Chapter Ten

For sixteen years Henriette Simpson and Henry Schuyler, as the saying is, had been “going together.”

They had graduated together from the Tallahassee High School, Class of ’91. A framed photograph of that class of nine girls and three boys, with the brick wall of the school-building for background, hung in Henriette’s front hall.

Henriette herself, a long-necked, frail-necked girl, supporting a weight of pompadour which she seemed to balance as if it were a vessel of water, while around her feet swirled train, and against her breast beat a gold watch hanging from a gold fleur-de-lis pin. Held firmly upright against her lap, a framed placard bore in admonitive script the class-motto, “Animus. Fides. Successus.” Eight more sweet-girl graduates flanked her on each side, interlarded with the three generous-wristed male members of the Class of ’91. They were a necky group, Henry’s characteristics of more-than-considerable of neck gangling above tall collar and stand-offish ears, holding for all of them. Henry’s hair, which at that time gave no sign of the premature horseshoe of baldness which was to beset him, was clamped in straight bangs across his brow. An enormously sober young man with a lantern jaw.

Henry and Henriette used to laugh over that picture. Only six out of the class, what with deaths and removals, were still living in Centralia.

May Kinealy, the third girl from the left, with the yellow Della Fox curl oozing from the center of her pompadour, had married Phil Koerber, the son of Centralia’s most prosperous grocer. The Koerbers had grown rich. Koerber’s Corner, where canned goods were piled in bins on the sidewalk and sold at slashed prices, was one of the thriving ones in town. May, who was fat now, and whose Della Fox curl had straightened from an interrogation-point into an exclamation-point at what she had become, had nine children. She still did her own work, however, and her own green-marketing at the farmers’ wagons, which gathered around Court House Square on three mornings a week, cramming purchases into two oilcloth shopping-bags, which bulged from beet, celery and carrot-tops.

Tom Powers, the exceedingly narrow boy, wedged in between Bleema Deifenbach and Ella Tarl, had married Hanna Quick, first girl on the left, and, at thirty, held what was to be a lifetime position as foundry-foreman with the Giles Tool Works, at a salary never to exceed twenty-four hundred a year.

Ella Tarl, the class beauty, with the small heart-shaped face hanging from her pompadour like a bangle, had died in a shameful childbirth, and the shooting and maiming of Judge Sloan’s son Tod by Ella’s brother, who was acquitted, was one of Centralia’s sensations of the decade.

From their first year in High, Henry and Henriette had paired off. That is, when there was occasion for it. Class functions, especially the senior year when Henry was class president and Henriette sergeant-at-arms. In the debating-society when teams were formed. Commencement hay-ride. The senior week-end excursion to the Etruscan Pottery Works and the Art Museum.

In the subsequent years that Henriette had been teaching fifth-grade, and Henry plodding his slow and thoughtful way into his curious sort of muted eminence, that friendship had ripened; indeed, there were those in Centralia who would have said, over-ripened—into one of those cases of courtship that never seem to come to anything.

“’Twan’t nice.”

“Henry hadn’t ought to.”

“Of course, just as abiding a pair of young folks as there is in town, but Henriette ought to have more pride.”

“Well, it might be abiding, so far’s anyone could tell, but why didn’t Henry marry her or leave off keeping company?”

“All those years. ’Twan’t nice!”

“Surprised the Old Gentleman would stand for such doings.”

“Now that Henriette was orphaned, too....”

“A nice pair.”

Centralia had its solutions. A streak of hypothetical and absolutely untraceable insanity that might lurk somewhere in the ostensibly nice, clean stock of Beebe Simpson and his wife, who had moved West from Edelweiss, Maine, years before. Then there was the old wives’ hypothetical legend of some streak of frigidity that might lurk in Henriette. Those high-shouldered, lean-necked girls. No telling! Or was it due to Henry’s just out-and-out failure to live up to his responsibilities of so long a courtship. Could that be? Henry, as fine a son to his family as ever breathed the county air!

For twelve years, at least, public opinion had wagged over this protracted courtship. The idea! High time! Here they were, Henry thirty-eight now, and Henriette possibly a month or two the older. Not that it mattered, where the difference was so little! For at least ten years of Friday nights, long before her parents had died and left her alone in the little, frame, two-family house on Primer Street, sure as fate, Henry had suppered at the Simpsons’. Every Saturday for at least the past eight years of her life, Henriette had lunched with Henry at the Blue Bird Lunch Room on High Street.

