A pen had been used and the printing was plain and careful. It was not signed. Clarence’s work, she thought at once. Whose else might it be? The poor lad was smitten. He had been in her room. He had taken her bookmark. He had brought it back and the folded note with it.
She’d brought the lines from the poem to the light of the window, and now she was staring out. Smother thee with kisses. It gave her the smallest bit of a thrill—she couldn’t deny it—even if it did come only from Clarence. For it had to be he. He went thick and scarlet in her presence, and that shy beguiled type was just the one to resort to a love verse anonymously delivered. He wasn’t a bit hard to look upon, with the deadly shy smile, but he was a babe all the same. She lived in his house, used the same bog, was trusted by his parents to lead no one astray. She folded the note closed. A gesture as useless as it was sweet, and that she might’ve liked it otherwise changed it not an iota.
But though she’d closed the note, she wasn’t ready to release the feeling. The room was more than warm—it was nearly torrid—so she closed the door to the rising heat. She considered opening the window, but that was too much—letting cold air in when so often she’d lain in this room with frozen bones. She took off her dress, the black one with seashells—she’d meant to wear the pink with the brown bow, but her mood after Mrs. Price’s words to her had turned dark—and hung it carefully in the wardrobe. She lay then on the bed paging through Venus and Adonis, nearly endless though it was, rereading certain of the verses. It was delicious that lines like these rose free as you please from pages that had lain unlocked in the country schoolhouse. Oh wouldn’t she like to have plump Mr. Josephson on hand when his sleeveen daughter, reading aloud for one and all, found Venus comparing herself to a park where Adonis-the-deer was invited to graze! Wouldn’t that be a taste to savor.
The smallest smile had formed on her lips. You are bad, she told herself. You are bad and rude and randy. Yet the small smile remained.
She closed the book and went to the window. She stood back a bit but there was nothing but fog and field and bare trees, so who was there to see? When Mr. Price or Clarence were seen out of doors, they were always going out to or coming from the fields to the west, or to the barn in the same direction. It had affected her, seeing him in the barn. She’d gone out to quit or complain or scream—she didn’t know what entirely—and then when she’d peered in, there he was squatting down, feeding coal into his stove, calm as could be, one piece after another, and then when he was satisfied, he stood slowly to full height and somehow with his beard and bigness she was put in mind of a tree, a stout sturdy tree just planted there staring into the fire and thinking his faraway thoughts.
Something, a kitchenlike clank from downstairs, brought her up from this reverie and she took away at once the hand at her chest. Idle hands, the devil’s playground, Aunt Sedge liked to say, and Busy hands are happy hands (on this theme, she and Leenie had done some smirky laughing about George Prendergast’s happy hands). But still, Sedge had a point, so Aldine propped herself against the bedstead and began to knit. Slip two, hold in front, knit two, knit two. Purl two, knit two, knit two, purl two. She was doing scarves, clever ones, with cabling, to give the students for end-of-year gifts—all the girls, anyway, the boys wouldn’t want them. She’d thought first of scarf and hat as the prize for the first plane to the end of its string, but she’d never seen such a hat or scarf on a lad, so she’d traded a scarf for a goldfish with a long silvery tail, which everyone seemed to want. Neva, who wanted it most of all and who had been in front of all others, was now falling back because of being croupy so often, or whatever it was that made the cough. There was a lemon downstairs among the Christmas bounty. Aldine wished she had some carrageen moss. She’d always liked picking it at the seashore and drying it on a hot rock and it would be just the thing for little Neva, a hot drink of moss and lemon juice. Well, she would just have to make Neva a scarf of her own no matter how far her plane got, something with the brightest colors she had, to go with a beret just like her own.
She laid down her knitting and opened the note without really meaning to. Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses, And being set I’ll smother thee with kisses. She couldn’t help it. Reading the note was better than reading the poem. It was like having it whispered to her. It gave her a little glow like the one she used to have in school when someone told her that a boy liked her. She let herself enjoy the feeling as she assayed the ups and downs of the letters, the maleness of the writing, and smoothed her fingertip along the indentations in the paper where the writer had pressed down hard.
It had been a strange Christmas Day, Charlotte thought. Strange but good.
She was washing the dishes slowly, moving them from wash water to rinse water, setting them in the drainer. They’d gotten the swell food from Aunt Ida and Uncle Hurd and the most beautiful presents from Opa. And her mother had given it to His Highness, given it to him good, which made her feel a little sorry for him, but it was good for him every now and then, when his subjects finally squealed. Maybe they would move. Maybe they would move and have oranges and kumquats and blue skies and people around to talk to.
“Milly Mandy Molly’s tired again,” Neva said. She sat on the floor with the stuffed monkey curled up in her lap and their mother, who had barely spoken ten words since the revolt against His Highness, said, “Why don’t you and she go to your cot and take a nap?”
Neva nodded and carried the doll-monkey away.
They were alone then, she and her mother, which was often the moment when her mother would share a thought, but she wasn’t talking today.
Outside the barn, smoke rose from the stovepipe. Her father had gone back in there after dinner and there, she supposed, he would stay. Now the barn would get warm and the house would fall cold. Just then Clare rounded the barn—where had he been?—and went off with a pail toward the cowshed so there would soon be the separator to clean.