September Song (9 page)

The work outside came to an abrupt stop. Lunchtime.

“I do,” he said in the sudden silence.

“Then I pronounce you …”

The grandfather's clock struck: twelve funereal knells. It ought to have stopped forever then, its hands folded together upon this moment that put an end to all its many yesterdays.

Corks popped, glasses were filled and toasts raised to the long life and happiness of the newlyweds. He set his down untouched, and there it stayed, going flat, through the rest of the celebrations. The bride sliced and served the cake.

“Dad,” Arnold, the unctuous undertaker, said brightly.

He hated to have his sons-in-law call him “Dad,” as all did. It was a familiarity, a presumption. They had married his daughters, not him. To add to his annoyance was the fact that “Dad” was what he had tried to get Pete to call him. It was a way of insinuating him into the family. Tried and failed. Pete refused. He wondered why.

“Maybe it was what he called his father,” Molly suggested.

“His father's dead.”

“That he's dead doesn't mean he's replaceable,” she said.

“Dad, now that you're free—”

He hated to be told that he was now free. “Free” meant idle, useless, finished. He longed for the lost servitude in which his life had been spent, for that was his life, and he feared the emptiness of however much future was his.

“—you ought to travel. Get away from here while all this clatter and mess is going on. You can afford to and you have certainly earned it. Or better still, why not buy yourself a nice little condominium somewhere in the Sun Belt and spend your winters down there? Be good for Mom's poor knees. They've got these retirement set-ups (he hated the word “retirement”) with social rooms, entertainment, dining commons, organized group activities, excursions. Never a dull moment.”

Shuffleboard. Ping-Pong. Bridge. Bingo. Exercise classes. Arts and crafts. Disneyland. This after life as a man, doing a man's work, feeding people, his own man, independent.

“Dad? Did you hear me?”

“There's nothing wrong with my hearing, thank you.” In fact his hearing was impaired from the years of exposure to the piercing noise of the pesticide sprayer. Sometimes it seemed he heard only what he would rather not hear.

“Oh. I just thought that with all the racket outside …”

“I heard you.”

“Well, just a suggestion. Think it over.”

He hated to be told to think something over.

Asked recently by somebody, “Did you hear what happened?” he had snapped, “No, and don't tell me. I hate everything that happens.”

If people thought he was churlish that suited him just fine. He had earned it. Or had had it thrust upon him.

The undertaker retreated with the air of someone who had tried to stroke a pet and been snarled at.

“Don't bury me yet. Hear?” he called. “I'm still alive!” It was saying so that made him wonder.

Presently the happy couple approached him, arm in arm.

“Papa, we've got something to tell you,” said Janet.

“Call me ‘Father,'” he said. “You're not a little girl anymore.” What he was saying was, “You're not
my
little girl anymore.”

“Very well, Father. Have it your way.”

“Hah! When have I had my way?”

To her husband she said, “Do you want to be the one to tell him or shall I?”

He hated this new wifely deference of hers. She seemed to have just been put on a leash, and to like it. To think that she must ask her husband's permission to tell him something!

Her husband gave her his consent with a nod.

“Well,” she said, “we thought you would like to know that we have decided to take the name Evans-Bennett.”

Like to know!
Like
to know! The thought of his name attached like a tail to that detested one! Meant as a sop, it was insult added to injury. He considered for a moment not saying what he felt like saying, then said it:

“I suppose there is nothing I can do to stop you.”

Her eyes flashed with hurt and anger.

Meanwhile:

“Well, if you won't I will.”

Mr. and Mrs. Minister were quarreling. How unbecoming! How inappropriate to the occasion! What an ill-timed show of marital disharmony to set before the newlyweds!

“Please, Trevor. No. Another time. Not now.”

“Why not now? What better time? Who knows when we will all be together like this again? When the hen lays the cock will crow.”

Their dispute having been made public, the husband felt obliged to explain it. His side of it, that was.

“Family. Friends of the family,” he said. “I have an announcement to make. One which, in her modesty, my dear wife does not want me to make. But I, in my immodesty, must overrule her. For the first time, you understand. My aim is to add joy to this joyful occasion by announcing that we are expecting.”

Until now his grandchildren had been fatherless in his imagination. Oh, they would require fathers, as the blossom required the pollen, but they were their mothers' children, fruit of his fruit. They had been faceless. Now in the features of his sons-in-law he saw theirs prefigured. They were to have been a prolongation of his life; this announcement of the first one's coming seemed to signal its approaching end. This child would bear no resemblance to him. He would have no share in the shaping of it. It would be a town child and would speak another language. Onto his stock had been grafted varieties alien to it.

Bitterness flooded him as he surveyed the gulf between his feelings and those he was supposed to be feeling on this occasion. A principal in these proceedings—their very source—he was no part of them. He was the father of the bride, an enviable role—for him a bitter disappointment. He had now married off all his three daughters, one of life's major milestones—to him a mockery. He had just learned that he would soon be a grandfather, another joy—for him joyless. He was now retired from his long years of hard labor, and he was burdened by his leisure. He might almost be called wealthy from the sale of the farm, and the money was hateful to him. This wedding was his wake.

Flashbulbs were gaily popping and this made him leaf back through that family album in his mind. Beneath the married faces of his daughters he saw the blossoms on the bough that they had been. He recalled the many times they had been tucked in bed and allowed to fall asleep before Molly and he went out on the tractor and the sprayer and spent the night in the orchard. They would leave them purring like kittens, yet while they worked they worried every minute that one of them might wake up sick or frightened and wake the others and they not find their parents there to comfort them, and he remembered one night when Molly dozed off at the wheel and woke up inches short of going over the cliff at the edge of the land and they had dashed to the house as if they had indeed orphaned the children.

