Mrs. White Read online

  Mrs. White rapped him with her wooden spoon, laughing. “Quit it. It’s good.” She took off his cap and gave it back to him. “How did it go today?”

  The cap came down over Paul’s blue eyes. “Okay. Job’s just about done. One more leg and we’re there.”

  “This is still the Miller woman?”

  “Yeah. She’s been pretty good, but her dog won’t leave me alone.”

  Mrs. White nodded. She looked at Paul a moment, as if waiting for him to continue, then, when he said nothing, with much less force than she had the children she told him, “Better wash up.”

  When they sat down to eat, Paul Jr. said grace and the rest of them mumbled along. Then all three—wife, daughter, and son—looked expectantly over at the only man among them.

  Paul grinned in his easy way. He reached out and picked up the large knife on the meat plate. He held it confidently above the bird. Its long blade glistened in the kitchen light.

  “I’ll carve,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After dinner the children were excused, and went to watch TV. Mrs. White and Paul stayed at the table.

  Paul leaned back, a cigarette caught in the tight grip of his short, strong fingers. Lately, he had been trying to cut down, but he still allowed himself one after meals. He inhaled the smoke deeply, with real pleasure. A bit abashed, he looked down at his spreading stomach, then as if to conceal it, shifted position a little.

  “So,” he said, “kids any trouble?”

  She shook her head. “Not today.”

  “I saw Paul Jr. on the road, from the truck. Boy, he looked big. I was surprised.”

  “He’s big,” she agreed.

  “He was with that Henderson kid, what’s his name?”

  “Kenny.”

  “Yeah, Kenny. I’m not so sure he’s the best one for Paul to be around, you know? I hear he drinks already.”

  Mrs. White wagged her head. “Sometimes the more you warn, the more they do.”

  “Yeah.” Paul was thoughtful. “But still. That Kenny.”

  Mrs. White eyed him indulgently. It was just like fathers to make such proclamations. They did not see the details, the whole day, every day. They observed from dinnertime to bedtime and then laid down the laws. Mrs. White usually ignored Paul’s and he usually forgot.

  “Well,” he said, stretching. “I’m beat.”

  After the dishes were done—Paul, as always, drying—they watched the second half of Merv Griffin and the entire eleven o’clock news. When the news commentator mentioned that there were no leads yet on that murder in Putnam Wells, Mrs. White attended to her knitting, shutting the voice from her mind. After the news the Whites went to bed.

  They lay side by side in the dark, the quiet of the woods and the house all around them.

  “I’m sure glad the winter’s over with,” said Paul softly. “Maybe I can lay some money away for a change.”

  “Do you think so? Do you think we can?”

  She heard him push out a long breath. “I guess we’ll just have to, won’t we?”

  Joan White rolled over and put her head on her husband’s chest. He put a heavy arm around her shoulder and held her fast.

  “Don’t make it sound so desperate,” she said softly.

  “Well, it is, kind of,” he said.

  “Why? What don’t we have?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not what we don’t have exactly. It’s what we can’t even think of having. Sometimes, Joanie, when I see these people with their houses …”

  “Well—” She snuggled closer to him. “We’re not them.”

  “Well, that’s what I mean.…”

  “But then they’re not us either,” she said.

  This stopped him. He grunted once and then she felt him nodding, as if he were thinking about it. But he said nothing more because soon the effort of the day overtook them.

  Mrs. White felt the regular push of his breath in her hair and she settled against him and closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In bed, the strong, masculine scent of Paul’s skin and hair was soothing. It seemed to carry her on its gentle waves. It seemed to carry her back. It made her—as she often did before she slept—remember.…

  She had grown up in Putnam, the rural county to the north. She was the only child of a postman and his wife. Her father was a loud, ruddy, warmhearted man. He sinned only, people said, in liking his drink too much. He died when his daughter, Joan, was sixteen.

