rich sheen of cornsilk when the ears begin to tassel. She was very proud of her hair and would call attention to it by complaining that it bothered her, especially in hot weather. “I declare,” she would say; “I declare this old hair of mine is about to drive me crazy. There’s so much of it!”

  Major Barcroft would come to her room for a half-hour visit every evening. Florence was afraid of him; he so obviously
represented the outside world against which she had built her barricade. But she would try to keep from showing this—she would chatter pleasantly about nothing at all. During the summer after she passed her twentieth year, the long hot summer of 1918, she complained especially about her hair, holding the thick limp pale gold weight of it away from her neck, and the major would listen testily. He despised boasting, never having needed to boast himself; most of all he despised any pretense that was meant to cover boasting. He would listen impatiently while she complained about her hair and held it out for his and Amanda’s admiration.

  He had been kept from a third chance at glory by a heart murmur which he had never suspected until he reported for his physical examination the year before. All through the period of skittish ‘armed’ neutrality he chafed at the delay; his hate for President Wilson was an intensely personal thing. As soon as war was declared he got his papers together and went to New Orleans to volunteer for active service. He was forty-four—they would probably give him a desk job; but he figured that, once he was in uniform, he could manage to get himself assigned to duty with troops in the field. Everything went well until at last he stood in the line of applicants, each with his shirt in his hands, queued up before a medical officer who thumped their torsos and listened to their chests. With most of them he made short work: a couple of thumps, a moment of auscultation, then a pat on the shoulder: “Youll do. Next!” But when Major Barcroft stood before him the doctor listened, paused, listened again more carefully, and finally said, “Wait over there, please.”

  One man was already waiting. By the time the doctor had finished with the queue two others had joined them. “I didnt think I’d make it,” one of them said. “But I’m glad I tried.” He was middle-aged, with a dyed mustache waxed to needle points. None of the rest of them said anything. They avoided looking at each other’s faces, like candidates blackballed from some exclusive club.

  After a more thorough examination the medical officer told Major Barcroft, “It’s not anything really serious. Just a murmur. But you see you could keel over at any time, under severe exertion. And we cant take those chances.” He spoke as if the Army belonged to him, and he had a hearty professional manner, a personable young man whose patients had mostly been women. The major glared at him, as if the doctor were somehow responsible for the murmuring heart. Then he put his shirt on, walked to the station where he had checked his bag, and took the train back to Bristol. Rejected, dejected, he watched the scenery slide past the Pullman window.

  He did not mention the incident, but all during the war his manner was short with everyone. Thus one night when Florence was complaining about her hair he looked at her with a peculiar intentness. “Does it really bother you so much?”

  “Oh yes, papa. Look.” She held it out from her shoulders on the pretext of keeping cool.

  He watched her, the pince-nez glinting. It was late July and Chateau-Thierry had been fought—the papers were full of it. “Sam Marino can fix that for you,” he said. Sam Marino was his barber. “Would you like that?”

  “Ah no, papa,” Amanda said.

  Florence was frightened but she continued her farce. “It really is warm,” she said uneasily.

  “Then I’ll tell him to come tomorrow night.” The major looked from one to the other, still with that peculiar intentness, as if he expected them to protest. But neither of the sisters said anything.

  Next evening, as the three of them sat together, no one mentioned the barber. From time to time, however, Major Barcroft would take out his watch, look at it, then put it back in his pocket and clear his throat. At last there was a rap at the front door. Amanda started to rise, but her father put out one hand; “I’ll get it,” he said. When he had left the room Florence sat watching her hands in her lap, head bowed, eyes almost closed, as if she were praying.

  Sam Marino followed Major Barcroft into the room. Carrying a small black satchel which resembled a surgeon’s instrument case, he paused just inside the door. “Evening, ladies,” he said, short and dark, a Sicilian with a neat but large mustache and an air of suppressed joviality. He bowed to each of them in turn. Amanda nodded but Florence remained in her attitude of prayer.

  “Here’s your new client, Sam,” the major said.

  The barber put his bag on a chair. “Ach, what a pity,” he said. He made a gesture of despair: “Such fine hair you seldom see,” then another of resignation: “But it makes business.”

  “It bothers her,” Major Barcroft said. “It makes her hot.” He watched her with the peculiar intentness of the night before, but the lamplight made his glasses opaque and they could not see his eyes. “Dont it, Florence?”

  She kept her eyes down. “Yes, papa.”

