Chapter 4

Leona got to her feet and smiled wryly at the man who was still kneeling by the flowerbed. "Oh, my aching back! Doesn't yours ever?"

"Doesn't what?" Pete Romano asked.

"Your back ache, gardening."

He shrugged and smiled. "Sometimes, in the spring when I start. Then I forget it." His quick, stubby fingers went on making little holes and setting out the young plants at exactly the right depth, the right distance apart. Watching him, Leona felt drugged with the rhythm of his movements, with the warm sun and air and with her own weariness.

"You don't like gardening, do you?" Pete said.

"Not really," she confessed. She stretched her arms over her head, yawning. "It's so slow, and I'm so clumsy."

His dark eyes gave her a brief, appraising glance. "You got to get used to it. You got to take things slow." She smiled, without answering. "You can't hurry plants," he said. "Or anything."

"Maybe you're right," she said.

"Sure I am."

He went on setting out the seedlings, and she took a cigarette from her sweater pocket and lit it. Presently she said, "Pete, do you ever get bored?"

"Bored gardening?"

"No, just bored. Living."

He shook his head and his teeth flashed in his dark face. "I'm too busy to get bored."

Leona sighed. There was a pause, then Pete said, without looking up, "You're bored, eh?"

"Well, sometimes this place gets me down."

He said, consideringly, "It's a nice place, once you get the big house fixed up."

"But it's so slow! Every night when Dan gets home we go through the house to see what's been done, and nothing has changed. Everything's at a standstill."

Pete agreed.. "Work goes slow, nowadays. But," he threw her a sharp look, "you got nothing to do but watch the workmen? Why don't you do some of it yourself?"

"Paint and paper?"

"My wife paints the whole house, inside-papers, too. You could learn."

Leona smiled mechanically, looking off at the line of trees. "I suppose I could." After a minute she said, "Did you know Dan's family well, Pete?"

"No one knew them well. His mother was sick, and Mr. Blake-well, I guess he was a nice man; he never bothered me, just let me do my work and paid me. But it wasn't a home for a kid."

"What wasn't-Windover, or this place?"

"This house," Pete said. "Windover's O.K. Nice town."

She wanted to disagree with him, but something in his quiet, half-averted face stopped her. How would an Italian gardener know what she was thinking and feeling? He was simply an animal; he worked and ate and slept and got up and did the same things over again. A wave of depression came over her-the feeling she had had more and more lately. With Dan away from eight-fifteen until quarter to six, the days seemed endless, far longer than they had ever been in New York. She was free; they had bought a small secondhand car, and she could go anywhere she liked; to shop, or explore the country, or to see some of the people they had met at the cocktail party that Dan's old friends, the Harwoods, had given for them. There was one attractive young man, who taught at the boys' school. His name was Alan Hunt; he and another young teacher had played tennis with Dan and Leona one Saturday. But this was Wednesday; all those people were busy during the week, as Dan was. Leona's frown deepened. As for the house, she had finished deciding about colors and wallpaper; there was nothing more to do until the workmen had finished. A shopping trip to New York had only increased her restlessness, and though today she had started out gardening enthusiastically enough, now she felt cross and discontented.

Her mood wasn't helped when Pete picked up the flats that had held the seedlings and collected his tools. "It's late," he said. "I didn't hear the bell."

"Maybe the church clock has stopped," Leona said.

"That clock never stops."

"When do you think they'll finish the house?"

"Two, three weeks. More, maybe."

"I wish I could hurry them." He laughed. "Robb Fenn don't hurry for anyone, not even you, Mrs. Collier."

"You don't have to call me Mrs. Collier, Pete," she said. He shook his head, smiling. "But you call Dan by his first name."

"I've known him since he was a kid. You're different." He added, respectfully, "You're a lady."

Leona smiled, then she narrowed her eyes, remembering something. "You call Mrs. Barr, Christina, and you call her husband Mr. Barr, don't you?"

"Sure," Pete said. "Christina's a town girl. She went to school with my young sisters. Anson Barr-well, his father was Doc Barr, and he's older. Not much, but he acts as if he was."

Leona frowned. "It's very mixed up."

"It's life," Pete said cheerfully. That, she had learned was his invariable answer to any question that puzzled him, and he found it perfectly satisfying.

When he had gone, leaving instructions about watering the new plants, Leona wandered across the lawn to the big house and sat on the terrace steps. The workmen had left and the place was very quiet. Dan wouldn't get home for another hour. If only there were some people whom she could drop in on for an amusing conversation, perhaps a cocktail. The young married couples they had met the other day were nice enough, but hopelessly tied up with jobs and children, and there wasn't anyone else she could think of-except Christina Barr.