  Joan’s mother was a more reserved sort of person, though equally kind. The two of them, both given to silence, lived with too much quiet after her father died.

  Joan’s lack of siblings made her anxious for companions but gave her also a natural shyness that kept her more often than not by herself. She had a good deal of untapped affection, which she gave for a time to animals and neighbors’ babies. But when she entered Carmel High School, she was eager to find someone for herself.

  For a long time her quiet manners prevented her from meeting boys. She was the sort of girl prettier girls confided in about their romances. She was often lonely, but rarely unhappy.

  She was a junior when she first became aware of Paul, who was a senior. He was tall and muscular and handsome. One day they passed each other in the hall and he looked at her.

  She knew immediately that he was not her type. He had a reputation for being wild. He wore leather jackets and smoked cigarettes. Joan smoked, too, then, but surreptitiously, warily, and, for all that, daintily. Paul smoked on the front of the high school lawn and let the cigarette dangle defiantly from the corner of his mouth. His crowd was not her crowd.

  Michael Chambers was more what she had in mind—at least at first. She was in a biology class with Mike because, even though he was a senior, he had had to repeat biology. Mike and Joan were in the same lab group and Joan began to help Mike with his homework. In return, Mike did all her dissecting for her.

  Mike was very tall and lanky and, though his white skin was pocked with acne, he was handsome in a clean-cut sort of way. Joan knew Mike liked her because he’d asked her to come and see him play on the basketball team. Eventually, she did go and Mike waved to her from the court. He played well, though the Carmel team lost. Afterward, they walked home together up Fair Street in the dark.

  There was a good deal of silence between them. Mike would start to speak as they walked along, but then he would bury his remark in a cough. When he did speak, it was about the weather, or he went on and on about the game. Joan decided to broach a more interesting subject but she did so with reluctance, for she felt making conversation was really Mike’s job.

  “So,” she said. “What are your plans after graduation?”

  “Me? More school,” Mike replied. “I’ll be going up to Ithaca. State school.”

  Joan waited for him to go on. But Mike was only nodding and kicking at a stone.

  She thought, on the one hand, that college would give a man a trade and so was a way to get a better job. But her father had always spoken against it as an idle luxury; a man, he said, should work his way up from the ground. She did not know how she felt about it, but Mike, with his shy, retiring ways, seemed the kind of college boy her father would have hated.

  “How about you?” Mike said at last. “Your plans?”

  Joan smiled and shyly shrugged away the question. “Right now I’d just like to get through finals.”

  Once again Mike only nodded. He did not pursue it, but Joan had hoped he might. He did not ask if she intended marriage or, more to the point, if she was already going steady with someone, and there was no way she could volunteer such information. She waited awhile for him to ask, and then she gave up.

  As they turned the corner two boys came up to them on the sidewalk from the other direction. The two were wearing leather jackets and were smoking cigarettes. They were pushing each other and laughing and calling each other dirty names. Joan was a little bit scared, but when she and Mike passed them,
she saw that one of them was Paul. Paul looked up and said, “Hey, Mike.”

  Mike waved. “Hey.”

  “You gonna be at Scotty’s tomorrow?” said Paul.

  “I’ll be there,” said Mike.

  “Okay,” said Paul. “See you there.”

  After Paul and the other boy went by, the silence between Joan and Mike seemed worse. To her it seemed lifeless compared to the energy of the boys who had just passed.

  Soon the lights of her house appeared ahead of them.

  “Well, thank you,” she said. “I enjoyed watching you play.”

  “Yeah.” Mike nodded and smiled. “Sorry we lost.”

  Joan smiled. There was something sweet about him. And she longed to have someone like her, really like her, all the time. He was, though passive, present. “See you in bio tomorrow,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  The next weekend Mike took her to a movie. They went to see The Hustler with Paul Newman. Joan cried at the end, and when Mike draped his arm around her shoulder, she did not object.