When the applause and the congratulations had died down, Ellen, in something like anguish, said to Janet, “I tried to stop him. You heard me. It would have kept for another time. This is your day.”

It took Janet a moment to understand. When she did she gasped. When she recovered her breath she said indignantly, “How could you think that I would resent it? How could you think that I would be so petty?
That
is what I resent! Oh, how
could
you?”

She was fighting back tears.

“My day,” she said bitterly. “My day. Come, Rodney. Let's get out of here.”

The time had come for him to spring his surprise.

“May I have your attention, please?” he said. “Will you be seated? Thank you.”

He put on his eyeglasses and took from their folder a sheaf of papers. Then, “As my son-in-law, the Reverend, said earlier in making his announcement of an addition to the family, ‘Who knows when we will all be together like this again?'”

It would not be anytime soon. A solitude had already settled upon the house. Once Pete was gone, as he would be shortly, Molly and he would be alone. The girls, feeling themselves and their husbands unwelcome and out of place, would seldom visit. Their old home was theirs no longer. It was not his either. He was in it only on tenure. It was not even his to bequeath.

“The last will and testament of Seth Bennett,” he read aloud.

He paused for effect.

His eyeglasses were for reading. He had worn them for years. Thus this was not the first time that, when he looked up from the page, his sight swam. But with those words of his still echoing, it was the first time that this vagueness of vision made it seem as though the world was receding from him, or he from it. He had meant to stun his audience, and so he had, but the one most stunned was himself. It was his obituary he was reading.

“I, Seth Bennett, residing in the town of New Utrecht, Columbia County, State of New York, do hereby make, publish and declare this my last will and testament, hereby revoking all testamentary instruments heretofore made by me.

“I direct that all my just debts and funeral expenses be paid as soon after my decease as may be practicable. I further direct that all estate, transfer and inheritance taxes, addressed with respect to my estate herein disposed of…”

Ordinarily so remote-sounding, pertaining to somebody else, the legalese took on a nearness felt by all, himself most of all.

“I give, devise and bequeath all my property, both real and personal—”

That was the standard form. He would leave no real property.

“—which I may own at the time of my death, wheresoever situate, to my beloved wife, Molly Bennett.”

He laid the paper aside and held up the three envelopes.

To all he said, “These contain three checks, one for each of my daughters.” To them he said, “Will you please come and take them.”

They hesitated. None wanted to be the first to show an eagerness to claim hers, just as, after having done so and resumed their seats, none wanted to be the first to open hers and exhibit a greedy curiosity.

He might have said, “Well. Open them,” and with that paternal command have relieved them of responsibility. But he was enjoying their discomfort. He was teasing them, tormenting them. He was corrupting them, and the one whose heart their corruption was breaking was himself.

“All together they represent the entire proceeds from the sale of the farm,” he said. “I want no part of it. You will find that they are all equal when you compare them.”

“Oh, Father!” the elder two exclaimed in tones of injured innocence, shock. Janet said nothing, but resentment was all over her face.

It was Doris who yielded first to the urge to look. The amount of the check made her gasp. She showed it to her husband for him to see their newfound wealth. Freed from restraint by her sister's example, Ellen opened hers.

“Oh! Father!” said both.

“You'd have gotten it sooner or later. Better sooner. I don't want to have to feel that you're just waiting for me to die.” Having settled their inheritance upon them, he could die whenever it suited him as far as they were concerned, or live as long as he might.

They hung their heads in sorrow and in shame for him at having such unnatural feelings imputed to them.

Janet's envelope remained unopened. She now rose, tore it in half and let the pieces fall to the floor.

Her final act before leaving home was to kiss him goodbye. It was a kiss on the cheek but it pierced his heart, as it was meant to do, an icy kiss, not a token of love but the discharge of her last duty as his daughter.

The land-clearing crew had quit work for the day. Inside and outside all was quiet. The ever-burning fires of the trees smoldered on and even in the house the air smelled of their smoke. The sun had set and the light was beginning to wane. He sat alone in the dusky parlor amid the leavings of the party, dirty plates, empty glasses. Molly was off somewhere, no doubt shedding her mother's tears of joy over the marriage of her baby daughter and of sorrow over her leaving home. He toyed with the figurine from the wedding cake of the bride and groom. In her haste to get away from the home he had made hateful to her, Janet had left it behind.

Pete appeared, carrying the suitcase and the duffelbag with which he had arrived a year earlier.

“So soon?” he said.

“The sooner the better. I've got my fortune to make. And that's going to take some doing.”

“Setting off so late in the day? Don't you want to wait until morning at least?”

“I can still make two hundred miles before bedtime.”

“Where will you go?”

“I'm thinking of Washington. That's still a big apple-producing state. There ought to be a place for me out there. I'll write when I'm settled.”

“I know how painful it must be to pull up your roots and transplant yourself. But you're young. You can send down new roots. I'll give you the highest recommendation. How are you fixed for money?”

“Got a pocketful. You've paid me well, and you know I'm not a big spender. But thanks for asking. You've been good to me, Seth. Like a father.”

“I hope you make that fortune. I wish you a long and happy life.”

“I've said goodbye to Molly.”

“We'll miss you.”

“And I will never forget you. No, don't follow me out to the car. We'll say goodbye here.”

“Goodbye, son. Bless you.”

Alone again in the failing light he considered the prospect before him. At its end, both near and far, stood that tombstone with his name on it and its uncompleted dates. His remaining years had become too many to endure, too few to cling to.

Outside, the eddying smoke dimming the air gave to things an aspect of unreality. He settled himself on the ground and leaned his back against his tombstone. He raised the pistol to his head, closed his eyes, fired—and missed his aim.

That right hand of his was good for nothing.

A Weekend in the Country