Chapter 5
Anson took out the heavy gold watch that had been his father's. In the dimness he could only guess at the position of the hands, but it looked like twenty minutes past eight; Chris was staying a long time at the young Colliers' housewarming. She had urged him to go with her, but the long flight of steps leading up to the house made it impossible. He didn't explain that, however; he only said, "I'm not good at parties, Chris. You go and tell me about it."
"I don't like to leave you. You're alone so much."
He had almost said, "What does it matter? Quite soon I shall be alone entirely." But he had stopped in time, as he had learned to do in the past months. When the terrible pain in his back and legs had turned into an even more terrible numbness, he had been tempted to tell her about it, but he had always managed to check himself. If telling her would help-if she could do something. But there was nothing. The only help she could give him was by being cool, quiet, stable-in other words, by being herself.
It was almost dark. A star shone in the southwest, near the horizon. Was it Venus? One of the things he had always meant to do was to study the stars. When he was in Italy, he had watched them above the mountains and determined that when he got home he would buy a book about them. He smiled bitterly to himself. How many things you plan to do when you get home-if you get home-and then it's too late! It isn't really-I could still learn about the stars, if I wanted to, but I don't. I feel as if the paralysis that is creeping through my body were numbing my mind. I don't want to do anything now but sit, and wait for Chris to come back. Where could she be? She never stayed late anywhere. Has something happened to her? The car is old.
He fought down his anxiety, and it turned to anger, or was it jealously? He must resist that, too. She deserved a good time, if anyone did. But he wondered a little about her fondness for the young Colliers, for Dan. She couldn't be fond of the girl, a difficult little creature; Anson thought. But then she was a child, not much more than twenty.
He sat forward. There had been a glint of yellow light between the trees. He narrowed his eyes, his heart beating faster. She was coming. Yes, the glint became two beams, the headlights of the car coming steadily down the hill. Anson sat back again, with painful slowness. He didn't think that Christina had noticed that he couldn't make certain movements; she believed that it hurt him so much to move that he did it very slowly. That was just as well; he would keep his secret as long as he could. Though at this rate, he reflected grimly, it won't be long before I'm flat in bed.
The headlights swung into the drive, streamed past the garden, and rounded the turn to the garage. Listening, Anson heard the motor stop, heard the opening and closing of the car door and Christina's quick footsteps sounding crisply on the drive, muffled as she crossed the grass. She spoke from the foot of the steps. "Anson?"
"I'm out here."
She was beside him, her warm hand on his. "You're cold. Why didn't you go in?"
He said, and instantly regretted having said it, "I kept thinking you'd be back."
"I know," she said. "I shouldn't have stayed so long."
"You never do, so I worried," Again, it wasn't he who was speaking-it was his new feeling of anger, jealousy, self-pity-whatever it was. "Did you have a good time?"
"Not really. It was a queer party. I'll tell you about it when we're in the house. You must be hungry."
"No." He had no appetite nowadays, though before he was ill he could eat enormously, without adding an ounce or an inch to his spare frame. Now he ate only to keep her from worrying.
"I'll put on the lights." She opened the screen door, and an instant later a yellow glow came from the hall. Anson pulled himself up. His arms and shoulders were still strong, but how long would they be able to lift the rest of his body? From knee to hip his legs seemed encased in armor plate, and he moved them stiffly, and a little sideways, as if he were swinging them from the shoulders like a man on crutches. Loring, the Windover doctor, had urged him to go to Boston, but what was the use? Anson had read enough in his father's medical books to know that spine operations were tricky things.
"Not nowadays," the doctor had argued. "They've made terrific progress in neurosurgery, Anson, even in the past three or four years. This man can take you whole spine apart and put it together again."
"But we don't know what started this trouble. If it were an ordinary injury, something that could be diagnosed-"
"He'll diagnose it," Dr. Loring said confidently. "At least go and have a preliminary examination."
"I'll think about it."
But he knew he wouldn't go. It would cost a lot, and an operation would be even more expensive. Besides, he was sure that nothing could be done. The paralysis would spread, and he would end up in an iron lung. "Except that I won't," Anson said to himself. "I'll be dead long before that, and not from an overdose of sleeping tablets, either." He had no personal scruples about taking his own life; he would do it in a moment if it weren't for Christina. But he couldn't be so unfair to her. There would be another way, he thought; there must be. God wouldn't let him down....
Christina brought trays to the living room and lighted a small fire. "I need it myself," she said. "Even in June, that house of the Colliers' isn't very warm."
"It used to be a tomb," he said. "What have they done to it?"
"They've done a lot. The girl must be clever at such things. The woodwork is painted white, and the old paper has been stripped off and the walls done in clear colors-turquoise and yellow and soft green. She has beautiful linen curtains-very expensive-looking." He thought she spoke rather wistfully. "There are other changes-a window cut beside the stairs, that used to be so dark. But it isn't a comfortable house." She looked thoughtfully around the low-beamed old living room. "I like this much better."