  The lights came up and Joan, abashed, dabbed at her wet eyes. When she could see again, she noticed a figure sitting a few rows in front of them. It was a boy dressed in a leather jacket. He was alone and sat slumped in his seat, making a show of indifference to his solitude. He was immobile, as if waiting for the film to start again. It was Paul.

  On the way out Joan casually asked Mike, “You know that boy, don’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “The one ahead of us. The one by himself.”

  Mike paused for a minute. Then he answered, “Yeah, that’s Paul. Paul White.”

  Joan nodded without speaking. Paul White. She would remember it. She was thinking it—Paul White—when she let Mike kiss her good night.

  Smiling, she remembered that first kiss now, twenty-one years later, a kiss haunted by another boy’s name. She lifted her face and kissed her sleeping husband on the cheek.

  “Paul White,” she whispered into Paul’s ear.

  Then she rolled over and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The trout hit with all the stealth and trickery of its kind. At first Jonathan Cornell saw the small slice of the tinfoil tobacco wrapper tremble where he had placed it on the line. Then it went out a little. Then it jerked. Cornell waited, sitting on the shore. His fleshy but handsome features were intent; his eyes peered owlishly through his glasses.

  The piece of foil began to run out, showing the progress of the line. It went slowly at first. Then, all at once, it gathered speed. With a small pip it hit the water and fell off the line. It floated with deceptive placidity on the surface while the trout continued to make its escape below.

  The moment the foil hit the water, Cornell plucked his rod from where it was balanced on a forked stick planted in the ground. He pulled up on it. The rod’s tip bowed with the weight of the fighter on the other end. For one thrilling instant Cornell’s opponent showed itself—a thrashing spark of silver deep in the water. Then, as Cornell reached for his reel to begin the fight in earnest, the tip of the rod suddenly straightened. The line relaxed and floated limply in the gently waving water.

  Cornell reeled in until the hook, stripped of its bait, popped out into the open air.

  Another man might have cursed. Another man might have railed against fate or against trout, or against fish in general. Cornell laughed, pushing the thick black frames of his glasses back on his small nose.

  “Enough,” he said aloud. “I give in.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue and cocked his head. “Next time, my friend.”

  He stood up at the edge of the water and stretched. He was a tall, loose-jointed man, a little thick at the middle but generally fit. As his arms pulled out beyond the cuffs of his jacket, his fingers flexing toward the sky, he gazed happily across the reservoir.

  Jonathan Cornell was a free-lance illustrator, a commercial artist. That was not to say that he worked solely for money. Like many another artist, he had his passion too. It was just that, whereas some men painted to live and some lived to paint, Jonathan Cornell lived and painted in order that he might fish.

  And fish he did. Every day almost, during the season. Every morning he took up his tackle box and pole and went down the drive to the street. He crossed over and passed the Whites’ cottage and their lawn, and then went down the slope into the conservancy woods. He followed the fire trail between the tall green pines and the leafless maples and elms until he reached the marked trail of the conservancy. This led steeply down the side of a wide gorge. A river ran along the bottom of the gorge to where it widened out and, held by a water company dam, became a reservoir. Here Cornell fished.

  When he was done he would trudge back up to his house and deal with the expediency of his art.

  He was done now, though unsuccessful. With a little sigh he began to gather his gear.

  The sigh was not so much for his lack of success: to fish was the thing, to catch something was only secondary. He sighed because today was Thursday and on Thursday he generally had to have coffee with Mrs. White.

  Every other day of the week Cornell could return past the Whites’ cottage with no more than a friendly wave at the window. Sometimes there was no need even for that. As Cornell well knew—for Mrs. White had often told him—she was not always home in the mornings. On Monday she did the shopping—Cornell passed by and went back to his house without fear. On Tuesday she did her baking, and, though she waved and smiled from the kitchen window, she was usually too busy to stop for coffee. On Wednesday her garden club met, and on Fridays she helped mend clothes for a charitable thrift shop near the Arbordale train station, so again Cornell had safe passage home.

