Bad Characters Read online

  Shocked by her duplicity, Aunt Jane said, “We ought to have suspected something when you went back to Boston for Christmas with Mary instead of resting here beside your own hearth fire.”

  Ignoring this sanctimonious accusation, Polly continued, and told them as much of Robert Fair as she thought they deserved to know, eliding some of his history—for there was a divorce in it—but as she spoke, she could not conjure his voice or his face, and he remained as hypothetical to her as to them, a circumstance that alarmed her and one that her astute uncle sensed.

  “You don’t seem head over heels about this Boston fellow,” he said.

  “I’m nearly thirty,” replied his niece. “I’m not sixteen. Wouldn’t it be unbecoming at my age if I were lovesick?” She was by no means convinced of her argument, for her uncle had that effect on her; he could make her doubt anything—the testimony of her own eyes, the judgments of her own intellect. Again, and in vain, she called on Robert Fair to materialize in this room that was so hostile to him and, through his affection, bring a persuasive color to her cheeks. She did not question the power of love nor did she question, specifically, the steadfastness of her own love, but she did observe, with some dismay, that, far from conquering all, love lazily sidestepped practical problems; it was no help in this interview; it seemed not to cease but to be temporarily at a standstill.

  Her uncle said, “Sixteen, thirty, sixty, it makes no difference. It’s true I wouldn’t like it if you were wearing your heart on your sleeve, but, my Lord, dear, I don’t see the semblance of a light in your eye. You look quite sad. Doesn’t Polly strike you as looking downright blue, Jane? If Mr. Fair makes you so doleful, it seems to me you’re better off with us.”

  “It’s not a laughing matter,” snapped Aunt Jane, for Uncle Francis, maddeningly, had chuckled. It was a way he had in disputation; it was intended to enrage and thereby rattle his adversary. He kept his smile, but for a moment he held his tongue while his sister tried a different tack. “What I don’t see is why you have to go to Boston, Polly,” she said. “Couldn’t he teach Italian at Nevilles just as well as at Harvard?”

  Their chauvinism was really staggering. When Roddy, Uncle Francis’s son, went off to take a glittering job in Brazil, Aunt Jane and his father had nearly reduced this stalwart boy to kicks and tears by reiterating that if there had been anything of worth or virtue in South America, the grandparent Bays would have settled there instead of in the Rocky Mountains.

  “I don’t think Robert would like it here,” said Polly.

  “What wouldn’t he like about it?” Aunt Jane bridled. “I thought our college had a distinguished reputation. Your great-grandfather, one of the leading founders of it, was a man of culture, and unless I am sadly misinformed, his humanistic spirit is still felt on the campus. Did you know that his critical study of Isocrates is highly esteemed amongst classical scholars?”

  “I mean I don’t think he would like the West,” said Polly, rash in her frustration.

  She could have bitten her tongue out for the indiscretion, because her jingoistic uncle reddened instantly and menacingly, and he banged on the table and shouted, “How does he know he doesn’t like the West? You’ve just told us he’s never been farther west than Ohio. How does he dare to presume to damn what he doesn’t know?”

  “I didn’t say he damned the West. I didn’t even say he didn’t like it. I said I thought he wouldn’t.”

  “Then you are presuming,” he scolded. “I am impatient with Easterners who look down their noses at the West and call us crude and barbaric. But Westerners who renounce and denounce and derogate their native ground are worse.”

  “Far worse,” agreed Aunt Jane. “What can have come over you to turn the man you intend to marry against the land of your forebears?”

  Polly had heard it all before. She wanted to clutch her head in her hands and groan with helplessness; even more, she wished that this were the middle of next week.

  “We three are the last left of the Bays in Adams,” pursued Aunt Jane, insinuating a quaver into her firm, stern voice. “And Francis and I will not last long. You’ll only be burdened and bored with us a little while longer.”

  “We have meant to reward you liberally for your loyalty,” said her uncle. “The houses will be yours when we join our ancestors.”

