The young man studied Holt’s face, blinking slowly as he made an obvious attempt to understand, to fit Holt’s cemetery observation into the pattern of everything he’d been taught before this. Because Holt’s idea had a different shape, and was angled in a different direction, the young man couldn’t absorb it, and the struggle deepened his frown until he discovered a possible relationship between what Holt had said and something he did know. “Still,” he said, the frown relaxing somewhat, “we all have to do our best.”
“Naturally,” Holt said. He let it go at that, and was relieved when the young man also showed no inclination to carry it further. He had just been reminded again of something it was easy to forget; that aside from simple memory items like numbers and names, no one can be taught anything they don’t already know. Some day the fist of experience would thud Holt’s thought into the young man’s head, but until then he could not effectively be told it.
And would he, when it finally did occur to him, suddenly snap his fingers and exclaim, “So that’s what Doctor Holt meant!”? Unlikely.
Ahead at last was the on-ramp for route 95, John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway. Frequently, when he saw that name, Holt found himself comparing the Presidencies of Kennedy and Lockridge, and he believed it was not entirely familial bias that left him with the conviction that Lockridge had left the greater legacy of accomplishment. But it was Kennedy’s name that filled the road maps, and all because Kennedy had managed the supreme achievement of any American President; he had died in office. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
Holt knew the thought was unworthy, but he also knew it was true. No President could ever accomplish any act, any feat, any dream that would be as hailed and rewarded and commemorated as his failure to survive his term of office. The mass of people preferred sentiment to accomplishment any day.
Come to think of it, that was why the young man’s mind had been forced to reject Holt’s parable of the cemeteries. It was anti-sentimental in the worst way, and the young man had been unable to digest it until he had reduced it to an old sentimental standby: “We all have to do our best.”
And it’s never good enough, Holt thought, and drove north on John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway.
ii
Near Bethayres, north of Philadelphia, the houses are large, old, rambling, but in excellent repair, set on plots of four or six or ten acres, frequently set far enough back from the road, and so screened in any case with trees, that people driving by, on their way up to New Hope or down to Philadelphia, can never be sure there’s a house there at all. Only the trees, perhaps a stone or iron fence, a blacktop driveway winding in amid the trees, a rural delivery mailbox with a name or just a number on it, and almost invariably some variation on the sign PRIVATE ROAD — NO TRESPASSING.
Holt was alone in the car now as he made the slow turn into his driveway and brought the Lincoln to a stop. He’d dropped the young man off in town, after having recouped from the cemetery error by engaging in an animated discussion on the professional football season just past, a subject in which they both had a true interest. Holt was one of the last true believers in the eventual arising from the grave of the Philadelphia Eagles, and the young man had wanted to know if it was really true what he’d heard of the Green Bay Packers while Vince Lombardi was the coach. “Before he went to Washington,” the young man said, but whether with disgust for the city or the football team it was hard to say.
Holt thought it was both sad and funny that he’d reconstructed himself in the young man’s estimation via football, and he’d mused on the subject most of the way from the city home. Now he stopped the car just in the entrance of his driveway and got out to see what mail had come today. It would have been lying in the box since noon, but Margaret knew how much pleasure he took in finding the mail for himself, and always left it there no matter how late he was due to come home. Margaret indulged him, she humored him, and he was aware of it in a slightly guilty way, and he was delighted by it.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation was after him again. There was an appeal for Haitian relief, this one putting its squatting starving child-with-bowl right out on the envelope, apparently acting from the realization that most of these envelopes would be thrown out unopened. There were bills. There was a letter from Gregory, wonder of wonders! A medical journal he usually found unreadable was there in its brown paper sleeve. And Sears & Co — didn’t they used to be Sears Roebuck? — wished to announce its Spring Sale. On February 23rd?
Holt carried it all back to the car and drove on to the house, which couldn’t be seen until one was almost on top of it, sitting as it did among dense shrubbery and in a slight depression, the cause of a perennially damp basement. Today, when he rounded the last curve and saw the house — two-story, large, white clapboard and fieldstone — he saw also a dark green Ford Mustang parked on the blacktop in front of the door.
A Mustang? Holt frowned at it, his diagnostic instincts aroused. Who would be here in a Mustang? Not a workman, no carpenter or plumber or electrician would drive a Mustang. Not a member of the family, the family’s cars were invariably either big or foreign, Holt himself driving this Lincoln while Margaret had the MG. No friend he could think of.
An Avon lady! The idea came to him with the force of revelation, and he could actually see her in the front room, perched on the edge of the gray sofa, nyloned knees together. A beige suit, some lace at the throat, and one of those hats that even women who know better buy at Eastertime.
Holt was so delighted with his deduction that he nearly forgot the mail in his haste to go indoors and have his diagnosis proved correct. He remembered it halfway, and trotted back to get it, then hurried to the front door. In some silly way, he was very happy.
Margaret met him in the entrance hall, and didn’t respond to his smile. She looked somber, and she said, “Evelyn is here.”
“Evelyn?” For just a second his mind was a blank, he couldn’t think of anyone he knew named Evelyn. The image of the Avon lady was still too central in his imagination.
“Evelyn Canby,” Margaret said. “From Brad.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, of course!”
“She’s in the front room,” Margaret said. “She phoned first, and I told her you’d be here around five.”
“When did she get here?”
“Twenty minutes ago.”
Holt looked at his watch. Not quite ten past five. He said, “What’s the problem? Something with Brad? Or Dinah?”
“She said she preferred to tell you.”
“A female complaint,” Holt said, and raised his eyes to heaven.
“No, she said she wanted to talk to you about Bradford.”
“Oh. All right, I’ll go see her.” He took a step, then remembered the mail he was still carrying, and turned back to hand it to her. “There’s a letter from Greg, believe it or not.”
Her mood lightened at once. “Oh, good! Did you open it?”
“Of course not. I get to bring it into the house, you get to open it. That’s what makes this a working marriage.” He kissed her on the cheek, and went in to see his niece Evelyn.
iii
She was sitting in the dark. Outside, daylight was clinging on in its pale February way, but the front room was in semi-darkness. Why hadn’t the girl turned on a light? The switch beside the door controlled several lamps around the large room. Holt pressed it, and the room leaped into sudden yellow definition, with pockets of shadow. Evelyn, who had been seated near the window and apparently lost in thought, started, then got to her feet and came toward Holt across the Persian carpet.