“What do you see in her, Sis?” Tom had asked after that first visit. Refusing Janet’s offer to walk her home, she had waved farewell to the two sisters who had stood on the steps to see her off, and headed home in the twilight. “She’s a kid, she’s younger than me, even! Jeeze, she’s younger than your own daughter!”
“She’s a friend, Tom, and she has lots of good qualities. I’m fond of her, and she likes me—look, she brought me flowers! I can’t remember you bringing me flowers, now. What am I to do: forbid her from seeing me?”
“You don’t really expect flowers from me, Sis, be serious!”
“I don’t expect flowers from anybody. But she likes me, Tom, and … everyone wants to be loved and appreciated. Why should I be different?”
Tom was persistent. “You just want to jump her bones. One of these days, it’ll be: Crystal, let’s go see a movie, and you’ll be off to a motel in St Paul, and be back in the wee hours, with a grin from ear to ear!”
Janet was very annoyed with Tom’s salacious remarks.
“All we need to do is go upstairs, Tom; I’ve got my own room, after all.”
“In the house? That’s disgusting!”
Janet stared at her, exasperated. “Listen to yourself! Where’s the logic? How come sex all night long is okay for you, but if I just bring up the possibility of inviting a young woman into the privacy of my own room, it’s disgusting? ” Janet had said it in a quiet tone, and with a smile on her lips, but Tommy winced. Janet gave her two seconds for a riposte that never came. Then she unhurriedly went up to her room and shut the door, and shuddered with controlled fury.
It didn’t take long for her to realize that Tom was reacting more from fear of her own reputation being compromised than out of any particular feeling about the appropriateness of sex between Janet and anybody. Circumstances had led the lifestyle of the Ferguson household to be sexually very liberal, but responsible and considerate (except in the case of Elly, which few of the residents were aware of). There was nothing in Tom’s experience, that Janet could think of, that could have resulted in such a censorious outburst.
Crystal had a wide range of moods. Some days she clearly preferred to walk with Janet. They walked up and down the 5-mile drive, and even summoned the courage to walk to town and sit down for a cup of tea at Crystal’s favorite table. Janet introduced Crystal to anyone who seemed interested as a good friend from Philadelphia. Crystal gradually became moderately relaxed during such an introduction, though the first couple of times she had to fight hard to keep her composure. During these private walks, their conversations ranged from philosophical, to quite intimate.
Other days, she was content to sit and chat with Janet and whoever else might have been around, Tom and sometimes Cindy. She was a forgiving girl, and she never seemed to hold a grudge at the petty remarks Tommy made occasionally, intended to put her down. Tommy remarked on her choice of major, her attitude towards countless subjects, her ignorance about music and the arts with barely disguised disparagement. Crystal’s reactions ranged from honest self-deprecation to mild indignation to puzzlement. For instance, Tom criticized Crystal’s partiality for dime-store romances. Crystal had become a member of the Ferguson Library, and often came up the hill with a bagful of romances. Tom never lost an opportunity to ridicule her choices.
“The Song of the Nightingale,” chortled Tom, one night. “I can just imagine how it goes … ‘Susan felt the sultry night air through her thin nightgown …’”
Crystal had giggled and said, “I like that stuff!”
“But what good is it? Have you read Pride & Prejudice?”
“Is it like War & Peace?” Crystal had asked innocently. The discussion had rapidly gone downhill from that point. Janet knew better than to join the fray, and she invariably felt, at the end of it, that not only did she love young Crystal more than she did before, but that Crystal could find a place in her circle. She had the same resilient patience that Cindy had in such great measure, but also the vigor and freshness of her youth. All the young people in their family circle were so thoroughly indoctrinated with great art, great music and great literature, that Tom seemed unfit for associating with people in the outside world without reflexively taking a patronizing position. She was becoming a hardened elitist, a trap into which the Nordstrom girls seemed not to have fallen. (Elly, too, seemed to have gotten over that awkward phase.) Crystal was a good foil for that inflexible streak in Tom.
In contrast, Crystal was willing to consider some of the books Tom suggested, such as the Jane Austen novels. “Is Pride & Prejudice any good?” she asked Janet in confidence.
“It’s a wonderful book,” Janet said seriously. “You must become comfortable with the manners and attitudes of those times, though.”
“What times were they?”
“Oh, er, early-to-mid nineteenth-century,” Janet said, hoping she was right.
“Around the Civil War, kind of?”
“Well, ye-es,” Janet said. “But you have to remember, America was very different from England in those days, you know. Not too different, but just different enough that you’ll have to get comfortable with the period.”
