“Sometimes I don’t hardly understand what you’re saying, either, May,” he said. “Miss Tina will be having her breakfast when she has it. When that will be I don’t know.”
“Only a cup of coffee is no breakfast for a healthy young girl. And she didn’t even drink all of that. People shouldn’t fight at breakfast. It ruins the whole day.” May let the door swing shut behind her to neutralize any reply he might be making.
He was not about to make one. May was the kind of servant that could be easily forgotten when she was not actually present, the nearest human thing to a kitchen utensil. Upstairs Tina was in extreme misery, and he could not help her. The sense of his ineffectuality was worsened by his inability to plan her way out of her unhappiness. For the first and only time in his life he thought of taking her away with him to some strange land where he and she could get a new start. There was no such land; he knew it; but he recognized the thought as a symptom of his ineffectuality.
He left the porch, taking the Boston and New York papers with him, and sat on the sofa in what the Elias Whites called the drawing-room. The term invariably conjured up a picture of ladies and gentlemen in formal evening dress, on their very best behavior, while a string quartette played softly behind a bank of potted palms. The Elias Whites surely had never had so much as a single violinist to play in their cottage, but in all descriptions of the house, in letters and on the floor plans, this was designated the drawing-room. Very well; in the drawing-room George Lockwood would pretend to read the morning papers while suffering retrocessively with his daughter’s contraction of a venereal disease. How had she discovered it? In all probability by being told she had passed it on to someone else. If that were the case, a man lived who despised her, and she would go through life knowing a man despised her. Sooner or later he had surely said, “I got a dose of clap from Tina Lockwood,” and even if he whispered it Tina would know he was saying it and could always say it. For her, too, there would be the moment when a man asked her to marry him and she would have to say, “I can’t have children.” And being Tina, she would have to tell him why.
And yet it apparently had made no difference to Preston Hib-bard . . .
George Lockwood tossed the papers aside and went upstairs to Tina’s room. He knocked on the door. “It’s me. Father,” he said.
“No,” she said, and even in the tiny word her voice was weak and tragic.
The door was not locked, and he entered the room. She was bent over in a rocking-chair. He closed the door behind him and went to her and put his hand on top of her head. “I’ve been thinking, Tina,” he said.
“Oh, don’t think, Father. I’ve done all of that that’s necessary. I’m going away.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said. “ ‘Time is a-wasting.’ “
She looked up at him and then compulsively at the wristwatch that lay on her dressing-table. He nodded. “Yes, I mean him. I want you to go to him now. Today.”
“And what?”
“And marry him.”
She straightened up. “You couldn’t have been listening very carefully.”
“I heard every syllable, and more to the point, he did when you were telling him the same things. What I think doesn’t matter, but that watch does. The watch, and what he says on it. Do you know where he is today?”
“Today? Yes, he’s at school,” she said.
“Go there. Don’t tell him you’re coming. Just go. Even if it only lasts a few years, Tina, it’ll be good for both of you.”
“Why will it?”
“Because it’s what you both want to do, and that’s reason enough. Do you want a high-minded reason? I can give you that, too.”
“I can’t think of any,” she said.
“There is one, though. Actually there are two. He needs you, and you need him.”
“High-minded? That’s selfish.”
“Think about it on your way to St. Bartholomew’s,” he said.
“You know, I’ve been to a lot of weddings, but this is the first time I ever really felt that the father was giving the bride away.”
“I feel the same way,” he said.
“I’m not going to tell Geraldine.”
“Send us a telegram,” he said.
Then, as if uttering a black prayer, she said, “And he can’t ever say he didn’t know what he was getting, can he, Father?”
They were married the next morning in Central Falls, Rhode Island, because the state law did not require a waiting period. Their telegram read:
TIME IS NO LONGER A-WASTING. WE WERE
MARRIED AT TEN O’CLOCK THIS MORNING.
MUCH LOVE.
It was signed “Pres and Tina Hibbard.” The telegram was delivered while George and Geraldine were at lunch.
“You of course knew about this,” said Geraldine.
“I was about to say the same thing to you,” said George.
“Yes, but I said it first. You did know about it, didn’t you?”
“I knew it was in the air,” he said.
“Are you pleased? You are, aren’t you?” she said.
“I can’t imagine anything that would please me more,” he said.
“Well, of course I was for it from the very beginning,” said Geraldine.
“That’s right, you were,” he said.
“I wonder where they’ll live. Do you think he’ll stay at St. Bartholomew’s? I can’t imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by hundreds of boys just finding out about sex.”
“When I was there nobody ever thought about sex.”
“When you were there there was at least one person thinking about it. You were probably screwing a chambermaid.”
“Didn’t have any. We made our own beds.”
“Well, the wife of the headmaster or somebody.”
“The headmaster’s wife was probably the reason why we gave so little thought to sex. As a matter of fact there weren’t any females worth lusting for. There was a certain amount of buggering among the boys themselves, and if you got really hard up you could usually find someone to relieve you in one way or another. But no female while I was there. I’m sure Tina will be able to cope with the problem.”
“I’m sure. It’s just that whenever I’ve visited a boys’ school, they look at you, and Tina’s worth looking at. And of course she being a brand-new bride, they’ll all be thinking the same thing.”
“Those thoughts won’t be confined to St. Bartholomew’s.”
“I think it’d be a good idea if Tina had a child right away,” said Geraldine.
He did not dare look at her. “Do you indeed? Why do you think so?”
“Well, you know as well as I do that she’s not a virgin, not by any stretch of the imagination. If I’d had children, my life would have been a great deal different.”
“No doubt it would have.”
“I might have made a very good mother.”
“Well, I don’t think you’d have made a bad one. But you must admit there are some women who lead a perfectly satisfactory life without adding to the population.”
“Satisfactory to whom?”
“To themselves and to the men they sleep with. Wilma, for instance, is better off without children. And so is the world. Not to mention the children she might have had.”
“Wilma, for your information, is anything but a nice woman. I’ve had to change my opinion of her.”
“It was never very high,” he said.
“No, and it’s lower than ever. Don’t ask me why.”