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“They’re too proud.”
“Well I feel sorry for them,” she said. “I feel really sorry for them, but I think that’s stupid. What about the little babies and the children? They ought to think about them. Are the children too proud too?”
“Everybody’s proud.”
When Mr. Montjoy came to the island on weekends, there was always a great deal of noise and activity. Some of that was because there were visitors who came by boat to swim and have drinks and watch sailing races. But a lot of it was generated by Mr. Montjoy himself. He had a loud blustery voice and a thick body with a skin that would never take a tan. Every weekend he turned red from the sun, and during the week the burned skin peeled away and left him pink and muddy with freckles, ready to be burned again. When he took off his glasses you could see that one eye was quick and squinty and the other boldly blue but helpless-looking, as if caught in a trap.
His blustering was often about things that he had misplaced, or dropped, or bumped into. “Where the hell is the-?” he would say, or “You didn’t happen to see the-?” So it seemed that he had also misplaced, or failed to grasp in the first place, even the name of the thing he was looking for. To console himself he might grab up a handful of peanuts or pretzels or whatever was nearby, and eat handful after handful until they were all gone. Then he would stare at the empty bowl as if that too astounded him.
One morning I heard him say, “Now where in hell is that-?” He was crashing around out on the deck.
“Your book?” said Mrs. Montjoy, in a tone of bright control. She was having her midmorning coffee.
“I thought I had it out here,” he said. “I was reading it.” “The Book-of-the-Month one?” she said. “I think you left it in the living room.”
She was right. I was vacuuming the living room, and a few moments before I had picked up a book pushed partway under the sofa. Its title was Seven Gothic Tales. The title made me want to open it, and even as I overheard the Montjoys’ conversation I was reading, holding the book open in one hand and guiding the vacuum cleaner with the other. They couldn’t see me from the deck.
“Nay, I speak from the heart,” said Mira. “I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.”
“There it is,” said Mr. Montjoy, who for a wonder had come into the room without his usual bumping and banging-or none at least that I had heard. “Good girl, you found my book. Now I remember. Last night I was reading it on the sofa.”
“It was on the floor,” I said. “I just picked it up.”
He must have seen me reading it. He said, “It’s a queer kind of book, but sometimes you want to read a book that isn’t like all the others.”
“I couldn’t make heads or tails of it,” said Mrs. Montjoy, coming in with the coffee tray. “We’ll have to get out of the way here and let her get on with the vacuuming.”
Mr. Montjoy went back to the mainland, and to the city, that evening. He was a bank director. That did not mean, apparently, that he worked in a bank. The day after he had gone I looked everywhere. I looked under the chairs and behind the curtains, in case he might have left that book behind. But I could not find it.
“I always thought it would be nice to live up here all the year round, the way you people do,” said Mrs. Foley. She must have cast me again as the girl who brought the groceries. Some days she said, “I know who you are now. You’re the new girl helping the Dutch woman in the kitchen. But I’m sorry, I just can’t recall your name.” And other days she let me walk by without giving any greeting or showing the least interest.
“We used to come up here in the winter,” she said. “The bay would be frozen over and there would be a road across the ice. We used to go snowshoeing. Now that’s something people don’t do anymore. Do they? Snowshoeing?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She leaned towards me. “Can you tell me something?” she said with embarrassment, speaking almost in a whisper. “Can you tell me where Jane is? I haven’t seen her ru
I said that I didn’t know. She smiled as if I was teasing her, and reached out a hand to touch my face. I had been stooping down to listen to her, but now I straightened up, and her hand grazed my chest instead. It was a hot day and I was wearing my halter, so it happened that she touched my skin. Her hand was light and dry as a wood shaving, but the nail scraped me.
“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said.
After that I simply waved if she spoke to me and hurried on my way.
On a Saturday afternoon towards the end of August, the Montjoys gave a cocktail party. The party was given in honor of the friends they had staying with them that weekend-Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. A good many small silver forks and spoons had to be polished in preparation for this event, so Mrs. Montjoy decided that all the silver might as well be done at the same time. I did the polishing and she stood beside me, inspecting it.
On the day of the party, people arrived in motorboats and sailboats. Some of them went swimming, then sat around on the rocks in their bathing suits, or lay on the dock in the sun. Others came up to the house immediately and started drinking and talking in the living room or out on the deck. Some children had come with their parents, and older children by themselves, in their own boats. They were not children of Mary A
Mrs. Montjoy and I had been busy all morning, making all the different things to eat, which we now arranged on platters and offered to people. Making them had been fiddly and exasperating work. Stuffing various mixtures into mushroom caps and sticking one tiny slice of something on top of a tiny slice of something else on top of a precise fragment of toast or bread. All the shapes had to be perfect-perfect triangles, perfect rounds and squares, perfect diamonds.
Mrs. Hammond came into the kitchen several times and admired what we were doing.
“How marvellous everything looks,” she said. “You notice I’m not offering to help. I’m a perfect mutt at this kind of thing.”
I liked the way she said that. I’m a perfect mutt. I admired her husky voice, its weary good-humored tone, and the way she seemed to suggest that tiny geometrical bits of food were not so necessary, might even be a trifle silly. I wished I could be her, in a sleek black bathing suit with a tan like dark toast, shoulder-length smooth dark hair, orchid-colored lipstick.
Not that she looked happy. But her air of sulle
Her name was Carol and her husband’s name was Ivan. I thought of them already by their first names-something I had never been tempted to do with the Montjoys.
Mrs. Montjoy had asked me to put on a dress, so I wore the pink and white striped cotton, with the smudged material at its waist tucked under the elasticized belt. Nearly everybody else was in shorts and bathing suits. I passed among them, offering food. I was not sure how to do this. Sometimes people were laughing or talking with such vigor that they didn’t notice me, and I was afraid that their gestures would send the food bits flying. So I said, “Excuse me-would you like one of these?” in a raised voice that sounded very determined or even reproving. Then they looked at me with startled amusement, and I had the feeling that my interruption had become another joke.