  In the dark parlor, they leaned toward her over their cups of cold tea, so tireless in their fusillade that she had no chance to deny them or to defend herself. Was there to be, they mourned, at last not one Bay left to lend his name and presence to municipal celebrations, to the laying of cornerstones and the opening of fairs? Polly thought they were probably already fretting over who would see that the grass between the family graves was mown.

  Panicked, she tried to recall how other members of her family had extricated themselves from these webs of casuistry. Now she wished that she had more fully explained her circumstances to Robert Fair and had told him to come and fetch her away, for he, uninvolved, could afford to pay the ransom more easily than she. But she had wanted to spare him such a scene as this; they would not have been any more reticent with him; they would have, with this same arrogance—and this under-handedness—used their advanced age and family honor to twist the argument away from its premise.

  * * *

  Darkness had shrunk the room to the small circle where they sat in the thin light of the lamp; it seemed to her that their reproaches and their jeremiads took hours before they recommenced the bargaining Aunt Jane had started.

  Reasonably, in a judicious voice, Uncle Francis said, “There is no reason at all, if Mr. Fair’s attainments are as you describe, that he can’t be got an appointment to our Romance Language Department. What is the good of my being a trustee if I can’t render such a service once in a way?”

  As if this were a perfectly wonderful and perfectly surprising solution, Aunt Jane enthusiastically cried, “But of course you can! That would settle everything. Polly can eat her cake and have it, too. Wouldn’t you give them your house, Francis?”

  “I’d propose an even better arrangement. Alone here, Jane, you and I would rattle. Perhaps we would move into one of my apartments and the Robert Fairs could have this house. Would that suit you?”

  “It would, indeed it would,” said Aunt Jane. “I have been noticing the drafts here more and more.”

  “I don’t ask you to agree today, Polly,” said Uncle Francis. “But think it over. Write your boy a letter tonight and tell him what your aunt and I are willing to do for him. The gift of a house, as big a house as this, is not to be scoffed at by young people just starting out.”

  Her “boy,” Robert, had a tall son who in the autumn would enter Harvard. “Robert has a house,” said Polly, and she thought of its dark-green front door with the brilliant brass trimmings; on Brimmer Street, at the foot of Beacon Hill, its garden faced the Charles. Nothing made her feel more safe and more mature than the image of that old and handsome house.

  “He could sell it,” said her indomitable aunt.

  “He could rent it,” said her practical uncle. “That would give you additional revenue.”

  The air was close; it was like the dead of night in a sealed room and Polly wanted to cry for help. She had not hated the West till now, she had not hated her relatives till now; indeed, till now she had had no experience of hate at all. Surprising as the emotion was—for it came swiftly and authoritatively—it nevertheless cleared her mind and, outraged, she got up and flicked the master switch to light up the chandelier. Her aunt and uncle blinked. She did not sit down again but stood in the doorway to deliver her valediction. “I don’t want Robert to come here because I don’t want to live here any longer. I want to live my own life.”

  “Being married is hardly living one’s own life,” said Aunt Jane.

  At the end of her tether now, Polly all but screamed at them, “We won’t live here and that’s that! You talk of my presuming, but how can you presume to boss not only me but a man you’ve never e
ven seen? I don’t want your houses! I hate these houses! It’s true—I hate, I despise, I abominate the West!”

  So new to the articulation of anger, she did it badly and, ashamed to death, began to cry. Though they were hurt, they were forgiving, and both of them rose and came across the room, and Aunt Jane, taking her in a spidery embrace, said, “There. You go upstairs and have a bath and rest and we’ll discuss it later. Couldn’t we have some sherry, Francis? It seems to me that all our nerves are unstrung.”

  Polly’s breath toiled against her sobs, but all the same she took her life in her hands and she said, “There’s nothing further to discuss. I am leaving. I am not coming back.”

