The Love of a Good Woman

pines on that side of the lane. Because there’s been a doctor living in this house since the end of the last century.
    All sorts of noisy grubby patients, children and mothers and old people, all afternoon, and quieter patients coming singly in the evenings. I used to sit out where there was a pear tree trapped in a clump of lilac bushes, and I’d spy on them, because young girls like to spy. That whole clump is gone now, cleaned out to make things easier for Mrs. B.’s nephew’s son on the power mower. I used to spy on ladies who got dressed up, at that time, for a visit to the doctor. I remember the clothes from soon after the war. Long full skirts and cinch belts and puffed-up blouses and sometimes short white gloves, for gloves were worn then in summer and not just to church. Hats not just to church either. Pastel straw hats that framed the face. A dress with light summer flounces, a ruffle on the shoulders like a little cape, a sash like a ribbon round the waist. The cape-ruffle could lift in the breeze, and the lady would raise her hand in a crocheted glove to brush it away from her face. This gesture was like a symbol to me of unattainable feminine loveliness. The wisp of cobweb cloth against the perfect velvet mouth. Not having a mother may have had something to do with how I felt. But I didn’t know anybody who had a mother that looked the way they did. I’d crouch under the bushes eating the spotty yellow pears and worshipping.
    One of our teachers had got us reading old ballads like “Patrick Spens” and “The Twa Corbies,” and there’d been a rash of ballad making at school.
    I’m going down the corridor
My good friend for to see
I’m going to the lav-a-to-ry
To have myself a pee—
    Ballads really tumbled you along into rhymes before you had a chance to think what anything meant. So with my mouth full of mushy pear I made them up.
    A lady walks on a long long path
She’s left the town behind.
She’s left her home and her father’s wrath
Her destiny for to find—
    When the wasps started bothering me too much I went into the house. Mrs. Barrie would be in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio, until my father called her. She stayed till the last patient had left and the place had been tidied up. If there was a yelp from the office she might give her own little yelping laugh and say, “Go ahead and holler.” I never bothered describing to her the clothes or the looks of the women I’d seen because I knew she’d never admire anybody for being beautiful or well dressed. Any more than she’d admire them for knowing something nobody needed to know, like a foreign language. Good card players she admired, and fast knitters—that was about all. Many people she had no use for. My father said that too. He had no use. That made me want to ask, If they did have a use, what would the use be? But I knew neither one would tell me. Instead they’d tell me not to be so smart.
    His Uncle came on Frederick Hyde
Carousing in the Dirt.
He shook him Hard from Side to Side
And Hit him where it Hurt—
    If I decided to send all this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It’s too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don’t know where, is worse.
    • • •
    D EAR R., Dear Robin, How do you think I didn’t know? It was right in front of my eyes all the time. If I had gone to school here, I’d surely have known. If I’d had friends. There’s no way one of the high-school girls, one of the older girls, wouldn’t have made sure I knew.
    Even so, I had plenty of time in the holidays. If I hadn’t been so bound up in myself, mooching around town and making up ballads, I could have figured it out. Now that I think of it, I knew that some of those evening patients, those ladies, came on the train. I associated them and their beautiful clothes with the evening train. And there was a late-night train they must have left on. Of course there could just as easily have been a car that dropped them off at the end of the lane.
    And I was told—by Mrs. B., I think, not by him—that they came to my father for vitamin shots. I know that, because I would think, Now she’s getting her shot, whenever we heard a woman make a noise, and I would be a little surprised that women so sophisticated and self-controlled were