  “But if youd rather keep it, we can tell Mr Marino it was all a mistake. Are you sure it bothers you so much?”

  “Yes, papa.”

  “Youre sure you want to get rid of it?”

  “Yes, papa.” She kept her eyes down.

  Now that the scene had progressed this far, the major began to have qualms. Intending to give her a lesson on the evils of pretense, he had thought she would back down, would admit her falseness when faced with the actual loss of her hair. But now that he saw she had no intention of admitting any such thing, he was almost sorry he had begun it. For now it was a contest: either he would relent or she would recant or she would lose her hair, and it had gone too far now to be anything but the last of these three—discipline had come to resemble cruelty. Yet at the same time he was rather proud of her determination; it showed the stock she came from. He stepped forward: “All right, Sam,” and outlined the style of the haircut with the tip of one finger.

  Sam Marino took his shears and a fine-tooth comb and a pair of clippers from the satchel, and while Florence sat perfectly motionless, her gaze fixed on the opposite wall, he cropped her long yellow hair as her father had indicated. Glinting coldly, the shears snicked along the line of her jaw and two short curves of hair sprang forward, projecting like spikes on both sides of her mouth. He combed her top hair forward so that it curtained her face, and then as he moved the shears across her forehead, clipping neat Dutch bangs, hair tumbled onto her hands in her lap and they saw that her eyes were filled with tears. The barber worked fast; he felt that something was wrong about this house, some tension he could sense but not define. He snicked the shears rapidly at the back of her head, great skeins of hair cascading to the floor, and then he ran the clippers up her neck.

  Though Amanda still had to come downstairs and sit with her, holding her hand and comforting her till dawn paled the windowpanes behind the draperies, Florence’s nightmares were no longer of nets and snakes and wild-maned horses. These were replaced by quiet dreams in which the violence was not actual but implied, not kinetic but potential: of a small room, a sort of cell whose walls are hung with shears and clippers and other tools, vaguely obstetric, and Sam Marino is there with his black satchel. Up to this point there is no terror, for the barber is not threatening her; he is merely there. But she feels a dim uneasiness, a sense of another presence, someone who intends to hurt her. Timidly she begins to look about the cell, turning her head to glance over her shoulders. Half her mind wonders what she will see, but the other half already knows. This disturbs her; this is part of the terror. How can I be two people? she thinks; how can I know and not-know? Then she sees him, her father, sitting in a far corner. His legs are crossed and he swings one brightly polished boot tip. For a moment terror chokes her; she cannot breathe. But when he rises and comes toward her, his face growing larger, she finds her breath and begins to scream. Her cries fill the cell, growing shriller as he comes nearer, and she feels a hand upon her arm and hears a voice she knows—and always it was Amanda holding her hand, saying “It’s all right, Florence. Shh: I’m here: I’m with you. Shh,” and the terrible dream-shapes were gone at last, back into whatever darkness they had emerged from; there was only Amanda with her.

  She had always been afraid of h
er father—in her early girlhood when he had no time for anything but his business and his son, in the time of mourning when he presented across the dining room table the stern and ravaged face of sorrow, and in the years of the great war when he believed himself robbed of his last chance at glory. But now, as a result of her nightmares and other imagined horrors, she would go rigid with fear whenever she heard his step on the veranda, the street door coming open, and then the sound of his feet in the hall, halting beside the hat rack and then coming on. As he approached the door she would stop breathing; she would clutch at the arms of her chair until he had passed and she heard him climb the stairs.

  There was no chance of happening on him; she never saw him unless he came to her. For now she never left her room. She even had her meals sent in and ate from a tray, propped in the patented chair. She wore a series of violently flowered wrappers—seven of them, named for the days of the week—black lisle stockings, the seams awry, and bottle-green carpet slippers that became shapeless within two hours of the first wearing. Twice a week Major Barcroft would visit the close, rank chamber, watching her shrink back in the chair. He never stayed long, and as the years passed he came even less often. Sometimes there was more than a week between visits. But Florence never got over her terror, the particular quality of which was obvious—the whole time he was with her she sat with her knees pressed close together, like a woman in fear of assault. Her hair was kept short; she preferred it that way, and Sam Marino returned four times a year for ‘trims.’ He brought no terror into her dreams, however: it was as if he had had no share in the original operation. “The night papa cut my hair,” she would say; she dated everything from that, after the manner of women who had more serious—anyhow bloodier—operations, or after the manner of the old people of her childhood, who dated everything from the year the stars fell.