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The Indian Summer of Mary McQueen

Mary, Mary quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

Mary McQueen murmured the words to herself lan­guidly as she stood at the veranda door, gazing through the mesh out to the barren, puddled lawns and the dripping maples. The rain was pouring straight down, a heavy cur­tain, never once slanted or scattered by the wind. She could hear the parched gardens gasping with gratitude beneath the weight of it.

Inside, the house was as hot as ever, humid and so uncomfortable that in another five minutes she would have to go and change her dress. She glanced back into the living room with its freshly laundered drapes and pretty summery chintz and she could not face the thought of dragging herself up the stairs.

If she did not look at the driveway where the gravel was rapidly disappearing beneath a sheet of slate-coloured puddles, for five whole minutes - not cheating - then, as she raised her eyes, surely she would see the biscuit- coloured Buick she had expected since breakfast, nosing in off the highway. She sat down on the rocking chair, her wrist dangling heavily across her knee. She immediately felt even hotter and more uncomfortable, but that way she could watch the tiny hands of the watch with the minimum of effort.

Dan McQueen had given it to her on the plane after they got married, as he took her up to the house in Vermont for their honeymoon. Then they had returned to live in New York. Fifteen years later, after deciding to make their home there in the soft woods and hills of New England Dan had inexplicably walked out. Mary had never sus­pected another woman.

'I have my English Mary,' he used to say, with nauseat­ing frequency, at dinner parties. 'She's just about the grea­test!'

Just about.

She had resented his work and his devotion to golf as did all the other wives at the Garden Club. But never had she suspected Dan, sidesman at the local church and co- organizer of the Lake Falls Arts Festival, of hankering after another woman.

Once, they had gone up to Tanglewood to listen beneath the great north American moon to Beethoven and Mozart. He had sat beside her on the grass holding her hand, trying to sneak little kisses like a boy of twenty. She had been so embarrassed. Dan was a man of fifty-six. But Dan did not like serious music - it was the organizing side of the Arts Festival he enjoyed, not the art - and they had not gone again.

She glanced at the watch once more. Two minutes more and she would look up at the rain-swept drive.

It was six weeks now since Dan had driven off with his bags to collect Sarah Walton. Mary could keep the house, he said. He would pay a regular allowance into her account.

He had been as excited as a kid going on holiday with his cases and, of course, his golf clubs. He had worn his new shirt and the silk cravat she had given him. She had had it sent from Fortnum's in London and she knew the label alone would have pleased him. That hurt as much as anything else; that he should wear her present when run­ning away with another woman. It was as though he expected her to share his excitement, help him pack, even prepare the two of them some sandwiches.



'Don't you want to know where we're going, honey?'

He had sounded quite hurt and when she shook her head, wordlessly miserable, he looked upset and worried and took her hand rather as an anxious mother takes the hand of her child to feel if it has a fever.

She had waved him goodbye though.

That night, inevitably, Cyrus Walton had driven up complete with Californian wine and barbecued chicken. As inevitably after they had eaten he had expected them to go to bed together. Even in Lake Falls it seemed wife swapping could be viewed with equanimity if it salved one's hurt and avenged one's pride. But she proved contrary and Cyrus at last went home, hiccoughing and unfulfilled to his empty bed. She had sat a long time after she had locked up that night, considering whether she had been foolish and should have accepted his offer. Perhaps if he had been different she would have. But she had always found Cyrus the worst type of boorish male. She preferred her loneli­ness. Then.

The hand on the watch had traversed its full five minutes but she was reluctant to look up now and break the spell she had woven.

She could hear the rain pounding down onto the leaves and the roof and the gravel outside, but no scrunch of car tyres. She would wait another two minutes, she bargained with fate, and then go in if he hadn't appeared and fix herself a cold fattening drink.

After all, it had not been such a definite arrangement that he arrive this morning. She pictured again the square jaw, the fair untidy hair, the piercing eyes which seemed to see her soul, of the man with whom she had shared martinis and lunch on the plane down to New York three weeks before.

They had got talking, as people do on planes. He helped her with her seat belt and adjusted the air conditioning. Then they had a drink and relaxed.