"We could do with some expensive linen curtains," he said dryly. "But if we once started fixing up this house, we'd never end. Who was at the party?"
She frowned at the fire. "It was a mixture. Poor Dan, he knew no one, really, when he was a boy, but the whole town knew who his family was, so he asked everyone. They came, too-most of them out of curiosity, I imagine."
"That's better than having no one at all."
"Yes, but so many of them were strangers to him, and of course they all were to his wife, so it was awkward. That's why I stayed," Christina said.
"To introduce people and be an assistant hostess? A thankless task."
"Well-" She hesitated. "Leona is young, and I imagine that her life has been sheltered, that she has always moved in one circle. She isn't very good with different sorts of people."
And you are, Anson added to himself, not ironically, but honestly. It was amazing. Christina, whose father had been an eccentric, half-drunken stonemason, was far more at home with different kinds of people than the girl who was Dan Collier's wife. And it wasn't just because she knew Windover. She would have been the same in London or Hongkong, in Alberta or Johannesburg, because she was Christina.
Aloud he said, "I wonder why they asked so many people."
"Because," Christina said, "that house is the nearest thing to a home that Dan's ever had. He wants it to be a real home now. I know, because he used to talk to me when he was eighteen."
Anson felt the new stab of jealousy. "You and he must have known each other pretty well. Most boys of eighteen don't talk easily about such things."
Christina turned her level gaze to him. "He did, because he was lonely, that last summer."
For a moment, Anson thought she was going on, to tell him what Dan Collier had talked to her about, but she turned away, back to the fire. He thought, There are some things she'll never tell me. In a way, she'll always be a mystery to me. But isn't that why I married her?
Presently she said, "I wonder how they'll get on, those two."
"In Windover, or with each other?"
"Both. They should have children, of course."
"Why of course? Are children the solution to all problems?" He knew he sounded bitter, but he couldn't help it.
"Not all," Christina said. "But of many. And nowadays, when people have fewer roots than they used to have, children are important."
He said, looking at her bent golden head, "Do you wish we had had them?"
There was a silence; he could feel his pulses quickening. She said at last, "If we could have looked ahead, before you went into the Army, but no one can look ahead." She turned. "Anson, you're not sorry?"
"No." It was the only thing he could say. It was too late, now, to regret anything. And in a way he couldn't regret that he hadn't burdened her with a child to bring up-alone. But he was the last of the Barrs. The family instinct dies hard, he thought, in New England, perhaps everywhere.
She looked at him for a long, thoughtful moment; then she rose and carried the trays out to the kitchen. He sat looking at the fire; it was dying down. What was the poem of Landor's that had depressed him so when he had read it years ago?
I warm both hands before the fire of life, it sinks, and I am ready to depart.
That thought didn't depress him now, for it was truer than he could once have believed. He wished that he had warmed his hands more freely, and for longer, but he was ready. If he could only sink, as this fire on his hearth was sinking now-if it were over, the fierce struggle with the flesh. He closed his eyes.
Christina was beside him, a warm, living presence. "Anson, where is the pain?"
He couldn't tell her that it was everywhere, in his heart, his mind, his whole being. Besides, that wasn't true. What he felt was no longer pain, merely weariness. "There's very little, tonight," he said. "I'm just tired. Let's go up."
"I wish you'd let me turn your study into a bedroom. That would be so much easier for you."
"I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't go upstairs to bed," he said. "Unless it's too much for you to help me?"
She smiled. "How foolish, Anson! As if I weren't strong. I'm as strong as-"
"As your heart," he said gravely. "And only I know how strong that is."
As she turned to him, he saw that her eyes were soft with tears. "I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"It's not nice enough," he said. "But I don't talk easily, Neither do you-that's why we get along. The silent Swede, the laconic Yankee. Come, Chris, let's go up."
But later, lying in bed and listening to her quiet breathing, he thought, I wish we did talk more. And, like a stab from the darkness, came the thought: She and Dan Collier talked. Were they in love? She's nearly seven years older than he, but years don't matter, especially with Christina. Is that why she goes to his house? Does she talk to him now?
He was used to lying awake, but tonight the darkness held a tension, as if it were black silk stretched across his eyeballs. He heard sounds too clearly-a car, rushing down the road, the June bugs blundering against the screen. He wished that he were back on the porch, or sitting in the garden. If he got up, but that would disturb Chris, and she was tired. He turned his aching shoulders on the pillow and stared at the dimly out-lined square of the window. He couldn't see the stars, but they were there. Tomorrow he would ask Chris to get him some books about them from the library. He might as well learn about the stars while he had time. Yes, he thought, rather bitterly, there is still time-time to feel pain, to wonder: Is that why she sees him? Do they still talk to each other, and what about?