Years of Grace · Part III · I · Chapter 3 1 1 (2/2)

Jane’s lips, in their turn, were slightly compressed at the familiar phrase. Proper deference! That commodity that the Carvers sought in vain, throughout the world, looking for it, Jane thought, with the most pathetic optimism, in the most unlikely places. In the manners of Irish housemaids, on the lips of trained nurses, and in the emotional reactions of modern grandchildren. They never lost their simple faith that they ought to find it. That it was somehow owing to them. Was it, thought Jane curiously, because they were all over sixty? Or because they were Carvers? Stephen was a Carver, yet proper deference meant nothing in his life.

“Here comes Alden!” said Mrs. Carver suddenly. “Marie, are you ready?”

The figure of Mr. Carver had indeed deserted the pier and advanced to the beach grass. He was waving peremptorily. Aunt Marie rose from the Nantucket hammock a trifle hastily.

“I’ll get my sneakers,” she said, and vanished into the house.

“Now, where is your Uncle Stephen?” said Mrs. Carver. Jane, you’ll need your hat.” She was hurriedly swathing her own with a purple face veil.

“Didn’t you hear the horn?” called Mr. Carver. “I blew it twice.”

“We didn’t, dear,” said Mrs. Carver. “The wind’s offshore.”

“Jane, not much time,” said Mr. Carver. He took out his watch as he spoke. “It’s twenty minutes to three. Where are your rubber shoes?”

“I’ll get them,” said Jane. “They’re in my room.”

“Gall your Uncle Stephen,” said Mrs. Carver. “He’s working in the study.”

“I can’t see why you can’t all be ready at the proper time,” Jane heard her father-in-law observe as she crossed the porch. “I only keep up the launch for the pleasure of the family.” The screened door banged behind her. She crossed the living-room with an air of extreme deliberation. What a ridiculous old man Mr. Carver was! Domestic dictator! Why didn’t they all revolt? Why hadn’t they all revolted, years ago, long before she came into the family?

Jane paused before the living-room chimneypiece to kick, vindictively, a smouldering log back into the ashes and place the screen before the dying fire. Always this fuss about nothing, every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon, at twenty minutes to three! That launch! The Whim! Ironic name! It ought to be called The Duty, The Responsibility, The Obligation. Or perhaps, like a British dreadnought, The Invincible. It was invincible, when manned by Mr. Carver. Those Wednesday and Saturday races! That sacred necessity of following them, twice every week, out of the harbour and into the bay, around the three buoys and home. Watching those ridiculous catboats with Alden and Silly at the helm of one, appraising the wind, discussing the course, commending the seamanship. No one cared to go⁠—except Mr. Carver. Take today when Mrs. Carver wanted to telephone for lobsters and Aunt Marie to read the Atlantic and Uncle Stephen to work in the study and she just to be let alone for a quiet afternoon, to finish Cicily’s sweater and think of Stephen’s arrival. No one ever cared to go, really⁠—except the children. And they couldn’t because they made Mrs. Carver nervous, climbing around the boat, and Mr. Carver irritated, ever since little Steve had dropped the compass and broken the glass and spilled the alcohol all over the varnished table in the cabin.

“I only keep up the launch,” thought Jane in resentful retrospect, as she crossed the hall, “for the pleasure of the family.” What bunk! It was really Mrs. Carver’s fault, of course. She should have taken him in hand just as soon as she married him. Her weakness was his strength. She’d made him what he was today and the rising generations had to suffer for her folly. Stephen might have been like that if he had married a woman like his own mother. There was lots of “Carver” in Stephen. Jane knew she had been good for him. All the Wards had been good for him. Her father in one way, and her mother, and even Isabel, in quite another. The West had been good for him. Jane paused at the living-room door.

“Uncle Stephen?” she said.

The elderly professor was seated at his brother’s mahogany secretary, bent over a little pile of manuscript. He did not hear her.

“Uncle Stephen!” said Jane again.