  Now, for the first time, the old brother and sister exchanged a look of real anxiety; they seemed, at last, to take her seriously; each waited for the other to speak. It was Aunt Jane who hit upon the new gambit. “I mean, dear, that we will discuss the wedding. You have given us very short notice but I daresay we can manage.”

  “There is to be no wedding,” said Polly. “We are just going to be married at Mary’s house. Fanny is coming up to Boston.”

  “Fanny has known all along?” Aunt Jane was insulted. “And all this time you’ve lived under our roof and sat at our table and have never told us but told your sisters, who abandoned you?”

  “Abandoned me? For God’s sake, Aunt Jane, they had their lives to lead!”

  “Don’t use that sort of language in this house, young lady,” said Uncle Francis.

  “I apologize. I’m sorry. I am just so sick and tired of—”

  “Of course you’re sick and tired,” said the adroit old woman. “You’ve had a heavy schedule this semester. No wonder you’re all nerves and tears.”

  “Oh, it isn’t that! Oh, leave me alone!”

  And, unable to withstand a fresh onslaught of tears, she rushed to the door. When she had closed it upon them, she heard her aunt say, “I simply can’t believe it. There must be some way out. Why, Francis, we would be left altogether alone,” and there was real terror in her voice.

  Polly locked the door to her bedroom and dried her eyes and bathed their lids with witch hazel, the odor of which made her think of her Aunt Lacy, who, poor simple creature, had had to die to escape this family. Polly remembered that every autumn Aunt Lacy had petitioned Uncle Francis to let her take her children home for a visit to her native Vermont, but she had never been allowed to go. Grandpa, roaring, thumping his stick, Uncle Francis bombarding her with rhetoric and using the word “duty” repeatedly, Polly’s father scathing her with sarcasm, Aunt Jane slyly confusing her with red herrings had kept her an exhausted prisoner. Her children, as a result, had scorned their passive mother and had wounded her, and once they finally escaped, they had not come back—not for so much as a visit. Aunt Lacy had died not having seen any of her grandchildren; in the last years of her life she did nothing but cry. Polly’s heart ached for the plight of that gentle, frightened woman. How lucky she was that the means of escape had come to her before it was too late! In her sister’s Boston drawing room, in a snowy twilight, Robert Fair’s proposal of marriage had seemed to release in her an inexhaustible wellspring of life; until that moment she had not known that she was dying, that she was being killed—by inches, but surely killed—by her aunt and uncle and by the green yearlings in her German classes and by the dogmatic monotony of the town’s provincialism. She shuddered to think of her narrow escape from wasting away in these arid foothills, never knowing the cause or the name of her disease.

  Quiet, herself again, Polly sat beside the window and looked out at the early stars and the crescent moon. Now that she had finally taken her stand, she was invulnerable, even though she knew that the brown sherry was being put ceremoniously on a tray, together with ancestral Waterford glasses, and though she knew that her aunt and uncle had not given up—that they had, on the contrary, just begun. And though she knew that for the last seven days of her life in this house she would be bludgeoned with the most splenetic and most defacing of emotions, she knew that the worst was over; she knew that she would survive, as her sisters and her cousins had survived. In the end, her aunt and uncle only seemed to survive; dead on their feet for most of their lives, they had no personal history; their genesis had not been individual—it had only been a part of a dull and factual plan. And they had been too busy honoring their family to love it, too busy defending the West even to look at it. For all their pride in their surroundings, they had never contemplated them at all but had sat with the shades drawn, huddled under the steel engravings. They and her father had lived their whole lives on the laurels of their grandparents; their goal had already been reached long before their birth.

  The mountains had never looked so superb to her. She imagined a time, after Uncle Francis and Aunt Jane were dead, when the young Bays and their wives and husbands might come back, free at last to admire the landscape, free to go swiftly through the town in the foothills without so much as a glance at the family memorials and to gain the high passes and the peaks and the glaciers. They would breathe in the thin, lovely air of summits, and in their mouths there would not be a trace of the dust of the prairies where, as on a treadmill, Great-Grandfather Bay’s oxen plodded on and on into eternity.

