If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you know the kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the front side by rank ligustrums and canna beds, for hens to congregate and fluff in the dust and an old shepherd dog to lie and pant in the hot days. It sits pretty well back from the road, in a lawn gone sparse and rusty in the late season. On each side of an anachronistic patch of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two round flower beds made by lying an old automobile tire on the ground and filling it with wood earth. There are few zinnias in each, hairy like an animal, brilliant in the dazzling sun. At each end of the house is a live oak, not grand ones. Beyond the house, flanking it on each side are the chicken houses and barns, unpainted. But the faded-white decent house itself, sitting there in the middle of the late-summer afternoon, in the absolute quiet of that time of day and year, with the sparse lawn and tidy flower beds and the prideful patch of concrete walk in front, the oaks at each side, is like nothing so much as a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, the pepper-and-salt hair coiled on her head, sitting in her rocker with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease, now the day's work is done and the menfolks are in the field and it's not yet time to think about supper and strain the evening milk.
I stepped gingerly up that patch of concrete walk, as though I were treading on dozens of eggs laid by all those white leghorns back in the chicken run.
Lucy led me into the parlor, which was just the place I had known it would be, the carved black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, with a few tassels still left hanging here and there, the Bible and the stereoscope and the neat pile of cards for the stereoscope on the carved black-walnut table, a flowered carpet, with little rag rugs laid over the places most worn, the big walnut and gilt frames on the wall enclosing the stern, malarial, Calvinistic faces whose eyes fixed you with little sympathy. The windows of the room were closed, and the curtains drawn to give a shadowy, aqueous light in which we sat silently for a minute as though at a funeral. The palm of my hand laid down on the plush prickled drily.
She sat there as though I hadn't come, not looking at me but down at the floral figure in the carpet. The abundant dark-brown hair which, when I first met Lucy out at the Stark place, had been massacred off at the neck and marcelled by the beauty operator of Mason City, had long since grown back to its proper length. The auburn luster was still in it, maybe, but I couldn't see it in the dim light of the parlor. I had, however, noticed the few touches of gray, when I met her at the door. She sat across from me on the red plush seat of a stiff, carved, walnut chair, with her still good ankles crossed in front of her, and her waist, not so little now, still straight, and her bosom full but not shapeless under the blue summer cloth. The soft soothing contours of her face weren't girlish any more, as they had been on that first evening back in Old Man Stark's house, for now there was a hint of weight, of the infinitesimal downward drag, in the flesh, the early curse and certain end of those soft, soothing faces which, especially when very young, appeal to all our natural goodness and make us think of the sanctity of motherhood. Yes, that is the kind of face you would put on the United States Madonna if you were going to paint her. But you aren't, and meanwhile it is the kind of face they try to put on advertisements of ready-mix cake flour and patented diapers and whole-wheat bread–good, honest, wholesome, trusting, courageous, tender, and with the glow of youth. The glow of youth wasn't on the particular face any more, but when Lucy Stark lifted her head to speak, I saw that the large, deep-brown eyes hadn't changed much. Time and trouble had shaded and deepened them some, but that was all.
She said, "It's about Tom."
"Yes," I said.
She said, "I know something is wrong."
I nodded
She said, "Tell me."
I inhaled the dry air and the faint closed-parlor odor of furniture polish, which is the odor of decency and care and modest hopes, and squirmed on my seat while the red plush prickled my pressed-down palm like a nettle.
She said, "Jack, tell me the truth. I've got to know the truth, Jack. You will tell me the truth. You've always been a good friend. You were a good friend to Willie and me–back yonder–back yonder–when–"
Her voice trailed off.
So I told her the truth. About Marvin Frey's visit.
Her hands twisted in her lap while I spoke, and then clenched and lay still. Then she said, "There's just one thing fro him to do."
"There might be a–a settlement–you know, a–"
But she broke in. "There's just one right thing," she said.
I waited.
"He'll–he'll marry her," she said, and held her head up very straight.
I squirmed a little, then said, "Well–well, you see–it looks like–like there might have been–some others–other friends of Sibyl–others who–"
"Oh, God," she breathed so softly I could scarcely tell it was more than a breath she uttered, and I saw the hands clench and unclench on her lap again.
"And," I went on, now I was in it, "there's another angle to it, too. There's some politics mixed up, too. You see–MacMurfee wants–"
"Oh, God," she breathed again, and rose abruptly from the chair, and pressed her clenched hand together in front of her bosom. "Oh, God, politics," she whispered, and took a distracted step or two away from me, and said again, "Politics." Then she swung toward me, and said, out loud now, "Oh, God, in this too."
"Yes," I nodded, "like most things."
She went to one of the windows, where she stood with her back to me and the parlor and peered through a crack between the curtains out into the hot, sun-dazzled world outside, where everything happened.
After a minute she said, "Go on, tell me what you were going to tell."
So not looking at her as she peered out the crack into the world but looking at the empty chair where she had been sitting, I told her about the MacMurfee proposition and how things were.
My voice stopped. Then there was another minute of silence. Then, I heard her voice back over by the window, "It had to be this way, I guess. I have tried to do right but it had to be this way, I guess. Oh, Jack–" I heard the rustle as she turned from the window, and swung my head toward her, as she said–"Oh, Jack, I tried to do right. I loved my boy and tried to raise him right. I loved my husband and tried to do my duty. And they love me. I think they love me. After everything I have to think that, Jack. I have to."
I sat there and sweated on the red plush, while the large, deep-brown eyes fixed on me in a mixture of appeal and affirmation.
Then she said, very quietly now, "I have to think that. And think that it will be all right in the end."