Her uncle raised his shiny bald head abruptly. His big blue eyes looked mildly up at her over his gold-rimmed spectacles. His face was very fat and round and pink and his head was very spherical and almost hairless. In spite of his white moustache, Jane always thought he looked just like a good-natured baby. Uncle Stephen was always good-natured and Jane was very fond of him. He didn’t seem at all like a Carver. Was that perhaps because of Aunt Marie, the indomitable daughter of “the great Nielson,” with whom he had been united in matrimony for more than forty years? Aunt Marie seemed so much more like a Carver than Uncle Stephen himself. There was a subtle warning in that thought, reflected Jane. In patiently eradicating, throughout a long lifetime, the more disagreeable traits of a husband, did a wife herself acquire them?

But Uncle Stephen’s pleasant pink old face had assumed a guilty expression.

“Good Lord, Janie!” he said regretfully. “Is it twenty minutes to three?”

“You bet it is,” said Jane briefly. And her eyes met those of her uncle in a twinkle of understanding. Jane never discussed Carvers with Carvers, but she knew just how Uncle Stephen felt about The Whim. Fumbling a little in his haste, he began to put away his manuscripts in a shabby brown briefcase.

“I wanted to finish these notes,” he said helplessly, “but⁠—”

“What are you doing?” asked Jane. The activities of Uncle Stephen at Gull Rocks were always refreshing. Jane thought scholarship a trifle amusing. Impersonal, however, and assuaging, like the blue sky. Uncle Stephen’s conversation could always be counted on to rise above the domestic plane.

“A monograph,” he said meekly, “on the Letters of William Wycherley, for the Modern Language Society. His correspondence with Alexander Pope.”

“I thought Wycherley wrote plays,” said Jane vaguely. In spite of the early exhortations of Miss Thomas, the details of a Bryn Mawr education were fast fading from her memory.

“He did, my dear,” said Uncle Stephen. “Good plays and bad poems and very bad letters.”

“Then why write monographs on them?” asked Jane.

“They are interesting,” said Uncle Stephen, rising from his chair, “because they stimulated Pope to reply.”

“Then why not write on Pope’s answers?”

“That has been done, my dear.”

Jane felt that the mysteries of scholarship were beyond her.

“Pope was very fond of him,” said Uncle Stephen, as they turned toward the door. “He said ‘the love of some things rewards itself, as of Virtue and of Mr. Wycherley.’ ”

As she mounted the stairs in search of her rubber shoes, Jane wished that she were a scholar. Scholarship would be a resource at Gull Rocks. She wished that she were capable of generating a passionate interest in the thoughts of Alexander Pope on Virtue and Mr. Wycherley. She wished that she were capable of generating a passionate interest in almost anything that would serve to pass the time. On the landing she met Miss Parrot.

“Mrs. Carver,” said the trained nurse. Her voice was pleasant but a trifle cool.

“Yes,” said Jane.

“I wanted to speak to you again about Steve’s diet,” said Miss Parrot. “His grandmother will keep on giving him too much sugar. He had three tablespoons on his raspberries at luncheon. I can’t convince her it won’t build him up⁠—”

“I’ll speak to her,” said Jane. She turned to mount the stairs.

“And Mrs. Carver⁠—”

“Yes,” said Jane, pausing again on the third step above the landing.

“I’ll have to speak to you again about my supper tray. The desserts⁠—last night the cook sent me up only three prunes. I thought you’d like to know.”

“Oh, I love to know!” thought Jane. But⁠—“I’m sorry, Miss Parrot,” she said. “I’ll see about it.”

“And Mrs. Carver⁠—Madam Carver spoke to me again about using the back stairs. I’m not a servant, Mrs. Carver.”

“You’re a guest, Miss Parrot,” said Jane, “as I am myself. You’ll have to use whatever stairs Madam Carver asks you to.”

Miss Parrot’s pretty lips were firmly compressed. Jane looked at her in silence. She was a very good heart nurse. Jane fell a prey to inner panic.

“Please be patient, Miss Parrot,” she said weakly. “It won’t be for long now.”

“I shall use the front stairs,” said Miss Parrot firmly. And turned to descend them.