  * * *

  The next days were for Polly at once harrowing and delightful. She suffered at the twilight hour (the brown sherry had become a daily custom, and she wondered if her aunt and uncle naïvely considered getting her drunk and, in this condition, persuading her to sign an unconditional indenture) and all through dinner as, by turns self-pitying and contentious, they sought to make her change her mind. Or, as they put it, “come to her senses.” At no time did they accept the fact that she was going. They wrangled over summer plans in which she was included; they plotted anniversary speeches in the Bay museum; one afternoon Aunt Jane even started making a list of miners’ families among whom Polly was to distribute Christmas baskets.

  But when they were out of her sight and their nagging voices were out of her hearing, they were out of her mind, and in it, instead, was Robert Fair, in his rightful place. She graded examination papers tolerantly, through a haze; she packed her new clothes into her new suitcases and emptied her writing desk completely. On these starry, handsome nights, her dreams were charming, although, to be sure, she sometimes woke from them to hear the shuffle of carpet slippers on the floor below her as her insomniac aunt or uncle paced. But before sadness or rue could overtake her, she burrowed into the memory of her late dream.

  The strain of her euphoria and her aunt’s and uncle’s antipodean gloom began at last to make her edgy, and she commenced to mark the days off on her calendar and even to reckon the hours. On the day she met her classes for the last time and told her colleagues goodbye and quit the campus forever, she did not stop on the first floor of the house but went directly to her room, only pausing at the parlor door to tell Aunt Jane and Uncle Francis that she had a letter to get off. Fraudulently humble, sighing, they begged her to join them later on for sherry. “The days are growing longer,” said Aunt Jane plaintively, “but they are growing fewer.”

  Polly had no letter to write. She had a letter from Robert Fair to read, and although she knew it by heart already, she read it again several times. He shared her impatience; his students bored him, too; he said he had tried to envision her uncle’s house, so that he could imagine her in a specific place, but he had not been able to succeed, even with the help of her sister. He wrote, “The house your malicious sister Mary describes could not exist. Does Aunt Jane really read Ouida?”

  She laughed aloud. She felt light and purged, as if she had finished a fever. She went to her dressing table and began to brush her hair and to gaze, comforted, upon her young and loving face. She was so lost in her relief that she was pretty, and that she was going to be married and was going away, that she heard neither the telephone nor Mildred’s feet upon the stairs, and the housekeeper was in the room before Polly had turned from her pool.

>   “It’s your sister calling you from Boston,” said Mildred with ice-cold contempt; she mirrored her employers. “I heard those operators back East giving themselves some airs with their la-di-da way of talking.”

  Clumsy with surprise and confusion (Mary’s calls to her were rare and never frivolous), and sorry that exigency and not calm plan took her downstairs again, she reeled into that smothering front hall where hat trees and cane stands stood like people. The door to the parlor was closed, but she knew that behind it Aunt Jane and Uncle Francis were listening.

  When Mary’s far-off, mourning voice broke to Polly the awful, the impossible, the unbelievable news that Robert Fair had died that morning of the heart disease from which he had intermittently suffered for some years, Polly, wordless and dry-eyed, contracted into a nonsensical, contorted position and gripped the telephone as if this alone could keep her from drowning in the savage flood that had come from nowhere.

  “Are you there, Polly? Can you hear me, darling?” Mary’s anxious voice came louder and faster. “Do you want me to come out to you? Or can you come on here now?”

  “I can’t come now,” said Polly. “There’s nothing you can do for me.” There had always been rapport between these sisters, and it had been deeper in the months since Robert Fair had appeared upon the scene to rescue and reward the younger woman. But it was shattered; the bearer of ill tidings is seldom thanked. “How can you help me?” Polly demanded, shocked and furious. “You can’t bring him back to life.”

  “I can help bring you back to life,” her sister said. “You must get out of there, Polly. It’s more important now than ever.”

  “Do you think that was why I was going to marry him? Just to escape this house and this town?”