“I could cheat, and watch the movie!” she laughed. Crystal had a sense of humor, though Tom couldn’t see it. Their humor often went past each other, but to Janet’s surprise and —admittedly her mild discomfort, too— neither girl gave up on working at the other.
Cindy and Crystal hit it off well with each other from the start. They had much in common, interest- and temperament-wise, as well as in the way they were subject to Tom’s merciless critical scrutiny. (It was remarkable that Tom responded more to Crystal’s thinking than she did to Cindy’s.)
Agnes looked at her over the dinner table, startled. There was a look of stubborn determination mixed with a good deal of contrition on Crystal’s soft face. The hardness in it that had resulted from her week of walking and hardship was mostly gone, and the natural freshness of her complexion, and the soft curves of her features were mostly back, but not quite.
What had she lied about? A thousand thoughts flashed through Agnes’s mind, and were rejected.
“All right, let’s have it,” Agnes said, as calmly as she could. She had gradually come to understand and appreciate her youthful companion, and had been congratulating herself that the young lady in question had so little idea of her value to her. Certainly, Agnes gave her full measure for what she received in return from the girl: three hundred dollars in rent per month. And a host of errands run, and cleaning on the weekends, and cheerful participation —for the most part— in Agnes’s outside activities, such as church, gardening, and yard-sale shopping on Saturday. She fed the girl as many meals as she would eat, and gave her the benefit of her motherly advice, which was certainly worth something. Still, a girl like her was a prize. Had been one, anyway.
“I wasn’t married, and … I wasn’t turned out of home.”
“And?”
“It was all a lie, Agnes … I ran away from home. I just had to tell you. You’ve been so … straight with me, and …” She looked at Agnes with eyes that were full of remorse. But those eyes also said: you weren’t harmed by the lies, were you? There’s not a lot to forgive, really. This is a matter of my own conscience! “You have a right to know the truth. If my dad comes looking, you could be in trouble for—I don’t know—harboring a fugitive, or something.”
That was just too much for Agnes. She burst out laughing, tears pouring down her face. Crystal looked at her in some alarm, until she understood where the amusement was coming from. Between wiping her eyes, Agnes expressed her sincere doubts that a girl of Crystal’s age running away from home would be a fugitive, exactly.
Agnes looked sternly at Crystal, across the table, and then smiled.
“Why don’t you tell me the whole story, Chrissy? You owe me a good story, at least.”
Crystal took a deep breath and began. There wasn’t a lot to tell. She had led an easy, responsibility-free childhood, and her tastes had been simple, she had no talents, and she had absolutely no ambition. Her parents had been thoroughly disappointed in her, notwithstanding her high SAT’s; she had no interest in science, law, or any kind of profession. So they’d sent her to the University of Pennsylvania, and got her started in a career in elementary education.
At this point Agnes’s eyes widened. She could hardly believe the young woman in front of her had completed a year at Penn. Crystal assured her that this was indeed the case. But she added that she had hated every minute of it, and had looked forward to finishing the year, and never going back.
Then she had met this most wonderful person at a bar. Crystal blushed; she hardly ever drank, she said, and she hadn’t even that fateful night, but she had brought someone home with her, and it had been love at first sight. Crystal had discovered that her angel was in fact the principal of a certain school in Minnesota, and she described how she had left everything behind, determined to start a new life, on her own, to prove her worthiness of her new love.
“Now, Chrissy, which school are we talking about?”
“Ferguson school!”
“Ferguson? Ferguson? But the principal of Ferguson is Mrs Janet Kolb!”
Crystal’s face lit up at the name. “You know her!” she sighed. “Yes, she’s the one!” She blushed with pleasure, a second before it hit her that Agnes might not have as liberal a view of her choice of love-object as she might have wished.
“Crystal … are you in love with—a woman?”
Crystal nodded slowly, her eyes wide with worry. It hadn’t crossed her mind that this might be a bigger issue than the lies she had told Agnes.
“Don’t you like boys, Crystal? Did …” she bent forward and spoke in a low voice, “… did your father—do anything … bad to you, when you were a little girl?”
“My dad? N-no, he was fine; well, just the college thing. He’s a little pushy, but otherwise he’s okay. I don’t hate him, or anything, Agnes, I just couldn’t deal with all the pressure!”
Agnes waved that aside. She was going somewhere else entirely, and she struggled to make her point.
“Have you been out with boys at all?”