Jane mounted to her room in silence. At thirty-six life was terrible, she thought, as she pulled on her rubber shoes. It had no dignity. It wasn’t at all what you expected, when you were young. Youth wasn’t dignified, of course, but it was simple, it was joyous, it was expectant. In youth life seemed⁠—important. The things you thought about were important, no matter how inadequately you thought about them. But later you found yourself involved in a labyrinth of trifles. Worrying, ridiculous trifles. Things that didn’t matter, yet had to be coped with. And you’d lost that sustaining sense that, at any moment, something different might be going to happen. At thirty-six you found yourself a buffer state between the older generation and the younger. You had to keep your son’s trained nurse and you had to keep the peace with your mother-in-law. Did Miss Parrot think she liked to live with Mrs. Carver? Did Mrs. Carver think she liked to live with Miss Parrot? If she could live with both of them, Jane thought, they might at least succeed in living with each other for two brief months⁠—

“Jane!” It was the voice of her mother-in-law, raised in anxious protest from the terrace below her window. “What are you doing, dear? The launch is waiting!”

Jane snatched up a hat and ran from her room. She dashed down the stairs. Oh, well! Stephen was coming that evening. They would go home in three weeks. Miss Parrot was a good heart nurse. She took all the responsibility. And Steve was much better. Gull Rocks had done a lot for him. The sun and the sea air. Her mother-in-law was pathetic. She couldn’t really help Mr. Carver. And Stephen was coming.

Jane banged the screened door and overtook Mrs. Carver on the path to the pier. She slipped her hand through her plump arm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was talking to Miss Parrot.”

“What about?” asked Mrs. Carver.

“She was telling me she didn’t like prunes,” said Jane, laughing.

“Did she think that you cared?” inquired Mrs. Carver with acerbity.

“Yes. But she was wrong!” Jane dropped her mother-in-law’s arm and stooped to pluck a handful of sweet fern from among the beach grass. The grey-green petals, wrenched from the fibrous stem, exhaled a pungent perfume. Jane buried her nose in them. They were very sweet and warm from the sun. She ran lightly ahead of her mother-in-law out onto the pier.

Mr. Carver was standing on the float, his watch in his hand. He looked severely at her from under his straw hat-brim.

“Quickly, now,” said Mr. Carver.

Jane sprang from the float to the boat. Aunt Marie was seated in a canvas deck chair. Her ankles looked thick and her small, wide feet very flat and stubby in her white sneakers. She had brought the August Atlantic with her. Jane knew she wouldn’t be allowed to read it. Uncle Stephen was sitting on the little varnished bench along the rail. He looked more like a baby than ever, thought Jane, in his round canvas boating hat. A semicircle of pink scalp showed under its floppy brim in the rear. Mr. Carver was carefully handing his wife up over the little landing-ladder. Her feet fumbled on the rubber treads and she clung a trifle nervously to his blue serge sleeve.

“We may be in time yet,” said Mr. Carver quite happily. Then, with severity, “The starting gun is late.” His tone implied that starting guns were not what they used to be. In the days when he was president of the Seaconsit Yacht Club⁠—

Jane, perched on the rail, her rubber-shod feet upon the varnished bench, suddenly realized that she was laughing aloud. Carvers were pathetic. They were all over sixty. They didn’t know how funny they were. Jane felt distinctly sorry for them. To a discerning daughter-in-law they didn’t really matter.

One white-clad sailor was pulling up the ladder. Another was standing by to push off the launch. Mr. Carver had taken his seat at the wheel. His shrivelled little New England face, with its grey Vandyke beard, was turned sideways and upward, estimating the weather.

“Not much wind,” he said.

The whir of the gasoline engine increased in volume, then quieted suddenly to a steady purr. The water widened between the launch and the pier. Jane turned to watch the catboats, veering and tacking now, around the first buoy. Suddenly she heard the gun. Mr. Carver rose from his seat, still holding the wheel, to observe the start. Alden and Silly were well in the rear. That was too bad, thought Jane. She had long ago decided that, all things considered, it was preferable to listen to Alden talking all evening of how he had won a race than of how he had lost one.