She frowned, thinking of Christina. She didn't dislike her, but she certainly didn't like her-she wasn't sure why. She and Dan had gone out to the Barrs' the Sunday before, and though Dan had enjoyed himself, Leona hadn't. It was a rainy day, and they had sat indoors by the fire. The house was good of its kind: low-ceilinged, white-paneled, comfortably shabby; Christina's coffee was excellent, and she was warm and friendly. But she and Dan began to talk about people they knew, leaving Leona to Anson. Leona was always uncomfortable in the presence of illness or pain, and she felt tongue-tied with this worn, haggard man who was making such an effort to be agreeable-an effort that exhausted him, for once or twice, when he thought no one was watching him, he leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, his face as gaunt as a skull.

-Dan noticed his fatigue, for as they left, he said to Christina that he was afraid they had stayed too long.

She shook her head. "He's tired now, but it's done him good to see people. You were nice to come out on such a day."

She stood by the front door watching them go down the steps-a tall figure in a blue dress, her hair bright against the dim hallway. Leona had never liked tall women, perhaps because she was a little afraid of them, but she had to admit that Christina was striking-looking. Dan thinks she's wonderful, she thought, with a prick of resentment. What were they talking about all that time? She had tried to listen, but Anson was speaking in a voice so low that she had difficulty hearing him, and she caught only scraps of their conversation-names she didn't know, Christina's slow voice, Dan's boyish laughter. He acts as if he'd known her always. What happened that summer, anyway? A schoolboy crush, a mother-fixation, or what?

Yet it was Christina who noticed when Anson was silent and Leona left out, and who changed the subject, drawing her into the talk, asking her about the work they were doing in the house. I suppose she means to be kind, Leona thought now, but she's so much older than I. And I simply can't imagine being friends with a woman like that.

She wasn't quite sure what she meant by like that, but she didn't analyze her feeling. She only knew that Christina Barr made her feel uncomfortable, and vaguely resentful, and that Dan, when he was with her, changed in an indefinable but annoying way.

She leaned back against a pillar at the foot of the terrace steps. The stones were still warm from the sun, but the late-afternoon air was growing cool. She thought, At home, Dot and Nelia will be playing tennis with the Merriam boys, and going to swim in someone's pool. It will be warm, warmer than this, and the box in Mother's garden will smell heavenly. A wave of homesickness engulfed her. I'll go down next week for a visit, she decided. There's nothing for me to do here until the workmen finish, and Dan can stay at the hotel in Deanebury if he likes.

"Asleep?" Dan's voice said. "What a lazy wench you are!"

"I'm not-I've been working in the garden all day." She opened her eyes and looked at her watch. "You're late."

"I stopped in the village to put a little more pressure on old Fenn about the repairs."

"It won't work. Pete says he never hurries."

"It did work. He promised to be out the middle of next week. Then we'll get a corps of cleaning women, move in our stuff, and give a party."

Leona jumped up and threw her arms around his neck. "Dan, how heavenly! I can't believe it. I feel as if we'd been here for years, doing nothing! Let's call up Fran and Johnny tonight and ask them to come up next weekend, and maybe Bob Stanton."

"I didn't mean a weekend party," Dan said. "We can have lots of those later on. I meant a Windover party. A sort of housewarming."

"Oh!" Leona's hands dropped from his shoulders and she turned away. "But why? It's so much more fun to import people."

"Later," he said. "Now that we're really living here, let's start by asking our neighbors." She didn't answer, and he said, "What's the matter?"

She bit her lip, then she burst out: "I don't want a stupid, stuffy, neighborhood business for our first party! I want it to be gay, with amusing people-our real friends. Why do we have to ask Windover?"

His eyes, burningly blue, held her. For a moment, she thought he was going to burst out, too, but when he spoke his voice was quiet. "I'll tell you why," he said. "For years, all the time I was growing up, no one was ever asked to this house. My mother and Uncle Edgar lived in it as if it were a mausoleum. They took everything from Windover and gave nothing. No one knew them-they were a mystery, and because of my father's absence, a rather sinsister one. I don't want to live like that. I want to do the exact opposite."

"You mean, you want to run a club?"

"No, but I want to be part of Windover. When you live in a place you owe it certain things. You-" He broke off. "If you don't see what I mean, Leona, I can't make you."