For those same eight years, Henriette had partaken of Tuesday suppers, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthday dinners at the House on Sycamore Street. The summer that Bek Schuyler stumped the state for Ephraim Howey, Henriette, who usually took summer-courses at State University, had accompanied her instead, distributing campaign literature during meetings.

“High time,” was the popular phraseology about it to everyone except those most immediately concerned. “High time” that they did something about it or quit. If they aren’t married, they ought to be! Oh, not that I mean it in that sense. Only, it isn’t fair to the girl. Henriette’s no spring chicken. Not fair to keep away others, if he hasn’t intentions. Surprised the Old Gentleman would countenance it. High time....

Fact of the matter was, Henry was not insensible to “high time.” At intervals of never less than a twelve-month, he was wont to open up this extremely delicate and periodic discussion with Henriette. Usually at the Blue Bird, where the privacy seemed less concentrated, than in Henriette’s own little front parlor, where two equidistant parental Simpsons, in crayon, looked down and bated one’s breathing.

Almost invariably at the Blue Bird, while Henriette broke up bread crumbs and squeezed them into dark-gray pellets, they discussed it. The Blue Bird was an ordinary room on a level with the sidewalk. There were two plate-glass windows that looked out on High Street, brown jardinières of artificial and fly-specked nasturtiums in each of them posed before lace curtains that were draped to shield the diners from the gaze of the passer-by.

Pasted against each of the plate-glass windows was the day’s menu. Hektographed. Twelve square tables, each large enough to seat four, formed three aisles.

Since the opening of the White Kitchen, one block down, there were those who contended that the old Blue Bird had deteriorated, to say nothing of the inroads by the Business Men’s Noonday Clubs. But all the old group from the Renchler Business Block still lunched there, the Giles brothers of the Tool Works and old Judge Wale, who brought most of his provender in a tin box from home and washed it down with hot coffee.

Henry and Henriette’s accustomed table was under a ceiling fan toward the rear.

Every Saturday, Henriette, who usually came directly from teachers’ meeting, arrived at five minutes to twelve, and did the ordering before Henry arrived.

Mock-turtle soup for herself; the Blue Bird Noonday specialty, lamb with mint-sauce and mashed potatoes, and a dessert also very special to the Blue Bird, known as “Berry Swim,” a concoction of noodles with stewed berries (in season) dumped over.

Henry’s lunch never varied, either. Poached eggs (eyes closed, please). Stewed corn. Glass of buttermilk (not too cold, please). Bowl of rice, for dessert, to be covered with cinnamon and cream (don’t forget his cinnamon, please).

They were, at their respective thirty-eights, a neat pair. Henriette in her tweed suit with fur tippet, or, in season, foulard, that she never wore in schoolroom, sprigged over with a small, coral, berry-and-leaf design. Henry in his gray sack suit of herring-bone pattern that he was never known to vary.[17]

If anything, the years had improved the angular Henriette of the Class of ’91 photograph. Her brown hair, graying now, was worn low enough to cover much of the high, narrow brow that the pompadour had flared to reveal. The current fashion of draped clothing concealed a certain spareness of figure. Henriette’s good eyes, golden, kind eyes, were capable of all sorts of humorous twinkles behind their pince-nez. The pince-nez, even though they dug in cruelly to the sides of her nose, far from detracting, gave importance to Henriette’s face. They shone like a pair of brilliant wings.

As is common enough among girls of her narrow-chested kind of youth, it could be said of Henriette that out of a girlhood filled with the agony of her awareness of her lack of so-called physical charms, in her thirties, a saving sense of humor had sprung full-grown to her rescue.

At thirty-four, Henriette, in her under-bodice, before her mirror, could smile and try to powder out the knobs of bones at the front of her neck, where at twenty-four she had stood and watched herself cry secret tears that coursed down her cheeks and splashed onto these bones.

After the first frightened months of pulling each gray hair out as it appeared, there was the solace of realizing that as they thickened and whitened beyond her control, they softened her face and became her.

The children, of her schoolmates, as they appeared from time to time in her classes, had for years been the source of her secret, gnawing pain. May Koerber’s (’91) two tow-heads might have been hers, but for accident of—of—everything. Little Jean Powers, child of Tom Powers (’91). Children to whose generation of mothers and fathers she belonged. By right! By right of—of—well, by the same right as the May Koerbers and the Tom Powers. The right of the secret places of her heart.

There had been years when carking yearnings lodged in Henriette.