By the time they had reached cruising altitude they had been chatting like friends; by the time they approached LaGuardia they had both felt, she was certain, that they were friends.

They were both pressed for time, but parting had seemed inappropriate and too hurried. Then she had remembered the new car, a biscuit-coloured Buick, which he was to pick up on this trip and drive back north. 'Come by, won't you?' She had asked and he had agreed. They had held hands for a moment and exchanged glances, she had thought, of significance and promise.

The two minutes were up. At last she raised her eyes again to the dripping garden. It was curtained by the falling rain, scented, beautiful. It smelt, she thought, like every beautiful smell there had ever been, but it was empty of life.

Getting up from the rocking chair she went through to the kitchen. Ice cream in the freezer. Maple syrup in the cupboard. Soda somewhere. To hell with the inches.

Then abruptly she slammed the carton back into the freezer. No. Bravado aside, she wanted a cup of tea, how­ever hot it would make her feel.

Then she would go up and change her dress. And if she had a quick shower as well, he would probably arrive then. People so often call when one is in the shower.

She snapped on the radio as she waited for the kettle to boil. A phone-in show was on, as always, with lonely women pouring out their hearts in the seclusion of their kitchens to the public anonymity of the air. American women have such shrill voices, she thought suddenly with a shudder, and they are always complaining. But that, after all, was the purpose of the programmes. Suffering in silence may be dignified and English but was it any better for one's peace of mind? She thought not.

She switched off and looked instead out of the back window over vistas of dripping bushes and trees, down towards the lake. She and Dan used to keep a boat down there. Then, two years before, he had suddenly announced he was too old and sold it. It was the first time he had done anything like that without consulting her and she had been heartbroken, both for the boat itself, which she loved and for the precedent which, she had felt somehow even then, might bode evil for the future.

She made the tea with a teabag in her cup and carried it, steaming, up to her bedroom. It looked out over the front of the house, so she could see him if he came.

If he came?

So she was having doubts now. She sat down at the dressing table and wondered for the first time whether he would come at all. She had been so certain. She had even bought a new dress for the occasion. She glanced sadly at the bed where she had thrown it, crumpled and damp with perspiration.

If only the rain would stop. If only she dared run down to the garden, naked. If only there would be a premature frost.

As she did every day of every summer she thought nostalgically of the summers at home in England with the cool fresh winds and early morning mists and felt homesick once more for her happy girlhood.

If I had stayed at home, she thought again, where would I have been now? And what would I have been? Not, certainly, a middle-aged American matron, husbandless and hunting for a man. She gazed up at herself in the mirror, suddenly appalled. Is that what she was? Is that what she, who so despised the other man-hunting women she had met, had become?

She scrutinized her image carefully. She certainly looked the part. Her hair showed no thread of grey and every strand was immaculate, her hairdresser saw to that. Her tights came from Lord and Taylor, her dresses from only a few select couture shops. Even in that boat she had not been really casual. Her slacks were tailored cleverly to conceal any broadening of the hips which might have shown and her jackets were without exception long enough. She had always been careful not to chip her nails gardening or on the jetty.

She stood up. Why in a temperature of over 100° and with the humidity unbearable was she wearing heavy make-up and tights at all? To impress a man she had picked up - oh yes, Mary, face the fact, that's what you did, she thought - picked up, three weeks ago on a plane ride to New York. For three weeks she had been living in a breath­less pause like a teenage girl with her first infatuation. It was shameful, shallow and childish.

Looking back at the mirror she caught herself blushing with embarrassment and she felt suddenly more contrary than she had ever felt in her life before.

Falling on her knees in front of the highboy in the corner she pulled open a heavy drawer. There, neatly packed away in tissue and lavender were some of the old clothes which she had never brought herself to give away to the Garden Club bazaar. Pulling them out she heaped them on the floor around her, searching through the well- remembered garments.

She couldn't make up her mind between the dark blue cotton shift and the slacks and cotton shirt. Both were a little shabby and badly needed pressing. Both had been hers when she had first come to the States so very long ago.