She said sulkily: "I don't see why you're so stuffy and ... and civic-minded, all of a sudden."

To her surprise, Dan flushed. "Maybe because I've never belonged anywhere before, or felt that I did. Now I do."

He was staring off at the hills beyond the river with a queer, remote look, as if he had forgetten her. All at once she heard herself saying, "I suppose you're going to ask Mrs. Barr to the party."

He turned back. "Christina? Of course-and Anson, if he'll come. Don't you want them?"

"Not especially." Leona spoke coolly. "But if this is a Windover party, I suppose you must ask all the natives."

Dan's face set. "Don't talk like a little Main Line snob."

Her cheeks were blazing. "And don't you talk to me that way-ever!"

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I didn't mean it. But you don't understand. Christina was my first friend in Windover. Naturally I want to ask her."

She shrugged. "Go ahead, if it amuses you."

"It doesn't, especially," Dan said. "Anson won't come and she may not, but I'm going to ask them just the same."

He turned away again. As she looked at his remote profile, she felt a little chill that froze her anger into something like fear. Dan had never spoken to her in that way since she had known him. She stood still, struggling for control. At last she said abruptly, "I was too busy gardening to do anything about supper. Shall we go to the Inn?"

"Yes." He swung around. His eyes were grave, but no longer angry. "Let's not quarrel, Leona-about anything."

"Of course not." But she went past him quickly, toward the cottage. "Make a drink for me while I get clean, will you?"

Ten minutes later she joined him, wearing a new amber-colored frock that matched her eyes, and a new shade of lipstick. They went to the Inn for dinner, and neither of them mentioned the housewarming again. But in the pauses, and there were some rather long ones, Leona found herself watching Dan under her eylashes and thinking, We never quarreled, in New York. But he isn't the person he was then-he's different. Sometimes I don't know him at all. What's changed him-this place, or the people in it? She clenched her hands under the table. I wish we'd never come to Windover!

Anson Barr sat watching the twilight steal across the garden. Even in June, dusk came early to the low-lying ground where the old house stood, though the tops of the encircling trees were still touched with sunlight. When he was a boy he used to wonder why the Barr who built the house hadn't chosen the hill across the road, with its view of Windover and of the valley, and, in autumn, its bright glimpse of the river. But his father always said he was glad the house stood where it did. "It's protected from the weather-easy to keep warm, and to get to. Just imagine going up and down that slope in winter! The old man picked the prettiest spot, too. Look at our trees-you couldn't get anything to grow like that on a hilltop."

The square white house was set in a half-circle of elms, with a group of hemlocks at its northeast corner. But now the trees had grown so tall and thick that the house was almost constantly in shadow; only the south side was sunny and open. Of course, Anson thought, everything needed pruning, especially the lilacs and the vines that draped the porch. Christina accomplished miracles, but she couldn't do everything, and in the awful years since he had been home she had had more to do than ever before.

He thought, as he did a dozen times a day, I'm worse than useless. She'd be far better off if I'd never come back. Why couldn't I have died cleanly and decently overseas instead of putting her through this?

Putting yourself through it, you mean, he answered himself. Lately, since he had been so much alone, he had seemed to became two per sons, with two separate and often opposed minds that welcomed an argument. You're deceiving yourself, trying to rationalize your own suffering by calling it Christina's. She doesn't know what you're feeling. That's one thing you 've spared her.

But Anson Barr replied to Anson Barr, I'm not sure I have. Maybe she's deceiving me; maybe she knows I'm getting worse. How can I tell what goes on behind that clear, serene look of hers? She never lets me know what she really thinks and feels-she never has, not even in the beginning.

Yet both parts of his mind had to agree that her detachment made things infinitely easier for him. He had married Christina because she was cool and self-contained; that was what he wanted. Once, years ago, he had thought he was in love with a girl who was just the opposite. Patty Martin was small, brown-eyed, and very feminine. Anson had known her all his life; when she was nineteen and he twenty-two, he suddenly became aware of her. At first he was fascinated, and later, frightened by her. When she told him she was going away to train as a nurse-when she waited, breathless, for him to ask her not to go-he had kept silent. She went, and afterward Windover talked, saying that he had jilted her because his mother couldn't face the thought of her only son's marrying anyone.

Anson heard the gossip and smiled grimly. The truth was that his mother had wanted him to marry Patty, and it was he who couldn't face it. She was too emotional; she gave and demanded too much; she got behind his reserve. He couldn't respond to her moods. If she were hurt by him, she recovered quickly, for she married within a few months. Anson never saw her again, but when his mother died, she wrote him a little note of sympathy saying that Mrs. Barr had been a wonderful character and that he must miss her.

