Hattie Barber’s satisfaction
August 1930
The Bains Institute had fallen on hard times. Nobody in Bellefield wanted to learn Spanish or double-entry bookkeeping and if you did not know how to shoot by now you were not about to pay Sargeant Imhoff to teach you how at $4.25 per six-week term. If you needed to learn you were more likely to put a can on a fencepost and bang away, if you could afford the ammunition. Also it was the businessman who had let everyone down and a sick atmosphere of self-disgust had settled down over all those types of endeavours, in the way it does with a bad hangover, when puritanical resolve comes easily, because it lines up with what the body really wants to do at the moment.
Now in the summer of 1930 Manwerth Bains was calling it quits. The swimming pool was empty and the spouting girl had lost a thick slice of her head to the weather. The streetcar no longer ran to the river full of singing people and at nine in the morning on the first day of May Hattie Barber stood in her office and looked out at the hedge and put a few things in a Coca-Cola box to take along home. Among these things was a photograph of a baby girl in a lace gown.
She would miss the piano and the students who came at night, most of them girls. Some of them would come to the house now and take private lessons but she knew from experience it was a sporadic way to make an income, girls grew up or their parents suffered some loss – it was not always a financial one, sometimes a family fell in society and it began to seem absurd and even cruel to send a girl off to learn to play the piano when now all she could hope for in life was to get by – no, it was no way to make a living. But she had a little money put by and Alan was good and sent what he could and she had a garden and few needs and she calculated she would be all right for a while until something else came along.
She did not know much about what had happened to Mary because Alan had not told her but she had the sense, from what letters he continued to send, that things were harder than they might have been, and that while his work was not in jeopardy he was not exactly happy; otherwise she might have entertained the idea of going to Arizona to see him, and also to look through the telescope and to see Pluto for herself. She was proud of him and she wanted to see it all in person, the telescope and the Grand Canyon and the Indians and all of it. But as things were she guessed she would give Alan more trouble than she got pleasure. It was hard not to know her own daughter-in-lawa but the time would come.
If you walked quickly you could make it from the Bains Institute to her front door in six minutes but with the box it took her a minute or two longer. It was not yet ten in the morning but it was warm and when she got into the house, the house was warm too. She set the box on the dining room table and took off her hat and her shoes and went upstairs to the bathroom. She drew a bath and took off her clothes and as she had since she had been a girl she examined, with uncurious gravity, the marks that had been left on her skin by her shoelaces and stockingtops and the drawstring of her underwear. She looks like a girl as she does it. She bathed in a cool tub and when she was done she dried herself and went to her closet and dressed and at last took out her bathing costume, which was very old-fashioned and unsatisfactory. But she folded it anyway and brought it downstairs with a blanket and lay them both on the bottom of the picnic basket which she now filled with a chicken dinner. She noted that she was not afraid of anything and that without her having exactly noticed when it had happened the sorrow that had followed her for so long following her husband’s death was simply gone, as it had been gone for about a year. She fastened the clasp of the basket and went out into the day to catch the streetcar, and at the river she changed in a bathhouse and came out wearing her silly costume and spread her towel on the sandy slope of the riverbank. When the paddleboat appeared at three in the afternoon she changed back into her clothes bought a ticket and went upriver six miles to Winter Island, where she nearly stepped on a copperhead. It slipped away into the water and she watched it go and felt a tremor in her breast. But the steamboat did not catch fire or sink and the streetcar brought her home safely and there was a letter on the hall table from Mr. Bains, asking her to meet him the next morning. He would ask her to marry him, she knew, and the next morning, as she waited for him, standing there in her empty parlor she suspected – in the slanting morning light – well, she suspected that she would agree to have him, because it was such a short life, after all, and she would be sorry – yes – sorry not to have company for the rest of what was left to her. And whatever her son was about, at that moment – well – he would simply have to understand.