Those particular years of the race were over now. And, with them, a letting-down. The fingers of the children to whose generation of parents she belonged no longer stabbed her with secret sense of frustration. There was something dry and brittle and no little efficient about Henriette now. Beside her, the May Koerbers looked and felt a little over-blown.

Henriette hadn’t let herself go. She attended summer sessions at State University, Morning Choral Society at Middleton, and, one summer, had taken a course in domestic science and English literature at Northwestern University. And why not, with no home ties to bind her? It was well known that Henry Schuyler considered her brainy and for years Henriette’s papers at the Saturday Morning Club annual had been outstanding. One had even found its way into print.

Some said they were written for her by Henry Schuyler. Be that as it may....[18]

The week that Henry’s proposed candidacy for District Attorney was being noised about, they met at the Blue Bird, come Saturday, in just the fashion they had been meeting there for the years of Saturdays. Henriette, in brown foulard and a mink tippet with a head that bit into its tail, already at table, and a heavy girl, named Katy, who had served them for all the years, spreading the unvarying meal.

Her orange pekoe tea, strong, the way she liked it, steamed up into Henriette’s face, softening the rather angular manner it had of thrusting itself into the light of a High Street midday.

“Are your eggs done enough, Henry?” For these years and years of Saturday noons, Henriette had asked that question. She was an excellent theoretic cook herself, and conducted a domestic-science class in the High School physics-laboratory every Wednesday evening. It was said of her that while she could direct the baking of a perfect cake, her own were apt to fall, sadly. And that whereas a pupil of Henriette’s could serve you up with an excellent meal, Henriette’s own meals were nothing to brag about.[19]

These solicitous little questionings of Henriette about his eggs, his cinnamon, the desired coolness of his buttermilk, the rightness of his stewed corn, apparently pleased Henry, although he never replied to them, shaking a bit of salt into his palm, mashing his poached eggs down into their toast, and drinking the buttermilk at one sustained tilting of the glass, even while she queried it.

“Here’s that Taine’s Origin of Contemporary France I was telling you about last week, Henriette. Thought you might be interested in reading it.”

“That’s mighty thoughtful of you, Henry.”

“Don’t block-read it, Henriette. There may be some of it makes pretty hard sledding, but if you’ll read it slowly, you’ll be well repaid. I tell you, that fellow had the right idea. Revolution, he points out, didn’t destroy absolutism and set up liberty, anything of the sort. France was already a centralized country before 1789, and grew more so from Louis XIV onward. The Revolution merely gave it new form. Don’t mean to say I agree with more than two-thirds, but I’d like you to read that book, carefully—there’s food for thought in his point of view....”

Years of Henry’s intellectual fodder, carefully predigested by him for her, had strengthened Henriette’s powers of assimilation. She owned, quite frankly, that it was a privilege to be dominated by another mind, if that mind was of incalculably better caliber. Therefore she seldom dipped into a book, since he almost entirely prescribed her reading, without the crutch of Henry’s preconceived opinion to help her toward his conclusions.

“I wrote down and pasted in the back of my attendance book, Henry, something you quoted me from Taine once. ‘Every man and every book can be summed up in three pages and those three pages can be summed up in three lines.’”

“That’s me, I reckon, and all this hubbub about the attorney-generalship. If there’s any special job that I’m cut out for at all, it’s not to be out in the ring, acting out the three pages. I’m the fellow on the side lines, who sums it all up in three lines.”

A kind of light came into Henriette’s long, lean oblong of a face. A pinkness across the bony mold of it.

With no other person in the world, except his sister Bek, would Henry voluntarily have opened up this subject. Henriette knew that. Something clutched at her, a little excitingly.

“You know best, of course, Henry. Of course, it isn’t given to many, Henry, to refuse honors like that—one after another—alderman—assemblyman—mayor—and now this! Why, there’s no telling....”

Henriette’s voice slipped a little, causing her to clutch with an angular hand at her angular throat. It was seldom, indeed if ever, in all the years of their methodical allotment of so many hours a week together, that Henriette ever let slip an emotion. She caught herself up by the slow, measured manner which followed.

“I mean, Henry, you have already refused more honor than comes to most men in a lifetime.”

There was something particularly pathetic about her half-illumined face, as if she dared not let the light come, and it was Henry’s turn, stung by a consciousness of what she withheld, to make his conscientiously periodic observation.

“I’ve refused the greatest honor of all, Henriette.”

“I didn’t mean that, Henry, and you know it,” she said without the artifice of pretending not to understand, and colored a wintry, russet sort of not unbecoming red.