Anson knew the truth about that, too. While her husband lived, his mother had successfully played the part of an overworked country doctor's busy wife, but when John Barr died she had become her real self-a selfish and domineering woman. Anson's only brother had died in the influenza epidemic that followed the Second World War; his only sister was a missionary in China, and he and his mother lived alone in what Mrs. Barr always called the homestead. He worked three days a week as a clerk in an office in Deanebury, hoping to pick up some knowledge of law and perhaps get a better job; he leased half the farm land and worked the other half; he served on the school board and the library committee, and ran-unsuccessfully-for town treasurer. The years went on with such a slow, grinding monotony that he could hardly tell one from another.

And then his mother died in her sleep, and he was free. Six months later he astonished Windover by marrying Axel Edgren's daughter, Christina, and at thirty-two his life began.

Anson moved a little in his chair on the shadowy porch. Even now, after seven years, it seemed like a miracle, his marrying Christina. He had seen her every day for years, he had always liked her, and thought she was lovely to look at, but it had never crossed his mind, or his heart, either, that she could hold the secret of a happiness deeper than any he had ever imagined. Yet it had all happened so easily! One day a few weeks after his mother's death, he stopped in at the drugstore to ask Mr. Pringle to notarize a paper connected with Mrs. Barr's estate.

The old man shook his head. "I'm not a notary anymore." he said. "You take it down to Len Pike, in the town hall. And here, take . Christina along with you. She's catching the bus for Deanebury to get some stuff we need. You all ready, Christina?"

The tall girl came out from behind the counter. "I don't want to take Mr. Barr out of his way-"

"Of course it isn't out of his way," Mrs. Pringle said testily. "The bus stop's right by the town hall. What are you doing, anyway-getting coy on me?"

Christina's gravity was anything but coy. "I only meant if he wasn't going down to Len Pike's right now-"

"He wants to get that paper signed, don't he? Well, then, hurry up. You don't want to miss the bus."

As they got into Anson's car, Christina said, smiling a little, "You don't have to take me downtown, you know. I have plenty of time to walk to the bus. Drop me anywhere you like."

"Do you think I'd let you-" Anson began, and then broke off, feeling himself flush at the intimacy of the words. "I mean, on a day like this?" he said.

Christina's smile deepened. "It is a glorious day," she said.

"But wet under foot," Anson said hastily.

It was one of those brilliant days in March when the icy grip of winter seems to have relaxed at last. The sky was dazzlingly blue, the sun yellow and warm, and patches of green were showing through the snow. That morning, looking out the kitchen window, Anson had felt his heart lift; now his vague anticipation was justified. He glanced at Christina. He knew her, and yet he didn't know her at all. He saw her in the drugstore, where his mother was forever sending him on errands; he had seen her, too, when she was younger: in the days when he worked in Deanebury he often passed her on her way to school-a tall girl whose long, fair braids were a contrast to the short, tortured locks of her companions. And of course he knew her father, for Axel Edgren was a colorful figure among the quiet Swedish families of the town. Anson recalled that he had died just before Christmas. Well, it was probably a relief; he hadn't worked for years, and he must have drunk up a good part of his wife's and his daughter's earnings.

They were in the village before Anson realized that he hadn't spoken a word to the girl beside him. As she leaned forward to open the door, he said quickly, "Why don't you wait till I get this thing signed, and then I'll drive you to Deanebury?"

"But you're busy-"

"No, I'm not." He almost laughed, it was so true. For the first time in years he didn't have to get back; there was no gray, shapeless figure in the big chair in the living room, waiting to ask where he had been, why the store didn't have this or that, or if he had remembered her medicine. His mother had been dead for a month, but today, for the first time, he felt really free.

The girl was hesitating, her blue eyes fixed on him. "I mean it," he said. "I haven't anything to do, but I can always invent some errand, if you think I need an excuse." He spoke almost gaily, getting out of the car.

Five minutes later, driving off with Christina, he wondered if Len Pike were watching from his office window. But it didn't matter; nothing mattered except that the sky was deep blue, the roadsides were streaming with melting snow, and that his feeling of happiness was bound up with the day, and even more bound up with the girl who sat beside him, her hair bright in the spring sunlight.

