Chapter 3: Not Today

There is no dinner in the world so dear as the one a woman sets before a relation who has married above her. Cornelia Vance had been at it since Monday: the cloth, the plates, the cream sent for twice, the boys’ collars picked out and made over by a girl who was not quick with her needle. By Thursday noon she could have told you what every hour of it had cost her, and she had told herself, more than once, because a thing nobody thanks you for is a thing you had better price yourself.

“There’s one more,” she said.

The boy did not look at his cousins. He stood with his hands behind his back and waited, and he did not fidget.

“One of your uncle’s girls,” Cornelia said. “The youngest. She’s been sick.”

“Is she very sick?”

“She was. Word came up this morning that she’s mending.” Cornelia turned her hand over, the way she did when a column of figures came out right. “But her mother’s dead and buried, and the child’s in black, and I’ll not have her at my table in black the first day your mother’s set foot in this house in twelve years. There is a right way to do a thing.”

“You wrote me about her,” Mrs. Aldridge said. “In the winter. The woman who sewed.”

“Eleven years she was with us. She did the fine work.”

“And the child’s been here since—”

“Since she was in arms,” Cornelia said. “Walter took her in. You know how Walter is.”

Mrs. Aldridge looked into the fire. “She’ll be nine?”

“Nine in August.”

“Nine is old enough to know what she’s lost.”

“She’s a quiet child. She gives no trouble.” Cornelia smoothed her cuff. “You’ve not come all this way to hear about a child’s troubles. There’s a fire laid for you in the south room since six this morning and nobody in it.”

“Take your cousins up, Theodore,” Mrs. Aldridge said. “They’ve not seen the books you brought from town.”

The boy bowed, first to his mother and then, more carefully, to his aunt. “Will you come up?” he said to the boys. “I’ve books from town, and there’s a fire.”

The boys were up before he had finished. The girls stayed where they were, hands in their laps, in their good dresses, and looked at their mother.

“The girls too,” Mrs. Aldridge said. “They’re not so much older than you are, and you’ll not see them again for years.”

He stood a moment. Then he bowed again. “Yes, Mother. Girls, will you come? You can tell me about the town. I want to know about the canal, and the second lock, and whether the ice is out of the river.”

“They’ll tell you a great deal more than that,” Cornelia said, “whether you ask them or not.”

They went up in a line, and the noise of them went up after, and the room was quiet, and the fire had burned down to a red heap.

Cornelia had told her own boys at breakfast to be forbearing with the cousin from the city. She had expected the boy she had met in such houses before — made much of, not knowing where to put his hands. She had been wrong, and she was not often wrong about children, and she did not mind being wrong in this direction at all. A boy like that would be a man in ten years, and a man remembers who was kind to him at eleven. Walter had nothing to stand on but the favor of people who had known him as a boy, and favor is only good while people still remember. A boy grows up and does his own remembering.

Mrs. Aldridge’s woman went out and shut the door, and the two of them sat back in their chairs.

Two women in the same family, married very differently, will always have a great deal to say to each other, and very little of it the thing each most wants to know.

“I’ll say this for the Aldridges,” Cornelia said. “They know how to bring up a boy.”

“They do.” Mrs. Aldridge turned her cup around. “He’s a little old man. He has been a little old man since he could walk. I have nothing to do with him. He’s with his grandfather from breakfast till dinner, and when he’s not with his grandfather he’s with his father, and those two are so much alike I have sometimes thought the Almighty made one man and had him copied.” She laughed. “There’s not a grain of me in him.”

The complaint was the shell of it. Cornelia had been a second son’s wife eleven years and did not need to be told what a woman looked like who had been handled kindly; it was in the eyes and at the corners of the mouth, and it did not come out of a house where somebody was being ground down.

“I’ve heard the judge named him off a red sky,” Cornelia said.

“There was a red morning. Father Aldridge saw the red on the window glass and took it for a sign, and he has been taking signs from that boy ever since.”

“There was a red sky the morning my eldest came,” Cornelia said, “and nobody made a sign of it.”

Mrs. Aldridge laughed again, and this time it was for Cornelia, which was the generous thing to do.

“Walter’s father said a thing to Walter once,” Cornelia said, “about your husband. He said the man had been steady since he was in short coats, and that the one time in his life he behaved like a young man was when he picked you himself.”

Mrs. Aldridge went red. She was thirty-odd and had been married eleven years and she went red like a girl, and she put her hand up as though there were something on her cheek to be got rid of.