“That is what makes it hard, Henriette. You are above meaning that which makes the situation difficult and no less true.”

The subject was one which always induced a rush of blood against Henriette’s heart. She could scarcely breathe. There were head noises. Secret, raging tragedy of her sparse years beat in blood against her heart. Under it all, she invariably succeeded in speaking in slow, measured tones.

“We understand each other, Henry.”

“I could never forgive myself if I for a moment thought otherwise, Henriette.”

How solid he was. How stolid. Sometimes, as she cried secretly while she lay in bed nights, that stolidity was almost a presence in the room.

“You have nothing to forgive yourself for, Henry.”

“Maybe not, Henriette. You can’t blame a man who knows the fruits on the tree are luscious, and yet, by some devilish inhibition, cannot raise his arm to pluck them. He is the loser.”

“Nonsense. Life is like that. You’ve every reason in the world to be in love with me, except you aren’t! Now!”

There was an air of surprise to Henriette, as if from what she had just heard her lips utter.

“No, Henriette——”

“All right then, except you aren’t enough in love with me. No, Henry, you have nothing to forgive yourself for. Except perhaps making life a pretty wonderful affair for me, with you to throw the light of your mind upon the world I live in. Think of the narrow, groping affair it might be for an old maid in a one-horse town. What would I be without this friendship, Henry?”

There was something of a cry in that question. The cry of a spinster’s dread of her loneliness.

“That is the question which sometimes torments me, Henriette. You have let the years pass by, when except for me, you might have been married by now and settled down to a home and children and the sort of life to which a normal, wholesome woman like yourself is entitled.”

“No, Henry, we have been over that hypothetical ground often enough for you to realize that in all probability things would not have been different.”

“Not even if no such person as me existed?”

“That, of course, is impossible to answer. But the fact remains that I am satisfied, Henry. In a way, quite happy. In any event, completely understanding.”

“I wish I were that—Henriette, about myself. Where you are concerned.”

“It needn’t trouble you, Henry. Ice-cream may be a nourishing and even a delicious food, and yet there are those who do not like it. There is not the slightest reason, merely because we have been friends all these years, for you to feel the responsibility of falling in love with me. Even granting, for the sake of our mutual amusement, that my friendship with you has kept off swarms of suitors, don’t fool yourself, Henry. My destiny in this town would have been just what it is, except without my friendship with you. And without it, I would be just one more old maid headed for the pension-list of our public-school system. I know what contact with a mind like yours has done for me. I’m the best appraiser of my own assets and liabilities.”

“You’re a thousand times too good for me, Henriette. I’m a fool.”

“If that explanation appeases you more successfully than any other, we’ll let it go at that. What’s our programme for the afternoon, Henry?”

“Thought we might drive out by the House on Sycamore Street and pick up Dave. Well, sir, funny thing about that youngster. Never saw the like, the way his mind runs to pretty nearly everything you put up to it. Napoleon, The Three Bears, sheep-breeding, and Gunga Din seem to interest him about alike. Got him all het-up now about his tiger-moth and its color-reaction to temperature.”

“I know it. I overheard him telling the Igrotte children about it last week when I took those Mason jars over to your mother. They didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“Speaking of natural history, other night, sitting smoking up in my room in the dark, along the time, I guess, when any well-meaning citizen should have been abed, thinks I to myself, is that something moving out there along South Meadow? Coyote? Dog? Stray sheep? Man? Turns out to be Dave, sneaking all the way from his sister Bek’s, where he was spending the night, to feed a sick lamb down in the kitchen, which, I figured out, he must have forgotten about. As a matter of fact, I had tended the little thing myself before going upstairs, and Trina had minded him too—but for a mite of a kid trudging all that way, dead o’ night—right queer, now wasn’t it?”

“He was telling me about the ant-hill you’ve made for him, his little old hiccoughy voice just heaving away and trying to explain their habits.”

“I think Dave ought to have a good hound-dog. There’s a fellow called Sweeney out along Pikes Road, breeds them.”

“Yes, I’ve had both the Sweeney youngsters in class. Ragged lot.”

“Thought we’d pick up the boy and take him out there and let him pick a puppy. Nothing like a good hound-dog to teach a fellow the decencies. A dog’s got about all of them—honor, loyalty, courage. Thought we’d take a ride out along Pikes Road to Sweeney’s, if it’s all the same to you?”

Henriette bit her tippet’s mouth into its tail, and rose from the table with a little backward kick of her long, full skirts.

“It will be the same to me, Henry, wherever we go—together.”

FOOTNOTES: