Business in New Hope fell off sharply. The bulk of weekend trade consisted of visitors from Philadelphia and New York who came to spend a day or two or three walking along the town’s determinedly quaint streets and browsing its little shops. As neither of those activities was much suited to a downpour, those tourists remained in Philadelphia or New York. Others, who liked Bucks County as a stopping place between Washington and New England, tended to stay in their cars and keep on the road; if they did stay a night, the hotel bar would get all their trade.
There were a clutch of bright days in early August. Then the rains came again, and the winds took down electric lines faster than the power company could tack them back up again. A dairy farmer on the Titusville-Pennington Road in New Jersey shot to death his entire herd of milkers, several barn cats, his wife’s bantam hens, a collie-shepherd cross, two of his three sons (the third was in Vietnam), his wife, and himself. Acquaintances said he’d always been a trifle strange, but a majority of people held the weather at least partly accountable for his behavior. It was generally agreed that it was a hell of a shame about the cows, as they’d been one of the best Holstein herds in the county.
Times of tragedy draw people together, and if the Delaware had given up and overflowed its banks, this might well have been the case. But the interminable rain was not sufficiently dramatic a tragedy. The rain continued for a period of almost four full weeks, but each time it broke just long enough for the river to do its job of running off the water. The promise of catastrophe hung in the humid air, while on a day-to-day basis life was less tragic than inconvenient. People were not drawn together. Rather, they were kept apart, staying in their own houses and contending with the incessant parade of minor irritations in their own lives. Basements were pumped dry, fallen trees sectioned and stored for firewood, dollars stretched, and homeowners sat with pencil and paper working out ways to transform flood damage (uninsured) into wind damage (fully covered).
Until, late in August, the rain stopped. This, too, was less dramatic than it might have been. No dove returned bearing an olive branch. There was one day with a little rain, another day with less, and then a day when, although clouds blocked the sun, no rain fell at all. When a full week passed without anything falling from the skies but pollution, the valley realized that it was over. The rains had come and gone, the river had held, and a repetition of ’55 was postponed for at least another year.
“Well, it’s over and we got through it,” they said. “As bad a season as we’ve seen in years, and God willing we won’t see it as bad again for some years to come.” They said this and meant it, and thanked God it hadn’t been worse than it was. And yet there was an undercurrent to the words, never voiced but almost always present, a resentment after the fact that the level of catastrophe had never been quite attained. If the governors of two states had declared the valley a disaster area, this was small comfort; the residents knew what true disaster was supposed to look like, and they had fallen short of it. There would be few stories to tell of this summer, and few ears interested in hearing them. They had endured, to be sure, but endurance, if easier in present time, is less thrilling in retrospect than survival. What might have been a moment in their lives of triumph and heroism was to have been no more than discomfort. So they resented this, and felt guilty at their resentment, and stood outside in the warmth of the sun.
Twenty
She stood on the sidewalk in front of the Shithouse watching Hugh’s Buick until it took a right at the corner and vanished from her sight. She took a last puff on her cigarette and let it fall from her fingers to the pavement, then ground it underfoot. It was early, not yet midnight, and she did not feel like going to sleep. Nor did she feel like staying awake in the loneliness of her room. It seemed that there ought to be somewhere to go, someone to whom she would want to talk. But she could think of no logical destination and no suitable companion.
She was discontented, and wondered why. The evening had been a pleasant one. A good dinner at Tannhauser’s, a drive in the country, a walk in his woods where they had lazily undressed before making gentle love in soft grass. It was a perfect night for outdoor lovemaking and their bodies had worked together to match the mood of the evening. It had been good for her and good for him, and after it they had gone into his house for a drink and his daughter Karen had joined them. Then Karen went diplomatically and with little awkwardness to her room, and they might have made love again, she might even have stayed the night, but the discontent set in and she wound up pleading tiredness. She had asked to be taken home, and now she was home, and if she had felt tired before she was certainly not tired now.
“Linda?”
She started at her name, then recognized Tanya Leopold.
“You were just standing there staring,” the little actress said. “You okay?”
“I was just thinking about something.”
“What was it? Not to be prying but you had this really intense expression on your face, and I was wondering how it got there. This play I’m in, Veil, not the one I’m in now but the one we’re rehearsing, we’re doing it next week, and I’ve got this one scene where I’m supposed look pensive, and I don’t have it down yet. Looking pensive. And you know, the Method, all of that, I oughta be able to find something to use to look pensive, so thought, oh, but what makes you look pensive wouldn’t do me any good, would it?”
“I don’t really know.”
“The thing is to find something in my past that had me looking pensive, but I could go bananas trying to think of something. Unless that would work. Do you think so?”
“Do I think what would work?”
“Trying to think of something to use. Did I look pensive to you just then?”
“In a way.”
“I think the problem is I don’t think very much. It blows my mind that some people will just sit still for hours, and all that time they’re thinking, thoughts are running through their brains. Are you going upstairs now or what?”
“That’s what I was trying to decide. Whether to go up now or not.”
“You got that look on your face just from whether or not you’re going upstairs?”
“More or less.” She smiled suddenly. “That’s what it boils down to, anyway. In a very pensive way, evidently. Are you going up? I’ll walk with you.”
On the way up the stairs Tanya said, “You’re looking so good lately, Linda.”
“I am? Why, thank you.”
“I’m glad you’ve got somebody,” she went on, avoiding Linda’s eyes. “What I said that other time—”
“Oh, forget that, Tanya.”
“I felt awful afterward. I just jump in and say things before I think about them. Do you think you’ll move in with him?”