“Don’t you drink coffee, dear?” Ellie asked, trying to keep her tone neutral, as if it didn’t bother her to see it wasted.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Aldine said. “It’s new to me, is all. At home, we drink tea.” She walked quickly to the counter, retrieved her cup, and swallowed the rest.
Ellie told her that wasn’t necessary, but Ansel thought it probably was. Everyone at the table had noticed that she’d left plum syrup pooled shallowly on her plate. Wasting coffee would only have compounded the sin.
Still, he thought, something almost boyish unfolding within him, sin can have its happy by-products.
So when the girls went upstairs for hats and last-minute adjustments to their dress, he winked at Clare, grabbed the last pancake, and tore it in two. He handed one portion to Clare, and they swabbed their halves assiduously over the girl’s dish, sopping up the sweet syrup until her white plate gleamed.
The wind whuffed at the windows of the Ford as it moved toward the church, but it was a mild wind, and the world looked newly hopeful to Ansel. He was proud of the new coat of paint on the Methodist church, which he’d helped apply last year. A white clapboard church circled by box elders with their leaves flickering yellow and orange was a good thing to show a foreign visitor. And the people they met going in were all the usual mix of Kansas-curious and Kansas-friendly, asking her name, shaking her hand. Mrs. Odekirk was the first, eyes bright and expecting the best, as she always seemed to do, and he heard himself say, “This is Aldine McKenna, who’s just come by train from New York to be our new teacher,” sealing his own fate as he said so, and Mrs. Odekirk saying, “Well, this is wonderful! We’re delighted to have you.” She turned, smiling, to Ansel and said, “You and your big ideas, Ansel Price. We will never doubt you again.” Ansel was fond of this tall, storklike woman. The lines in her face were symmetrical and handsome, like the comb marks in her tightly bound gray hair.
“She’s a piano teacher!” Neva told her.
Reverend Bakely turned round. She could play the piano, could she? It happened that Mrs. Tanner, the accompanist, was ill this morning. Did she know any Methodist hymns?
“Miss McKenna is from Scotland,” Ansel said. “That’s Anglican, right?”
Aldine said no, that actually the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian (a mistake that made him feel like a fool) but she could sight-read, and she didn’t mind trying if they didn’t mind a mistake or two. So she sat at the piano in her pink dress and brown bow and looked slightly less lost, Ansel thought, when she didn’t have to speak or look at anyone. She played well. Even the most tin eared among them could hear that much, and as the congregation registered the surprise of this sudden wonder, he felt suffused with pride in the Scottish girl, and (it had to be admitted) in the fact that he, Ansel Price, had delivered her here.
14
On Monday night, the Prices sat listening to a radio show, some of the family more attentively than others. Mrs. Price stitched shut a hole in one of Mr. Price’s black woolen socks; Charlotte had a book on her lap that she read or did not read depending on her interest in the show; Neva played with one of Aldine’s knitting needles and leaned close to the big freestanding radio, staring at it as if there were strangers inside she could almost see; Clarence listened with nothing to do, it seemed, but look at Aldine or his knees; whereas Mr. Price sat back with a bemused expression, his interest in the show, as in all things, calibrated somehow.
Aldine knitted. She had begun a blanket with Leenie’s baby in mind. She’d spent the day helping with the household work, though Mrs. Price’s standards were beyond her—she saw defects in Aldine’s cleaning that Aldine could not discern no matter how keenly she stared or studied the chair rung or window glass or chowder bowl in question—so that in the end Mrs. Price seemed to think her more a nuisance than anything else. Whereas Charlotte seemed glad for her company, especially when wiping and rewiping the dust from sills and surfaces with wet rags morning and afternoon. The wind here was horrid but the dust was worse. It got into Aldine’s ears and her nose. Her skin dried and cracked and when she asked Charlotte what she did about it, the girl had laughed and said, “Pray that we’ll leave!” Which, though Aldine laughed, did nothing to lift her spirits.
The radio program featured a flat-voiced rich man who hoarded his money in his basement and who, besides his stinginess, seemed bland to the edge of flavorless. That did not, however, keep everyone in the radio audience from laughing at every word he said. Aldine couldn’t fathom it, and when Mr. Price began to stare off through the window so that now she faced only the scrutiny of Neva and Clarence, she fixed a smile on her face.
The family was suddenly laughing, so she laughed as well, not too soft and not too loud, which seemed to satisfy Neva, but she knew for a fact that Mr. Price saw how lost she was, and what would she tell Leenie about him? That he seemed somehow two men? Well, she would not tell her about the one who was sturdy and tall and entered rooms headfirst, who was rugged-looking to a point just beyond routinely handsome, though he was, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said about married men, and he was forty, at least. His dark hair was receding but his arms were still thick with hair, and his rough fingers were hairy on top. No, she would give Leenie the other one of him, the one who was distant and gentle and full of big boyish hopes, sort of like their own half-daft Uncle Gus, who had no children and raised sheep in Perthshire and trained trees into odd shapes and once, not long ago, brought home in eleven great crates a rusted Ferris wheel that he put right and reassembled. And then when no mother at all would let her child board for the first ride, his barren wife—their sweet Aunt Kathleen—stepped forward and when Uncle Gus sent her around twice and then stopped her at the top, she had whooped in delight and exclaimed at the view, which, Aldine was dead sure, Mrs. Price would never have done for Mr. Price, whatever contraption he might build. She might tell Leenie, too, that when the man stared off (he was doing it now), it was as if he could disconnect himself from the very world round him, but where he’d reconnected himself to in the meantime was the mystery she wished to pierce. And yet when he looked directly into her eyes, he seemed to offer her something—confidence, maybe, or hope—as if she were a prisoner and he had no other way to assure her that he was on her side. Because of that much she was almost certain. He was on her side. He hoped she could be contented.
And then at this very moment, he glanced Aldine’s way, but only for a moment, as if he’d felt something on him and had now satisfied himself as to its source, which embarrassed her completely.