How stupid it is, Anson thought now, that a man never remembers what he talks about at the most important times in his life. He remembers the feeling of the moment, the smell of the air, the curve of lips in a smile, but not the words those lips have formed. Perhaps he and Christina hadn't said much on that drive to Deanebury, but he knew he had never felt so gay, so unlike his old self. He recalled scattered bits of their talk; she said she was sorry about his mother, and he thanked her, briefly, and added, "You lost your father a while back. He was an interesting man."

She said, surprised, "Did you know him?"

"Not as well as I'd have liked to."

"People in town weren't very friendly to him, you know." she said slowly. "Perhaps because he was different from most men his age."

"Yes," Anson said. "He enjoyed life, and he told the truth. There aren't many men of seventy who do that."

She was silent for so long that he was afraid he had upset her. When she turned to him, her eyes were bright with tears. "You did know him," she said. "I miss him dreadfully, and so does my mother-even though she was often cross with him."

Anson said, "You have two brothers, haven't you?"

"Yes. The older one, Carl, is in the Navy, and Eric-he's only sixteen, but very big for his age-threatens to run away and enlist in the Army. The war in 'Nam makes boys restless." She paused for a moment, then she asked, "If this war goes on, will you enlist?"

Anson didn't think the question was strange, for he had asked it of himself a good many times during the past few months, before his mother's death and after. "Yes, I would. I'm too old to fly, and I don't know about the Navy, but the Army would take me." He frowned through the windshield. "I'm thirty-two. I suppose that seems old to you."

"No," she said, seriously. "I'm almost twenty-five, and after you're twenty-one or two, everyone is the same age."

The golden afternoon slipped by. They reached Deanebury, and she did her errands, much too quickly. They drank coffee at a soda fountain, and then he drove her back to Windover, to the drugstore and Mr. Pringle.

Since his mother's death, the old house had held a wonderful peace, but at night it seemed too big, too crowded with heavy furniture and too full of shadows. But before he went to bed, he opened the front door and stood listening to the rush of water, the brook, tumbling down the hill across the road-the sound of spring. And suddenly Anson Barr realized that, for the first time since he could remember, he was looking forward to the next day. Tomorrow he could see Christina Edgren. He spoke aloud, standing alone in the windy darkness. "I'm going to marry her. It's the only thing I've ever wanted."

Now, seven years and a few months after that night, he wondered if it were some deep instinct, some need of the race to strengthen and renew itself, that had made him fall in love with Christina so swiftly and so unquestioningly. It was possible. Certainly his own inheritance wasn't strong; the weakness was not on the Barr side, but on his mother's. His father had told him that when he was quite young. Anson remembered being shocked by the detachment with which John Barr spoke of his wife's father, and his queerness, and about her various cousins. "There's a bad strain in the Logans," he said. "It keeps cropping up in different ways."

Was it the unconscious memory of his father's warning that had first drawn Anson to Christina? In marrying her, he had strengthened his New England stock with the best that had come to this country from Northern Europe. Christina's father could out drink most men, but he was no alcoholic; he was essentially healthy-minded and full of vitality. And her mother was a remarkable woman-intelligent, patient, energetic, kind.

But whatever the cause, conscious or unconscious, Anson had fallen in love with Christina as easily and as naturally as breathing. One day, he was alone in the world; the next, he was unable to imagine living another moment without her. But for weeks he put off asking her to marry him, because he was so afraid she would refuse.

And then one May afternoon he walked into the drugstore and told the astounded proprietor that he was taking his assistant off for the rest of the day. Mr. Pringle's jaw dropped and Christina looked amazed, but Anson only said, "Come on, Chris-I want to talk to you." She went, astonished but obedient. Halfway out to his house, he stopped the car and turned to her. "Chris," he said, hoarsely, "Chris, I don't know how to say it, but you've got to marry me. Tomorrow or next week or next month-I don't care when. But you've got to."

Christina laughed. It was the first time he had ever heard her really laugh, and the sound filled him with mingled delight and terror. When she could speak, she said, "Oh, Anson, I thought you'd gone out of your mind! Of course I'll marry you."

He looked at her with desperate intentness. "Do you love me, Chris? Are you sure?"

Instantly she was grave. "Yes, Anson." She spoke slowly. "I love you more than I've ever believed I could love anyone, I've been so afraid-"

"Of what?"

"Afraid that you wouldn't ask me to marry you. But now," she drew a breath, "now we'll be married whenever you like." Her voice was as steady as her eyes, but she blushed deeply as he leaned toward her.

"Oh, Chris," he said. "Chris...."