She showered and removed her make-up and slipped at last into the shift, unwilling to try the test of time and her constant slimming by putting on trousers which she had worn as a girl.

Then she stood bare-legged and barefoot before the mirror. The dress was creased and faded in the creases and shabby and the wrong length for today's fashions but her legs, she decided critically, were perhaps not too bad. Her hair was all wrong. It was formal and stiff and, she suddenly realized, the colour was too hard for her face.

She brushed it hard, trying to dislodge the careful style, but it would not be disarranged.

Ten minutes later she was in the rain, her feet delight­fully chilled in the cold grass, her shift black with absorbed water and clinging to her skin, her hair bedraggled, untidy and quite styleless. She cut armloads of roses, the raindrops still on their petals and watched the gentle curves of their leaves fill with more rain as they lay in the basket on the grass at her feet. She wondered if Sue Beckstein could see her across the lawn from her kitchen window. If so she would probably call up the local sanatarium.

She laughed aloud at the thought, shook her head so the raindrops flew, then picking up her basket she almost danced back to the house.

Her hair dried into tight little curls, with wisps and loose ends around her eyes. She stripped off the dress and threw it in the tub. Recklessly she tried on the old slacks. They still fitted after all those years.

She rummaged in a drawer and found a copper- hammered pendant which went with the throbbing green of her shirt, then still barefoot she ran downstairs to arrange her flowers. Dan had always discouraged flowers indoors because he reckoned they gave him asthma and hay fever. She bought Levis and sneakers and, studying herself in her mirror at home, decided she looked good in them. Not mutton trying to be lamb, but artistic and intelligent.

She had the piano tuner come by and dug out all her old music and classical records. She read Walt Whitman and Emerson, Salinger, Burroughs and Mary McCarthy and replenished the tubes of paint in her paintbox. She had always meant to paint the fall; that after all had been the reason she had first come to visit the States as an art student way back. After she met Dan she had painted less and less as his social interests took up her time. Besides he thought her Bohemian and although he had said nothing she had felt herself discouraged.

She threw all the garbage and accumulated junk out of one of the guest rooms, set up her easel and began to paint again. She took her records up there and the kettle and wondered how she could have wasted her life for so long.

Slowly, by a fraction of an inch at a time as though not believing the chance she gave it, the grey began to appear in the roots of her hair. Bravely she ignored it and began to plan her trip to England.

Then with the first frosts Dan returned. He drove up beneath the reddening leaves sheepish and alone.

'I guess she and I didn't gel, honey,' was his only com­ment.

She was glad to have him back.

He noticed her hair, but said nothing. For two days she braved his puzzled looks and then she fled back to her hairdresser, who thought she must have been ill and congratulated her on her recovery.

Slowly she packed away her paints, brought the hi-fi hack downstairs and forgot to practise the piano.

One day he said, 'Hon, I don't go much for those pants. They don't suit the more mature woman.' Sadly she packed away her Levis, neatly washed and pressed, into the high­boy. It was almost a relief to slip back into her smart clothes. She felt clean again, confident and immaculate. Her feet had had so much hard skin from going bare that she had laddered her tights when she first put them back on.

She missed the music and the painting. When Dan found her reading poetry he teased her; when he found flowers on the table he looked pained and sneezed. He said nothing, but she did not replace them when the petals dropped.

Arm in arm they attended parties and dinners as though nothing had happened. At first she tried to discuss things she loved and had rediscovered: poetry, music, the latest novels. But she met incomprehension and boredom. She remembered now why, so long ago, she had given up.

As though conscious of some loss in his wife which he could not name Dan suddenly promised her a trip to Europe in the spring. Quietly she slipped downtown and cancelled her own flight to England. With her returned reservations went the rest of her dreams.

The summer had been fun. But it was over. She knew the chance would never come again.

The day before the Garden Club winter bazaar she emptied the bottom drawer of the highboy, threw her paints and brushes on the top of the box of clothes and took the whole lot across to the jumble stall.

Her books she kept. That one small part of her, re­deemed that summer and hidden in the guest room, she kept. That was all.

 


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 902


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