“Well, yes; oh, I see what you mean. Agnes, … I find it hard to relate to boys, you know? I just don’t want to have sex with boys. It was always the girls that I wanted to …” She blushed bright red. It struck her that Agnes might be frightened if she began to think that she was harboring someone in her own home who might threaten her person sexually. She dropped her eyes carefully. “I’m not an aggressive person, Agnes; I … I’m pretty much a one-woman girl, you know? One at a time. Oh, this is coming out all wrong!”
Agnes was saved by her irrepressible sense of humor.
“Oh Crystal, I have to tell you something.”
“Yes, Miss Agnes.”
“You can leave off the ‘Miss Agnes’ bit. You always do that when you want me to feel sorry for you. Don’t do it; it isn’t necessary.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Well, … I was hoping to have you meet my son, Crystal; he’s a little older, around forty, and … he’s never married, and I thought, why, here’s a sweet young girl, and there’s Andrew, my son, …” she shook her head, and looked up at Crystal. She threw up her hands in a gesture that she had hardly ever used before. But nothing else could express how she felt.
Crystal let out a long sigh. “I … I hadn’t thought of all the angles before I started talking, Agnes; I wasn’t planning to … come out to you. I’m not ready to tell everyone that I’m in love with a woman. All I know is—suddenly, I want to go back to college, to … oh god, what a fool I am!”
“What?”
“I can just go back to school in the Fall!”
“Well, of course! You’re not on suspension, or something dreadful like that, are you?”
“Oh no, I thought I did fairly well. There was this —young lady— who helped me a whole lot.”
“There you are, then, you go straight back to college! I shall miss you, Chrissy! You’ve only been here a few weeks and …”
“I’d like to stay the rest of the summer, Agnes, if you don’t mind!”
“Of course I don’t! So what will you do?”
“I’d like to have Janet over, to visit. I visit there, now and then, and …”
“Do you? And what does her family think?”
“Well, there’s a sister —who argues with me a good bit; I don’t guess she thinks much of me at all— and a sort of a friend and housekeeper, a Sr. Cathleen, whom I like very much. Everyone else is gone for the summer. Janet has a daughter out in Philadelphia, whom I haven’t met yet. And there’s her mother, who’s gone to Illinois, to check on their house out there.”
“So that’s the reason for your sudden interest in getting a college education.”
“Yes, exactly. I have to meet her at her level, Agnes. I can’t just be a housewife, or I’ll end up being a servant. I don’t mind being a stay-at-home wife; I wanted to be one, until I met her. She’s changed my whole life, without meaning to, though.”
Agnes nodded, studying her. It went against everything that Agnes considered normal, and against everything that she had imagined for the healthy, wholesome, utterly normal-seeming Crystal. She had imagined a happy home with a handsome, doting husband —preferably her own Andrew— and a bunch of bonny babies in perfect little sailor suits. But no, the girl was in love with Janet Kolb, of all people.
Agnes had the greatest respect for Janet Kolb. After that strange Helen Nordstrom had left, throwing the quiet school community into such confusion, Janet had brought a welcome period of sanity to the place. There had never been the slightest hint of scandal attached to her, except that she had been widowed before her daughter was born. Well, he had been called up for the war, and had died out there, and the child had been born after he had been dead some weeks.
There had been a rumor that Janet Kolb had a romantic relationship with Helen Nordstrom, and god knew she had romantic relationships with nearly every woman in the country. But in the end, there was nothing anyone could make of such stories. All that could be said was that the Nordstrom children had lived with the Kolbs for a while.
“Are you very upset?”
Agnes got up, and briskly put away the remains of the meal. “No, not very, dear; though, if you’re planning to go back to school, I’d write and tell your father that. Then he can rant and rave and threaten not to pay your fees, and we’d have to start saving.”
“Oops!”
Agnes shrugged. “It’s a strange thing, being a parent, you know.” She brought out a lovely apple pie she had bought from the store as a surprise for Crystal. Crystal’s eyes widened, and the tip of her tongue slid across her cute mouth, bringing a smile to Agnes’s lips. “You like something back from your kids for all the money you lavish on them. I know.”
“Uh huh,” said Crystal, her intonation curling up as if it were a question.
“But in the end, he probably loves you, you know, and he probably misses you. And he’ll kill you, as soon as he learns you’re … oh God, I can’t even say it! What kind of a world is this, with girls falling in love with women, men falling in love with men … I just don’t understand it!”
“Do you have to put that in a regular oven, or can you microwave it?”
“What? Oh, the pie.”
“Uh … I kind of missed what you said,” said Crystal, looking blank.
Agnes shook her head.
K
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