"People didn't grow up so fast in those days," Sears said. "All of this-young men in their early twenties mooning about a woman of twenty-five or -six as if she were an unattainable priestess-must seem risible to you. But it was the way we thought of her-beyond our reach. She was Stringer's, and we all thought that after they married we'd be as welcome at his house as at hers."
The two older men fell silent for a moment. They looked into the fire on Edward Wanderley's hearth and drank whiskey. Don did not prod them to speak, knowing that a crucial turn in the story had come and that they would finish telling it when they were able.
"We were in a sort of sexless, pre-Freudian paradise," Ricky finally said. "In an enchantment. Sometimes we even danced with her, but even holding her, watching her move, we never thought about sex. Not consciously. Not to admit. Well, paradise died in October, 1929, shortly after the stock market and Stringer Dedham."
"Paradise died," Sears echoed, "and we looked into the devil's face." He turned his head toward the window.
13
Sears said, "Look at the snow."
The other two followed his gaze and saw white flakes blizzarding against the window. "If his wife can find him, Omar Norris will have to be out plowing before morning."
Ricky drank more of his whiskey. "It was tropically hot," he said, melting the present storm in the unseasonal October of nearly fifty years before. "The threshing got done late that year. It seemed folks couldn't get down to work. People said money worries made Stringer absentminded. The Dedham girls said no, that wasn't it, he'd gone by Miss Galli's house that morning. He'd seen something."
"Stringer put his arms in the thresher," Sears said, "and his sisters blamed Eva. He said things while he was dying, wrapped up in blankets on their table. But you couldn't make head or tail of what they thought they heard him say. 'Bury her,' that was one thing, and 'cut her up,' as though he'd seen what was going to happen to himself."
"And," said Ricky, "one other thing. The Dedham girls said he screamed something else-but it was so mixed up with his other screams that they weren't sure about it. 'Bee-orchid.' 'Bee-orchid,' just that. He had been raving, obviously. Out of his head with shock and pain. Well, he died on that table, and got a good burial a few days later. Eva Galli didn't come to the funeral. Half the town was on Pleasant Hill, but not the dead man's fiancée. That fueled their tongues."
"The old women, the women she had ignored," Sears said. "They laid into her. Said she'd ruined Stringer. Of course half of them had unmarried daughters and they'd had their eyes on Stringer long before Eva Galli showed up. They said he made some discovery-an abandoned husband or an illegitimate child, something like that. They made her out to be a real Jezebel."
"We didn't know what to do," Ricky said. "We were afraid to visit her, after Stringer died. She might be grieving as much as a widow, you see, but she was unattached. It was our parents' place to console her, not ours. If we had called on her, the female malice would have gone into high gear. So we stewed-just stewed. Everybody assumed that she'd pack up and move back to New York. But we couldn't forget those afternoons."
"If anything, they became more magical, more poignant," Sears said. "Now we knew what we had lost. An ideal-and a romantic friendship conducted in the light of an ideal."
"Sears is right," Ricky said. "But in the end, we idealized her even more. She became an emblem of grief-of a fractured heart. All we wanted to do was to visit her. We sent her a note of condolence, and we would have gone through fire to see her. What we couldn't go through was the iron-bound social convention that set her apart. There weren't any cracks to slip through."
"Instead she visited us," Sears said. "At the apartment your uncle lived in then. Edward was the only one who had his own place. We got together to talk and drink applejack. To talk about all the things we were going to do."
"And to talk about her," Ricky said. "Do you know that Ernest Dowson poem: 'I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion'? Lewis found it and read it to us. That poem went through us like a knife. 'Thy pale lost lilies.' It certainly called for more applejack. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' What idiots we were. Anyhow, she turned up one night at Edward's apartment"
"And she was wild," Sears said. "She was frightening. She came in like a typhoon."
"She said she was lonely," Ricky said. "Said she was sick of this damned town and all the hypocrites in it. She wanted to drink and she wanted to dance, and she didn't care who was shocked. Said this dead little town and all its dead little people could go to hell as far as she was concerned. And if we were men and not little boys, we'd damn the town too."
"We were speechless," Sears said. "There was our unattainable goddess, cursing like a sailor and raging… acting like a whore. 'Madder music and stronger wine.' That's what we got, all right. Edward had a little gramophone and some records, and she made us crank it up and put on the loudest jazz he had. She was so vehement! It was crazy-we'd never seen any woman act that way, and for us she was, you know, sort of a cross between the Statue of Liberty and Mary Pickford. 'Dance with me, you little toad,' she said to John, and he was so frightened by her that he scarcely dared touch her. Her eyes were just blazing."
"I think what she felt was hate," Ricky said. "For us, for the town, for Stringer. But it was hatred, and it was boiling. A cyclone of hate. She kissed Lewis while they were dancing, and he jumped back like she burned him. He dropped his arms, and she spun off to Edward and grabbed him and made him dance. Her face was terrible-rigid. Edward was always more worldly than the rest of us, but he too was shaken by Eva's wildness- our paradise was crumbling all around us, and she kicked it into powder with every step. With every glance. She did seem like a devil; like something possessed. You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces-how all that feeling comes out and hits you like a truck? It was like that. 'Aren't you little sissies going to drink?' she said. So we drank."
"It was unspeakable," Sears said. "She seemed twice our size. I think I knew what was coming. There was only one thing that could be coming. We were simply too immature to know how to handle it."
"I don't know if I saw it coming, but it came anyhow," Ricky said. "She tried to seduce Lewis."
"He was the worst possible choice," Sears said. "Lewis was only a boy. He may have kissed a gal before that night, but he certainly had done no more than that. We all loved Eva, but Lewis probably loved her most-he was the one who found that Dowson poem, remember. And because he loved her most, her performance that evening and her hatred stunned him."
"And she knew it," Ricky said. "She was delighted. It pleased her, that Lewis was so shocked he could scarcely utter a word. And when she pushed Edward away and went after Lewis, Lewis was frozen stiff with horror. As if he had seen his mother begin to act that way."
"His mother?" Sears asked. "Well, I suppose. At least it tells you the depth of his fantasy about her- our fantasy, to be honest. And he was dumbstruck. Eva snaked her arms around him and kissed him. It looked like she was eating half his face. Imagine that-those hate-filled kisses pouring over you, all that fury biting into your month. It must have been like kissing a razor. When she drew back her head, Lewis's face was smeared with lipstick. Normally it would have been a funny sight but it was somehow horrifying. As if he was smeared with blood."