  On Thursdays, however, when she did the major housecleaning of the week, Mrs. White usually lingered over coffee. She was usually still lingering when Cornell went by. Occasionally, even so, he made it back without her noticing. More often, though, he was pegged by her high-pitched “Yoo-hoo.” The rest—coffee and pound cake and talk and talk and talk—was inevitable.

  Certainly, he could have declined her invitation. Sometimes he did. But, though Mrs. White was his tenant and he owned the land around the cottage, her lease gave her rights to it. Technically, when he took the shortcut into the woods, he was trespassing. It was best to stay on good terms.

  What’s more, the Whites were model tenants and he did not want to lose them. They were quiet and clean, and, as Mr. White was a carpenter, there was rarely need for Cornell to bother about repairs. They were stable enough too. They’d lived in the cottage for eight years, six of them before Cornell bought the place. That meant there was little chance that Cornell would have to worry about renting to someone new and untried. And that suited him to the ground. He didn’t like to be bothered by anything even slightly tainted by business: as it was, he only charged the Whites enough to pay for the taxes and expenses on the cottage land.

  Cornell broke down his rod and laid it against a tree. He untied the hook and put it into his box. He picked up the stringer—empty of fish—and put this into the box as well. He started back up the trail, box in hand, and got almost twenty yards up the steep gorge wall before he realized he’d forgotten his rod. Breathless, he went back down to the bottom, took the rod from the tree, and started up again.

  The morning sun filtered through the budding tree branches and fell in various pools on the forest floor. Secret groves and odd configurations of rocks and vines held back in the shadows, while the needles of pines or the light brown of a dead, fallen oak were hit by the sun and defined in sharp detail. The forest was a weird checkerboard pattern of recess and relief, and all through it the birds sang cheerily. It was enough to make Cornell forget coffee with Mrs. White and climb the trail briskly, whistling when he could.

  It was not, after all, as if she were a bad person. She was just a dowdy person. A person whose thoughts never rose above the quotidian. It was not that she talked too much, it was just that she talked of things t
hat did not interest him. Children and gardens and thrift shops were all very well, he supposed. He’d married a woman who wanted children and gardens and thrift shops. He hoped—he sincerely hoped—she had them now. He wished—he truly wished—her happiness with her new husband. He was glad—he was very glad—he did not have to pay her alimony anymore.

  Anyway, Cornell was not the type to hold a grudge against anyone. He bore his ex no ill will for leaving him, nor Mrs. White for boring him. All the same, he slackened his pace a little as he came out of the woods onto her lawn. He set his face in a look of absentminded, artistlike intensity (something he never felt). He walked across the lawn toward the edge of the white cottage, his eyes fixed straight ahead, as much as to say: I must get to my easel before this stunning, earthshaking idea deserts me.

  He heard the kitchen door of the cottage open.

  “Yoo-hoo,” came the high-pitched song.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Standing at the kitchen window, Mrs. White saw Jonathan Cornell striding out of the forest. He looked very much the jolly fisherman, his unkempt black hair blowing in the slight breeze, his loose clothes and his big shoes flapping.

  She did not really want to have coffee with him, but she felt obliged. It wasn’t a painful obligation exactly—but it was true: She would not have chosen him for a friend.

  He was a reckless and rather useless sort, she felt. He was dreamy and frivolous and smug. What did he even do? Nothing that she could see, besides fish. And fishing was the only aspect of real life he ever talked about. Mrs. White was very glad that Paul did not fish. She could not think of a more boring thing.

  When he was not on the subject of fishing, and even sometimes when he was, Cornell’s ideas were a little highfalutin for her taste. He always acted above her and often seemed to stare off into space, uninterested, when she was speaking. She felt, sometimes, that he mocked her, too, and that, if nothing else, was just impolite. All in all she thought he thought too much. He could never let anything be, and she could see the ill effects of it in his pale face and shambling walk. He was not, she was sure, a happy man.