“He’s a credit,” Cornelia said. “A boy doesn’t come up so straight where nobody’s minding, whatever the grandfather does.”

“It’s his father’s doing,” Mrs. Aldridge said. “And this afternoon is the first time in a year he’s had a houseful of children to be a boy with. He’ll be the better for it.”

“She’ll want you at her table before you go back,” Cornelia said. “The old lady. Mrs. Vance.” She tipped her head toward the front of the house. “She’ll want to show you off to the county.”

“She’s been very kind.”

Cornelia opened her mouth on the thing she actually thought, and looked at the face across from her, and shut it again. There was no getting at it from that side; you might as well try to lift a floorboard with a spoon.

“We’d have had the child into our rooms a month ago,” she said, “if the house was mine to order.”

She heard it about the time it got out of her. She put her cup down and picked it up again and went on smoothly.

“Not that it isn’t mine to order. It is. Only there’s notions in this house about where a child sleeps, and I’ve got enough to do without arguing the point with the old lady.”

“The child will be the better for a quiet room while she’s mending,” Mrs. Aldridge said.

“Exactly so. Exactly what I said.”

Cornelia drank her tea. It had gone lukewarm, and she drank it anyway.

“Your Theodore will be at the bar before my Hattie is out of the schoolroom,” she said. “There’s a pity. If he’d wait for her I’d die a happy woman.”

“She’s a fine girl,” Mrs. Aldridge said, and smiled, and drank her tea.

That was all. It took Cornelia no longer than lifting her own cup to read the smile, and she had done the sum years ago and had it by heart. What the Aldridges owed, they owed to Eleanor. She had been taken into this house at four years old, a Vance of the side branch, and raised in it, and married out of it, when she was grown, to the judge’s son. Whatever obligation the judge’s family carried had been carried out through that marriage, and it would be paid back through it, to her and to her children, and to nobody else. Walter had been in short coats when the business with the judge was done. He had done none of it; he had been at school, and then in the counting house, and then he had married and been given a house and a place in the freight line, and none of that had cost the Aldridges a thing. A debt is only good to the man who paid it. Walter’s girls were born in wedlock, every one of them — which was more than could be said for the child in the back room — and it made no difference at all. They were Walter’s girls, and the Aldridges would marry where the Aldridges liked.

Her husband had come to her three nights ago, when the whole town was talking about the visit, and said what he always said: that if they could draw closer to the Aldridges it would be the making of the family. He had wanted her to find out how the land lay. She had told him then it was no good, and she would tell him again tonight, and this time she would make him hear her. He was a man who took a thing and turned it over until he had made it into a hope, and then wanted somebody to go and fetch the hope for him.

At four the light went off the far wall, and Mrs. Aldridge’s woman came to say the carriage was not wanted, it being no distance across the yard to Cornelia’s own door; and Cornelia gathered her seven and took them down and across.

“Come again tomorrow,” Mrs. Aldridge said at the door, and kissed her, and kissed each of the children by name, which took some time and was done properly.

In her own back parlor Cornelia sat down and put her feet on the rail and let her breath out.

“How did she find him?” Mrs. Hale said, folding the good cloth.

“She found him very well. She’d have found him better if he’d been hers.”

“Ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me, I know what I saw. She smiled at me, Mrs. Hale. A smile and no more, and then she looked at her cup.” Cornelia put her head back against the chair. “I’ve kept this house eleven years and seen the dead carried out of it and brought its children through the measles, and if my husband thinks I’ve done it for the pleasure of hearing him say so, he is mistaken.”

Mrs. Hale made a small sound of agreement and went on folding.

“And Hattie’s to be nothing, because her father’s a second son with a good head for figures and no name to put to them.”

“Miss Hattie’s got time.”

“Time,” Cornelia said, and let it go at that.

Mrs. Hale laid the cloth in the chest and came back. “Shall I have the child’s things taken up to the rooms off your passage, then, ma’am? Now the fever’s off her.”

“No.”

Mrs. Hale waited.

“Not today,” Cornelia said. “She’s to have her bread and milk and nobody chattering at her. She’s had enough of that.”

“I’ll tell the girl.”

“Tell her to keep the fire in and the door shut.” Cornelia got up and counted the spoons into their box herself, and set the box on the shelf, and turned the key, and put the key in her pocket. Then she went to find her husband, who would be in the small parlor with his pipe.

Nobody went up to the room over the back kitchen until suppertime.